How To Ensure Your Reps Use Reflective Listening on Calls With Real-time Guidance

Don’t sell to meet quotas. Sell to solve problems.

As Andy Paul (host of the wildly popular Sales Enablement Podcast) puts it, “The job of a seller is to listen to the buyer, understand what is most important to them, and then help them get that.” 

And the only way to do that is to ask practical questions and actively listen. It’s one thing to go down your list of discovery questions simply, but it’s another to be genuinely curious and listen to the answers. Like nearly every sales skill, listening is a muscle that can be learned and strengthened. One of the most powerful types of listening is reflective listening. 

Reflective listening is responding to the other person by reflecting the information, thoughts and feelings you heard in his or her words, tone of voice, body posture, and gestures.

Why reflective listening is essential in sales: 

1. It focuses on the buyers and their challenges instead of your product. 
2. It helps build rapport with buyers faster. 
3. It draws out more information from buyers than you would normally get because it encourages them to clarify, confirm and expand on ideas.
4. It leads buyers to realize for themselves if your product is a good fit for what they’re trying to accomplish, which is more effective than you trying to persuade them.

In this short video, Anna Kelley, CSM Lead at Revenue.io, explains how to use our real-time guidance solution Moments™ to build up reps’ listening muscles. 

Using Real-time Guidance To Reinforce Reflective Listening With Reps

In Moments™, navigate to your Notifications tab from the left menu bar and create a new Notification. Here, we’ll name it “Listening Notice.” 

The next step is to set up targeting. In this video, Anna is targeting individual users, but you could set this up for groups of people. You can choose between all users, specific teams, users with a specific Salesforce profile, or users with a specific Salesforce role.

Triggering criteria is where the magic happens. Here, we’ll set up Moments™ to listen for phrases that demonstrate someone is listening. For example, the phrases “It seems like,” “It sounds like,” and “You mentioned,” are all phrases that show you are listening to someone and reflecting back to them what you heard. 

The power of Moments™ is its ability to identify when these phrases are NOT mentioned during a conversation. We call this a “keyword exclusion.” This concept is extremely powerful and can be leveraged by reps in a broad range of ways. 

Here are some other great examples of keyword exclusions you can set up for your teams, based on what is not said in a conversation: 

• Best practices: If a rep has not asked a key qualifying question five minutes into a call, remind the rep with a Notification. 
• Next action: When the phrases “next steps,” “calendar,” “schedule,” or “time to chat” are not mentioned five minutes into the call, remind the rep with a Notification.
• Policy: If the word “recorded” or a similar phrase has not been spoken by a rep in the first thirty seconds of a call to notify the caller that the call is being recorded, remind the rep with a Notification.
• Announcements: When “promotion” is not mentioned in the first three minutes of a call to tell the buyer about a special promotion, remind the rep with a Notification.

Going back to our example, you’ll see that Anna also defines the timeframe of the call that Moments™ is listening for the phrase as 20 seconds, but you can set this up for whatever makes the most sense for your specific Notification. 

The next step is to define who on the call will trigger the Notification. Do you want Moments™ to listen to the Rep/Agent, Participant/Caller or Anyone on the call for this phrase? 

Following the triggering criteria, we have to define who will receive this Notification. Moments™ has the ability to notify the Rep/Agent (which is the most common use and the use in this example), but you can also choose to notify a Supervisor or both the Rep/Agent and Supervisor. 

Now we have to define the content of the Notification. From the Category dropdown, Anna chose Behavioral Notification, then chose “warning” as the type, which means the content will display in an orange Notification as opposed to a blue Notification for “information” Notifications or red for “alert” Notifications.

Lastly, we will enter the content itself. For this example, Anna is reminding the Rep/Agent to use reflective listening language. 

Give Reps Critical Information at the Exact Moment They Need It

As you can see, Moments™ is a powerful tool to help reps through a myriad of situations that they encounter live on every call by giving them critical information at the exact moment they need it. 

To learn more about how you can coach your team to use reflective listening, we put together a cheatsheet for you which you can download here. 

If you are looking for more examples of how to use real-time notifications to drive better sales outcomes, check out 10 Real-Time Notifications Every Revenue Team Needs in Their Playbook.

Learn more about how Moments™ can ensure that your reps say the right things every time.