Sales and Mastering the Art of Listening

Salespeople are often described as great talkers or presenters. While that may be true, it misses the key characteristic of the great ones. Truly effective sales and business development professionals do two things that separate them from average: 1) they ask smart questions and 2) they listen.

Think of the best salespeople you know, or the people with the highest social IQ, and how they interact. They get people talking about themselves and show genuine interest in what those people have to say. Call it human nature, psychology, or ego, but people want and need to be heard and valued. The best way to connect personally or professionally is to get people talking and really listen.

Applied to building companies, this simple concept can have a profound impact.

Early in the GoTo.com/Overture days, we sold “paid search” results as a replacement for the algorithmic technology publishers used to power their search engines. Smaller publishers adopted it quickly. Larger portals like Yahoo met us with violent resistance, rejecting the idea of “corrupting” editorial search results with advertising.

One meeting with CNet’s Search.com was headed for the same ending. Two minutes in: “There’s no way we’re doing that.” With nothing to lose, I started asking questions. How was their search business doing? How were they doing against revenue objectives?

“Not well. We make no money. But we can’t kill our product by making it all paid search. Our users would leave us.”

Ten minutes later, they floated an idea: keep most of the algorithmic results, but integrate a few paid results at the top. I took it back to our product team, and we built the first “paid layer” search implementation. Search.com became the precedent that helped convince AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and (eventually) Google to adopt the model.

A great customer suggestion laid the foundation for one of our industry’s most powerful advertising models. All we did was ask leading questions, listen, and act.

Years later at OpenX, a meeting with Fox Audience Network produced another turning point. We asked how they’d like to buy our ad exchange inventory. They wanted to value inventory at the individual impression and user level, then execute bids in real time.

In 2008, real-time bidding didn’t exist. Building it would take a major investment with no guarantee of adoption. But we valued Fox as a partner and made the bet. Within two years, RTB was generating more than 70% of our revenue and had reshaped the display advertising landscape.

Once again, a great customer idea became the basis for a transformational model.

When IBM told Bill Gates they needed a disk operating system, Microsoft didn’t have one. Gates bought a version from a Seattle developer for $50,000, customized it, and delivered MS-DOS within months. That single conversation set Microsoft’s future.

Customers will tell you what’s going on in the industry, what your competitors do well (and don’t), their biggest pain points, and ideas for solving them. Often, all you have to do is listen. Do it well, and you might close a sale, or you might get information that changes your company or your industry.

Jack Dorsey has said successful companies have multiple “founding moments” in their lifecycle. Many of them come from customers. To detect them, you have to listen, understand their needs, and deliver.

If you’re talking more than 50% of the time in a meeting, you’re talking too much. Stop. Ask good questions. Really listen to what your customers tell you.

One reason I’ve always been passionate about my work in adtech start ups is that we sit at the center of a dynamic, fast-moving industry with many partners to serve. Understanding their needs and delivering against them has been, and will continue to be, a guiding principle behind the innovation process. And this will continue to be the case — as long as we keep listening.