How to approach Listening Test Part Two • In this part of the Listening Test you listen to five short monologues, spoken by five

Speaker 1
I love selling- I think it’s the essence of business. Two competitors can have products of equal quality but the one with the better sales force will win out every time, But it’s a complex operation, negotiating successfully, especially since you’re often having to pitch without having as much information at your fingertips as you’d like about the client’s business. And sometimes you need to set aside fixed ideas about price and maybe meet demands to add in some extras, ways to secure the deal that might seem to damage your margin. Of course, you can get it wrong sometimes - once I approached a client very demandingly, pushing him to give me responses without accommodating his very different attitude to negotiating, and it just alienated him.
Speaker 2
I’m learning all the time about how to improve techniques, but there’s only so much you can control on a technical basis. I mean, the price and quality you’re offering are probably a given, and your client’s going to be making their own calculations about how they compare with the competition. So a lot of it comes down to how you put yourself over, and if that’s confident and presuming a good outcome to your discussions, I think you’ve got a winning approach. But you still have to stay alert to the possibility of making mistakes. I was once so involved in all He toing and froing you get in dosing a deal, you know, all the phone calls, that I forgot to keep or ask for proper notes, and they were able to really sting me,
Speaker 3
You can read all the books you want, but they won’t tell you how to deal with any particular client. Some people spend so much time studying their competitors that they almost seem to know more about them than their own products, and it’s a waste of time, cos you have to se//your plus points, not their minuses - that’s something you don’t refer to. For all you know, your client’s already got a good relationship with your strongest rival. Never assume anything. I really misread a client once. I was talking away, listing all Our special features in far too much detail, and completely missed the point that the client just wasn’t in a hurry He wanted to take it nice and slow, and was dropping hints about good dinners which passed me by at the time, cos most customers aren’t so interested in that.
Speaker 4
Despite what anyone says, you’ll never really know how your client runs their business, only what they tell you, and they may tell you all sorts of things to try and bring down the price, upgrade the offer, and so on, within your margins. You can’t know what discussions they have already been in with your competition either So you need to work on building up an understanding between you, to give you some kind of a basis to work from. Which is, of course, easier said than done. The larger the deal, the more anxious you can become, and once I got overwhelmed by that, so much so that the client clearly thought that not only was I an idiot, but that my firm must be pretty useless too. Not my most successful day!
Speaker 5
Selling is a science, not an art-form. The easy bit is cost and calculation, which anyone can do, but your offerings don’t mean anything in themselves, you have to see them in context, and that means how the client sees them. So if you don’t do your homework on the client’s set-up, you’re talking to the wind - information is power Mind you, I’ve taken that logic a step too far in the past. I’m still embarrassed when I remember the time I was so keen to make the client understand all the particular ways in which my offer suited him so very perfectly that I didn’t stop to consider the fact that he was basically saying yes already I actually prolonged the process so much that I ended up in danger of blowing the whole thing!