The Power of Pausing
Archives: Business Skills
Top salespeople ask good questions and listen carefully to the answers. One of the most important listening skills they develop is to simply pause before replying. When the prospect finishes talking, rather than jumping in with the first thing they can think of, they take three to five seconds to quietly wait.
Pausing before you speak has three specific benefits.
• You avoid the risk of interrupting the prospect if he has just stopped to gather his thoughts.
• Your silence tells the prospect that you are giving careful consideration to what he has just said. This is a compliment, and makes him feel valuable.
• Pausing before replying means that you will actually hear and understand the prospect better because you’ve given his words a little time to soak into your mind. You will be more alert to how his words can connect with other things you know about him in relation to your product or service.
When you pause, not only do you become a more thoughtful person, you convey this to the customer. By extension, you become a more valuable person to do business with.
[Ed. Note: In his audio program, Communicate With Power , Brian Tracy, master salesman and business coach, will show you how to influence people and get what you want by using only words.
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If someone would have no consideration for reply.
His word would start on the wrong foot
From the other perspective, I know many people having trouble with just saying “no” when salespeople leave no gap between their words. The seller thinks he’s doing a great job, but for the prospect it feels somewhat like a cross-examination. A unpleasant conflict situation. If salespeople would know how it actually felt for the other, they wouldn’t be so proud of it.
Leaving some space for the prospect to take a breath of courage, to re-play the words in mind what he/she really wants to say instead of nodding and being polite, that would be the difference between conflict and understanding. It’s nothing new, just the old way of polite communication, the way how merchants like those on the Silk route had to deal with traders from other places. They watched, listened, spoke only when needed, taking great care not to offend anyone, because if you did, you might loose your head