Brian Tracy explains how to make customers feel valued: listen warmly without interrupting, ask questions, and pay full attention. Men interrupt women 95% more often, and that same damage happens in business when you cut people off.
Men are 95% more likely to interrupt a woman than a woman is to interrupt a man.
If you're in business, the most important thing you do is you make your customers happy. You make your customers feel good that they're dealing with you or that they're buying from you. And one of the things you can do that is you can boost your customers self esteem. The more a customer likes themselves and respects himself and considers themselves to be valuable and important as a result of the way you treat them, the more the customer likes you and wants to buy whatever it is you're selling. Now, it's been said that rapt attention is the highest form of flattery. When you listen intently to another person when they speak, and it's clear that you genuinely care about what that other person is saying, his or her self esteem goes up, his or her feeling of personal value increases. He or she feels more worthwhile and important as as a human being, you can actually make another person feel terrific about himself or herself by listening in a warm and genuine and caring way to everything he or she has to say. When a man and a woman go out for the first time, they spend an inordinate amount of time talking and listening to each other. They look into each other's eyes and they hang on every word. They are each fascinated by the personality of the other person if they are compatible. The more each one listens to the other, the more positive and happy each of them feel and the stronger becomes the bonds of affection between them. You always listen to someone who you most value. You always ignore that which you devalue. The fastest way to turn a person off to hurt their feelings and make them feel slighted and angry is to simply ignore what they're saying or interrupt them in the middle of a thought. Ignoring or interrupting is the equivalent of an emotional slap in the face. Men especially have to be careful about their natural desire to make a remark or an observation in the middle of a conversation. Men are 95% more likely to interrupt a woman than then a woman is likely to interrupt a man. And this can often cause the entire conversation, including a sales conversation, to come to a grinding halt. So one of the most important things that you do to build the self esteem of another person, a customer, a friend, a spouse, someone you're going out with, is to ask them questions and listen intently to the answers without interrupting and without jumping in with your own observations. Just listen, pause and stare at them as though what they're saying is the most fascinating thing in the world.
