Professional broadcast sales people need to know how to LISTEN!  Really listen.  Instead of spending our time with our clients TALKING about our stations, we need to spend the time LISTENING to our clients talk about their businesses.  Sound easy?  It's not.

Being a good listener takes effort and practice.  In today's over-saturated world, we spend a lot of time engaging in selective listening: we filter out the noise around us.  But, in so doing, we can fall victim to only hearing what we want to hear.

Responsive listening simply means showing the other person that we are listening by maintaining good eye contact, nodding, using such phrases as "tell me more" or "that's interesting".

But the key skill used in fact finding and pain finding calls is empathetic listening. In this form of listening, you feed back the words and ideas of the other person.  You use phrases such as "When you said ____, did you mean____?, " or "In other words, you mean....".

Here are ten keys to developing effective listening:

1. Find areas of interest
2. Judge content, not delivery
3. Listen for ideas
4. Keep your own opinions to yourself
5. Be flexible
6. Resist Distractions
7. Work at listening
8. Exercise your mind
9. Keep your mind open
10. Understand that thought is faster than speech

Add these two phrases to your listening vocabulary:

"Let me see if I understand what you just said." (Then feed back the speaker's words as nearly verbatim as possible.)

"So you feel (how you interpret their feelings) because"...(And you interpret the speaker's feelings and attempt to determine their reason for feeling that way.)

Powerful listening skills will increase your sales.  After all, we have one mouth and two ears for a reason!