As communication gets faster and more fragmented, Vance Crowe makes the case for presence, storytelling and genuine curiosity as the ultimate competitive edge.
By Pete Mercer
Everything starts with a conversation. Friendships, partnerships, marriages – even your relationships with your customers. Communicating with your customers is a huge part of the job, which is why it’s so important to communicate clearly and effectively.
Repertoire Magazine recently spoke to Vance Crowe, the founder of Legacy Interviews and a communications expert, on the value of communication to the sales process, the biggest gaps in communication and how to show genuine curiosity during a sales call.
Starting Legacy Interviews
Crowe has had an interesting career. After graduating college with a degree in communications, he decided he wasn’t interested in that line of work anymore. He went from working as a deckhand to joining the US Peace Corps, eventually ending up in California working at a radio station. At this point, he decided to go back to school to get a Master’s of Arts, Diplomacy and International Relations, which he used while working at places like The World Bank and Monsanto.
He founded Legacy Interviews as a way to sit down with individuals and couples to record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history. Crowe said, “I often say that I went from being a professional speaker to a becoming a professional listener.”
Crowe believes the wildest change we have all seen in our lives is that while communication has become so much faster and our voice can be heard by so many more people, we have actually subtracted the number of channels that we use when we’re talking with people. “If you’re trying to write a text message, you’re stripping out all the nuance of your voice and the reactions that you can have in real time.”
Practicing real listening to have great conversations
A gap in communication can lead to confusion and misunderstandings, which is a significant obstacle in the sales process. For Crowe, the best communication skill is good listening – when you’re distracted, it’s hard to actively listen to what’s going on in the conversation.
“When your mind is thinking about an obstacle or a goal, that’s all you hear in the conversation. Is this conversation getting me closer to my goal? Is this helping me get around my obstacles? When you’re fully present and trying to understand someone, those things clear away,” Crowe said.
For sales reps who are trying to get their numbers up, it can be easy to miss the simple joy of a conversation. But the reality is that true success comes from having the patience to invest one’s time in real conversations with a prospect. You can better understand the challenges prospects and customers are facing and the types of solutions that they are looking for when you take the time to listen and have a real conversation.
“You will know you are having a great conversation if the person you’re talking with, even if they’re talking about a subject they know a lot about, is discovering something new,” Crowe said. “One of the techniques I teach in my classes is that it’s much better to ask ‘how’ questions than ‘why’ questions. When you ask a ‘why’ question, that gets to the motivation, which gets to the big secret of it all. Most of what we do is a reaction to things – we don’t know why we do what we do.”
By asking someone a ‘how’ question, you can get to the root of what led them to that decision and what was going on in the moment. This prompts people to think, which will help them discover new things. Crowe argues that ‘why’ questions trigger the imagination part of the brain, where they will be more likely to embellish the truth in the retelling.
Tapping into curiosity
One of the things that separates a great sales rep from average sales reps is the ability to tap into your curiosity. When you are in a conversation with someone, you might notice that people begin to pepper in seemingly extraneous details about where they were and what they were doing, “When they’re telling a story or explaining something, they include some reference to a sweatshirt or the old sales guy they had there. If you ask them a question about some of the tiny details that they put in their explanation, you will watch people open up like a flower,” Crowe said.
By allowing yourself to be curious and ask questions about those tiny details, you will discover entirely new avenues and folds within the narrative that this person is trying to convey. “The sales rep that is listening for those tiny details will pull on threads that will open a person up. Once they’re open, trust can be built and then you can find your way towards that sale if you are offering something valuable.”
Building communication skills
While we obviously all know how to communicate with each other, there’s a huge difference between people who can communicate satisfactorily and people who are great communicators. It takes a fair amount of practice and skills, which can be developed over time.
One of the skills that Crowe is trying to impart to his team at Legacy Interviews is body language. When you are actively and physically reacting to things being said, like a raised eyebrow or a head nod, it goes a long way to communicate that you are engaged and listening to what they are saying in the moment.
Allowing for some (potentially uncomfortable) moments of silence for the other person to work through their answers to your questions can help to dive a little deeper than the reflexive quick answers that we are accustomed to. This is one approach that Crowe said he had to develop over time.
Even in the interview for this story, Crowe took the time to get his thoughts in order before giving measured, articulate responses to the questions. He said, “It’s not my natural way and it took me a long time to develop it. Once I got there, I realized that my answers are so much better than when I’m trying to work out it as I’m talking.”
The power of storytelling
What makes storytelling so compelling? As long as humans have walked on Earth, they’ve been telling each other stories. It’s sort of a primal way to tap into empathy and learn how to relate to other people, sharing history, experiences and perspectives.
“I believe that the human mind only thinks in stories. Even when we find scientific evidence, it’s recorded in our minds as stories,” Crowe said. “Being a person that’s open to hearing a story, even if you know it, is deeply powerful because everything about the human mind is designed around telling stories, remembering stories, sharing stories and understanding those stories.”
There’s a common idea that data and storytelling are incongruous and not meant to work together, but the reality is that data and storytelling can inform each other to create a more cohesive narrative. By using data that shows how things work and what is most effective, it can help to weave a better and more cohesive story that will leave a bigger impact on the listener. The bigger the impact, the better the response.
While data and storytelling can work together beautifully to achieve your goals, Crowe is reluctant to lean too much on AI for developing better stories. As a creative endeavor, storytelling is one of the things that makes us most human.
Likewise, using AI for communication purposes is an equally slippery slope. Crowe argues that no one wants to feel like they are being put into an automated system – the person that can demonstrate that they are giving their full attention to the customers they are working with will vastly exceed other people.
He said, “You may need to use AI for many things, but you should be careful to always remember that people will respect and be grateful for the attention that you give them. Your attention is the most valuable thing you own.”
Want to be a better communicator? Follow these rules:
• Prioritize active listening over talking
• Ask “how” instead of “why” questions
• Pay attention to small, incidental details
• Use silence and body language intentionally