Brian is an awesome Realtor who knows the benefit of over-delivering when it comes to quality service!
I came across this while browsing around the ActiveRain site:
“The quieter you become the more you hear.”
Posted by Lou Ludwig of Boca Raton, Florida, the quote caused me to recall a business training initiative on effective listeniing which became a core element of Xerox Corporation’s business skills training program. In an article entitled Xerox U (Time/CNN) reported, “Since it set up its industrial-education program in 1965, the Xerox Corp. of Rochester has cranked up sales of crisp courses in business skills to 20,000 a month. Currently boasting three short (up to three days) courses that include drills on sales and problem-solving techniques as well as ‘effective listening,’ the program has drawn more than 500,000 students from such companies as Pfizer, General Electric, Burlington Industries and Eastern Airlines.” So, effective listening is clearly a big deal and Lou’s quote, “The quieter you become the more you hear,” is an elequent expression of it.
I think that the first step towards effective listening is valuing silence as an important part of a client relationship. Dead air does not have to be filled with my words. Rather, the silence should be allowed to act as a vacuum to be filled with our clients’ information…information that will help us serve them better.
Consultant Germaine Knapp, president of Wordsmart Inc., a consulting and training firm in Rochester, N.Y. notes: “Effective listening–we call it power listening–is one of the strongest assets in professional life today. Too few of us take advantage of it, but all of us could. There are dozens of field-proven techniques and tactics for applying the power of listening, and they get results.”
The second step is realizing that, as realtors, we exist only to help our clients reach their goals…and to do that we have listen.
Visit the writer at home.
