Face-To-Face Encounters

The key to success is to get onto your business contact’s wavelength as soon as possible. By putting yourself in his shoes you’ll demonstrate your ability to empathise with him. He’ll find communicating with you easy and will show positive responses.

One of the most important aspects of communicating is to develop good listening skills. By listening you will pick up quickly on the areas of common ground between you.

Good listening avoids misunderstandings and the errors that result from them. The behaviour of a good listener is as follows:

• A person who is listening attentively keeps a comfortable level of eye contact and has an open and relaxed but alert pose. You should face the speaker and respond to what he is saying with appropriate facial expressions, offering encouragement with a nod or a smile.

 

• Adopting the behaviour of a good listener will help you establish good rapport with your business contact. It requires a degree of self-discipline and a genuine desire to take on board the message the speaker is trying to convey. You need to be able to suspend judgement and avoid contradicting or interrupting him. Postpone saying your bit until you are sure he has finished and you have understood his point.

 

• Reflecting and summarising – repeating back a key word or phrase the speaker has used – shows you have listened and understood. Summarising gives the speaker a chance to add to or amend your understanding. Your business contact is far more likely to listen to you if you have let him know that you have heard what he said by using the tactics of reflecting and summarising.

 

You should avoid:

• thinking up clever counter-arguments before he has finished making his point

 

• interrupting unnecessarily or reacting emotionally to anything that is said

 

• if the subject becomes dull or complex, registering your disinterest by succumbing to distractions or fidgeting.

 

The Five Levels Of Listening Skills

There are five levels of listening skills and it pays to remember them.

The first and worst level is ignoring the speaker. You look away, avoid eye contact and do something else altogether. (I get this sort of reaction from my family much of the time! The lights are on but nobody’s there.) This is dreadful in a business context. Your hard-earned business contact will never give you the time of day again if you commit this cardinal sin.

The second level, which is almost as bad, is to pretend to listen. In some ways this can be quite dangerous. If you’re nodding your head, and saying ‘mmm, yes, aha’ when you actually have no idea what’s being said, you could be in for a nasty shock. Don’t be surprised if you hear your business contact saying, ‘So you’ll run in the London Marathon next year on behalf of my favourite charity – how wonderful!’ – you deserved that!

The third-level listening skill is being selective. You may well find yourself listening for key words that are of importance, such as ‘business opportunities’, ‘budgets’ or ‘new suppliers’. The result is that you’ll miss the main content of the exchange. Your contact could have been telling you that there are no openings for business until the end of the next financial year.

If you can develop the fourth-level skill, you’re doing well. This is called being attentive. You are focused, with positive body language, leaning forward, nodding your head appropriately and maintaining eye contact. Your business contact knows you’re paying attention and this creates an atmosphere where he’ll want to share valuable information and engage in serious dialogue.

The final level is being empathetic. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s place and see things from their perspective. This takes time to achieve but it will knock the socks off anyone once you have reached it. It is the art of being able to identify mentally and emotionally with your communicator, fully comprehending the tones, pitch, body language and other subtle messages your contact is conveying.

It is totally exhausting to do this for any length of time but it will take your business relationship to a much higher level rapidly. You will have included each other in the closest of possible personal networks (sometimes called a virtual team). He will consider you one of his first ports of call when information gathering or project awarding is required, and you’ll willingly reciprocate.