You will be able to tell when you are listening to reply rather than listening to understand, and switch.
You are in a meeting and the buyer is halfway through a sentence. You already know what you are going to say next. It is a good point, possibly the best thing you could say, and you are holding it ready for the moment they pause. When they do, you say it. Later you cannot quite remember the second half of their sentence.
Almost everyone does this, and in a sales conversation it is expensive. This lesson breaks listening into three levels so you can notice which one you are at and move up when you need to.
At level one, the buyer is talking but your attention is on your own head. You are planning your reply, rehearsing a feature, wondering whether you sound knowledgeable, or thinking about the next meeting. You hear enough to know when it is your turn, and not much more.
It is easy to spot from the outside. A seller at level one answers a slightly different question from the one asked. They interrupt, or they reply instantly with no gap at all, because the reply was ready before the buyer finished. In lesson 2.1, What trust is made of, this is self-orientation in action. The buyer feels it even if they could not name it.
Level one is not a character flaw. It happens most when you are nervous, when you care about the outcome, or when you think you already know the answer. Those describe most sales meetings, which is why it is so common.
At level two, your attention is on what the buyer is saying. You could repeat their sentences back fairly accurately. You take good notes. You would pass a test on the facts.
What you have not yet done is notice what those facts mean to the person saying them. A buyer says, "We're paying about S$800 a month for the current system, which is fine, it's just that nobody really uses the reports." At level two you write down S$800 and "reports not used". Both are true. You have the content, but you may have missed the point.
Level two is where most competent people sit most of the time, and for many conversations it is enough. For understanding a buyer's real problem, it usually is not.
At level three, your attention is on the buyer as a whole: their tone, their pace, where they hesitate, what they skip and what they keep coming back to.
Take that same sentence about the S$800 system. At level three you notice that the buyer said "which is fine" quickly, as if brushing it aside, and that their voice dropped on "nobody really uses the reports". You notice they mentioned the reports once before, ten minutes ago, when talking about their boss. That might mean the real problem is that they championed this system and now cannot show it was worth the money. That is a very different conversation from a cheaper price.
Here is a Singapore example. Wei Jie, an insurance adviser, is meeting a client in her forties at a coffee shop in Toa Payoh. She is talking about her budget and mentions, almost in passing, that her mother was in hospital for two weeks last year. Then she goes straight back to numbers. At level two, Wei Jie notes "mother, hospitalised". At level three, he notices that she changed topic fast, and that this is the second time her mother has come up. He does not pounce. He waits for a natural point and asks, "You mentioned your mum's hospital stay. How did that go for the family?" Her answer reshapes the whole meeting.
Three signals are worth training yourself to catch: hesitation, where a buyer slows down or starts a sentence twice; omission, where they talk about everything except one obvious thing; and repetition, where a topic keeps returning.
The simplest level three tool is silence. When the buyer finishes speaking, wait two or three seconds before you reply. It will feel long to you. To the buyer it feels like you are thinking about what they said, because you are.
That short gap often brings out the most useful sentence in the conversation. People tend to fill silence, and what they add after a pause is often the thing they were not sure whether to say. "It's fine, really. Well, actually, my wife thinks we're overpaying, and she's probably right." A seller who jumps in at once never hears the second half.
You cannot stay at level three for an hour, and you do not need to. The skill is noticing when you have dropped to level one and pulling yourself back. A useful cue is the moment you catch yourself waiting for your turn. When that happens, let go of the point you were holding. If it matters, it will still be relevant in five minutes.
Over the next few days, pay attention to your own head during ordinary conversations, at work, at dinner, on the phone. You do not need to fix anything yet, only notice, which is what the activity below asks you to record.
In your next three work conversations, note one moment when you caught yourself at level one and what you missed because of it.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).