The Art of Conversation

Salespeople love to talk. Give them a topic – products, customers, markets – and most will be off and running within seconds. It’s talk, after all, that enables reps to do what they do. Talk builds relationships. Talk turns prospects into customers. It transforms skeptics into believers and diffuses objections until the client is nodding, smiling and signing on the dotted line. Indeed, where would the sales profession be without this vital method of communication?

Probably a lot further than it is now, suggest two prominent thinkers who are challenging our notions about talk. Talk, they tell us, is not just telling another person what you know. It starts as an exchange of information. It may become an opportunity to try to convert others to your point of view, to gain or lose power as you win or concede points, even with the most mundane of exchanges. And most of the time, talk includes a river of thoughts, feelings and opinions that courses below the surface of what is being said but for a variety of reasons is never expressed outright. As a result, talking “does not necessarily change one’s own or other people’s feelings or ideas,” says Dr. Theodore Zeldin, a fellow and former dean of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, and author of Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives (The Harvill Press, 1998). “I believe the 21st century needs a new ambition – to develop not talk, but conversation, which does change people. Real conversation catches fire. It involves more than sending and receiving information.”

But here’s the real value of good conversation. It can transform two disparate viewpoints into something entirely new, something more powerful than either of the individual opinions and something neither participant in the conversation could have imagined when that conversation began. It’s like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial. One actor is thoroughly enjoying his peanut butter, another one is blissfully munching on plain chocolate, when – wham! The two collide, and the bar of chocolate falls headlong into the jar of peanut butter. The accusations fly: “You got peanut butter on my chocolate!” says one. “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” chides the other. Then the actors try the peanut butter-chocolate combination and both are wowed by its amazing taste. Two simple, unconnected ingredients, when combined, produce a best-selling candy. Conversation, in its most sublime form, works the same way.

“Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts, they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought,” says Zeldin. “Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards, it creates new cards. That’s the part that interests me. That’s where I find the excitement. It’s like a spark that two minds create.”

These insights aren’t just for academics. The ability to converse and think together with others has a direct bearing on professional lives, whether you’re the CEO, the VP of sales, or a brand-new sales rep meeting with a first prospect. “How we talk together definitively determines our effectiveness,” says Dr. William Isaacs, president of Dialogos, a consulting and leadership education firm based in Cambridge, MA, and author of Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together: A Pioneering Approach to Communicating in Business and in Life (Doubleday, 1999). “Indeed,” he adds, “it could be said that all great failures in practical and professional life stem from parallel failures in this single domain of conversation. The problems that even the most practical organizations have in improving their performance and obtaining the results they desire can be traced directly to their inability to think and talk together, particularly at critical moments.”

Learning how to converse and think together, however, is a tough challenge in the year 2003. Not only are we busier than ever, which means there’s less time than ever before for unhurried, thoughtful dialogue, but we’ve learned that pushing our viewpoints and holding firm on our opinions is a sign of strength while acknowledging the superiority of another person’s idea shows weakness. It’s apparent everywhere from the board room to the courts to the dining table – if you can convince others that your ideas are right, you have won an argument regardless of whether those ideas are, in fact, the best course of action. So rather than having conversations, which use our differences to create something entirely new, most of us are simply talking – volleying opinions, thinking not about what the other person just said but about how we’ll respond, and skimming along the surface of issues.

Experts in Human Relations

So what does all this have to do with sales? Everything – at least for those reps who see selling as a reciprocal activity that involves more than simply an exchange of products and dollars. If you are interested in truly partnering with customers, in reaching a genuine understanding of prospects’ needs and desires, and becoming a trusted advisor or educator, then putting Zeldin’s and Isaacs’ ideas to work will help you accomplish those goals, which in turn are likely to result in more sales. Why? Because the basis of selling is trust, says Zeldin, and the way to establish trust is to “create relationships in which people reciprocally reveal something of themselves, not with the purpose of selling, but with the purpose of seeing if they can each be useful to the other. I like to look at selling as a meeting of two people rather than a meeting of two commercial entities.”

It’s easy for reps to forget this basic truth as they’re rushing from customer to customer, updating mobile CRM applications via wireless devices, checking voice mail on cell phones, and logging in to check email at every opportunity. But if you can take a step back, forget about quotas and call reports, and truly zero in on building relationships, Zeldin says, you’ll derive much more satisfaction from your profession. “The salesperson is not just an instrument of commerce,” he reminds us, “but also an expert in human relations, and the rep’s function is to make the customer feel better and understand better and feel more satisfied. The sales rep is an outsider who can expand another person’s world.” And the way to do that, he adds, is through conversation.

That’s a noble goal for any rep. To get there, however, you genuinely have to forget about making a sale, and that is the really tough part for most sales reps because, let’s face it, you’re meeting a prospect with the goal of ultimately making a sale. But to engage in true dialogue you have to put that goal aside. If it’s anywhere in your thoughts while you’re meeting with a prospect, then, consciously or unconsciously, you’re trying to manipulate that prospect to get a decision that meets your agenda – and that’s not dialogue. “Dialogue is a conversation in which people think together in relationship,” says Isaacs. “Thinking together implies that you no longer take your own position as final. You relax your grip on certainty and listen to the possibilities that result simply from being in a relationship with others – possibilities that might not otherwise have occurred.”

In a sense, forgetting about selling in an effort to create dialogue with customers is a real leap of faith. It’s Indiana Jones stepping off the cliff over the bottomless chasm in The Last Crusade and trusting he won’t plunge to his death. Isaacs calls the point at which salespeople are not selling the “Zen of selling” – and for good reason. It is at this point that reps are truly open to learning, exploring and discovering, which in turn leads to richer relationships, unforeseen insights and deeper trust. “Giving up trying to impose an agenda and genuinely listening to what is really needed and wanted in a situation is a far more potent way to operate,” he says.

Isaacs’ Four Practices of Dialogue

If you think dialogue could be the door to better relationships, but you need a roadmap to get there, Isaacs offers one in his book. Years of study led him to realize that good conversation happens when people exhibit four core practises: truly listening and providing a field of space in which ideas can emerge; respecting and recognizing the legitimacy of another’s point of view and boundaries; suspending our opinions, our judgments, our certainty about what the other person should do, thereby making room for genuine choice as opposed to trying to force a choice onto someone; and speaking your voice, which is about “revealing what is true for you regardless of other influences that might be brought to bear,” says Isaacs. To begin learning how to think together and engage in meaningful dialogue, start by understanding and applying these four practices.

The heart of dialogue is the first of those behaviors – listening. It’s a subject most salespeople take for granted. If a sales rep asks a prospect how business is going, and the prospect says it’s a bit slow right now because the economy has made people nervous about buying luxury items, and the rep hears him, he’s listening, right? Not necessarily. If he’s like most reps, he is probably thinking about how his product could help stimulate this person’s sales and how he has a golden opportunity here. Or he is thinking that the prospect’s slow sales probably mean there isn’t any money in the budget for the rep’s services, so it would probably be wise to move on to the next prospect. Or he is thinking about the next few questions he needs to ask the prospect. In fact, if anything at all is going through the rep’s mind while the prospect is speaking, then the rep isn’t listening.

“To listen is to develop an inner silence,” says Isaacs. It requires being still, quieting the ongoing chatter in our minds and, as Isaacs puts it, “providing a field of space in which ideas can emerge.” The practice, he acknowledges, is not a familiar habit for most of us.

Next, reps must learn to respect, an act that involves honoring or deferring to the speaker. “At its core, the act of respect invites us to see others as legitimate,” Isaacs points out. “We may not like what they do or say or think, but we cannot deny their legitimacy as beings.” It also means accepting that they have things to teach us. Think you know your product inside and out? By genuinely respecting your prospects and accepting that you can learn from them, you and a client may discover an application for your product that you never imagined existed.

Third is the practice of suspending our opinions, or holding them in abeyance. Think about it: when someone speaks and you’re not engaged in genuinely listening, you’re probably beginning to form an opinion. As that opinion forms, if it’s not in accordance with the views of the speaker, you’re probably figuring out how you can defend your view and then get the other person to come around to agree with it. That’s not dialogue. Instead, we should simply acknowledge and observe our thoughts, feelings and opinions without being compelled to act on them. Doing so, says Isaacs, “can release a tremendous amount of creative energy.”

Last, reps must learn how to speak their voice. Finding that voice is about learning to ask one question: What needs to be expressed now? “To do this,” says Isaacs, “you need to know how to listen not only to your internal emotional reactions and impulses – or to the many images of how you think you should behave – but to yourself.” Voicing is about truthfulness and courage and expressing an important thought even when you know that doing so means you probably won’t make the sale. It’s also about taking the time to form complete thoughts and find the right words to express them.

Tools to Use

As you begin to elevate your interactions with others from talking to conversing, remember that there’s a difference between having a good conversation and having a good conversation with an end in mind. When you’ve got an end in mind, you’re not engaged in Zeldin’s definition of conversation or Isaacs’ definition of dialogue. But once you think you’re doing it right and putting these four practices to work in your meetings with customers, you can check your progress with a couple of tools.

The first, a reflective tool called the Left-hand Column Tool, requires that you go back and reflect on conversations you already have had. Draw a vertical line down a sheet of paper, says Isaacs, and on the right-hand side write down what was said. On the left-hand side, write down what you were thinking and feeling but didn’t say. “If you find yourself withholding massive amounts of information, you’re not ready to engage in dialogue,” says Isaacs. Another tool to measure your progress is something Isaacs calls “seeing in the moment.” It requires that you notice during your conversations how you are or are not being consistent with the four practices of dialogue. It’s not thinking – it’s simply being aware of the here and now. “You’re physically conscious of how you feel, which is very different from having a conversation in your head instead of listening,” he says.

Finally, once you begin putting these theories into practice, ask yourself the following questions: Am I doing what’s best for the customers, or am I really pushing my agenda? Am I letting their voices come all the way out, or am I suppressing their voices? Have I suspended my judgments about what people understand and do not understand? How aware am I of my own blind spots? Is there a way in which I can understand prospects’ resistance and objections as sensible? Can I choose not to oppose their opposition but to inquire into it, to understand it without seeking to alter it? If you can answer these questions in the affirmative, then you have likely made the difficult transition from talking to engaging in meaningful dialogue.

You will also be well on your way to meeting Zeldin’s high standards for the sales profession. His understanding of conversation and human relations gives him a unique appreciation of the profession’s potential. As a result, he says, he is trying to elevate the definition of “salesperson.” It’s not someone who sells – it’s someone “who opens up new worlds, new possibilities to clients. I think in the future,” Zeldin says, “the salesman will probably adopt another name, like ‘intermediary,’ which is about bringing two ideas or institutions together for mutual advantage.”

Dialogue and conversation, therefore, will give salespeople a mission with social importance and value far beyond any commercial transaction. It will enable them to be intermediaries in helping people to live better lives. And those are ideas worth conversing about.