The Poetry of Sales: How to Listen

The Maestro Group believes that sales is comprised of science and art. I’m taking that one step further: sales is comprised of science and poetry. Too often, we get so caught up in the labor of reading a poem on the page that we forget to listen to the poet’s language. The science of communication teaches us six ways of listening: discriminative, comprehensive, critical, therapeutic, active, and deep. Think of that as six different ways you can learn to appreciate a poem—and six different ways you can learn to listen in sales transactions.

BUZZIN’ AND HOPPIN’

The first way we listen is discriminative; as children, we extract understanding from tones and sounds even before we fully access the words. Ever hear your mother call down from upstairs and, without making out exactly what she was saying, knew immediately that you were in trouble? That’s discriminative listening.

The same early years that we rely on discriminative listening, we delight in nursery rhymes, in part because they use big, juicy music. To recapture that joy, turn to poetry. Before I tell you the title of this poem by Hailey Leithauser, hunker down with the text—be sure to read it aloud—and guess what creature caused the speaker’s complaint:

I was, I was—by its posthumous chomp,
by its bad dab of venom, its joy-buzzer buzz.
If you’re ever shanked like the chump
that I was, by the posthumous chomp
of an expired wire, you’ll bellow out prompt
at the pitiless shiv when she does what she does.
Was you? I was. By its posthumous chomp,
by its bad dab of venom, its joy-buzzer buzz.

Did you feel those Zzzs vibrate on your tongue? No surprise to learn that Leithauser’s title asks, “Was You Ever Bit by a Dead Bee?” The story is simple—the speaker learns, the hard way, that a dead bee can still sting—but what cranks this poem’s energy is the soundplay, the percussive Bs and Ps, and how the descriptions of the stinger are so relentlessly irked in tone. In other words: this poem’s pleasure is 1% story and 99% vibes.

We often skip over discriminative listening when we connect with a client because we’re so focused on the content of their answers. But it’s important to listen not only to what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it. If they were speaking a language you didn’t know, what could you guess about their emotional state based on voice alone? What’s their energy level? Are their sentences shaped by rhythmic confidence, or choppy frustration?

Comprehensive listening builds on sound but is also decodes every word choice. Let’s be honest, sometimes decoding can be a pain in the butt. Take this poem by E.E. Cummings:

                                     r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
                           who
  a)s w(e loo)k
  upnowgath

                       PPEGORHRASS
                                                       eringint(o-
  aThe):l
               eA
                    !p:
S                                                                        a
                                      (r
  rIvInG                              .gRrEaPsPhOs)
                                                                         to
  rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
  ,grasshopper;

This isn’t a poem full of juicy music, at least not on first glance. I understand the temptation to grab the one easily recognizable word, grasshopper, and keep scrolling. But puzzle this out letter-by-letter—or, to save time, let me lend you my decoder ring—and find: The grasshopper who, as we look up, now gathering into a grasshopper, leaps! Grasshopper arriving to become, rearrangingly, a grasshopper. Look at the poem again, with this language in mind. Hear the satisfying sproing as a little green guy hops around in your field of vision.    

The enemy of comprehensive listening is the sales professional who won’t admit they don’t have the understanding they need. Instead, they fake a knowing nod, scribble their best approximation of the technical term or acronym’s spelling, and Google it later. When you bluff your way around not-knowing, you miss out on additional information. Maybe if you ask the client to define a technical term, they’ll reveal problems with a team responsible for it. Maybe if you ask what an acronym stands for, you’ll learn it’s an industry score the company needs to raise.

HEAR ME OUT

The third mode of listening is critical, which evaluates words using what you already know or believe. While Lucille Clifton’s poems are modestly styled and deceptively short in length, they pack a wallop. Listen to “won’t you celebrate with me”:

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Clifton knew that she’d have two categories of reader bringing their critical ears to this text. One category—her kindred, “nonwhite and woman”—can empathize, celebrating not only her experience but their experience. The other category, whether white or male or both, is also welcome to take up her invitation. But in doing so, she demands they judge their own complicity in the “something” that has repeatedly tried to kill the speaker. This poem challenges every reader: where do you draw your power from, and what are you going to do with it?

When we sit down with a client, we receive lots of data, which we can compare to what we already know about the topic at hand. If what you learn aligns with what you already believe, great. However, given contradiction—a disconnect in scale or budget, new characterization of leadership, hesitation attached to the timeline—don’t rush past your discomfort. Slow down, gently dig, and discern, even if it forces you to change previously held opinions.

Critical listening goes hand-in-hand with therapeutic listening, which holds space for the feelings and emotions of the speaker. You don’t have to extract a philosophical treatise or a call to action; you just need to serve as witness. In the sales context, this can be five minutes of venting that you don’t put into the official report of your meeting, which earns the trust of your client. In poetry, this service of witness calls to mind a three-line poem by W.S. Merwin:

Separation 

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

NO ONE’S MAID

We’ve calibrated four different types of listening. You’ve practiced reading poems for their sound; for their information; for how their views stack up against your existing understanding; and for their emotional value to the speaker. That means you’re now primed for active listening, which is all about maximizing context. Did you know that Margaret Atwood began not as a novelist, but as a poet? In the 1970s, she published six books of poetry, including a collection provocatively titled Power Politics, which gives us this untitled poem:

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

Whenever I read this, my initial reaction is a grimace as I follow the pivot from cozy hook-and-eye clasp to squelch of hook and eyeball. Then I marvel at using couplets to describe a relationship that is anything but happily “coupled.” Then I remember that Atwood published this fifteen years before her dystopian feminist masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, for which the novelist would reframe the symbolic “eye,” here vulnerable, into the ominous Eyes of Gilead.

There’s a phenomenon that happens at poetry readings when active listening is happening: the Mmm. This collaborative sigh, which usually punctuates the end of a poem in a larger set of five to eight poems, disrupts otherwise reverential silence. Once people are moved to connect, they become an unstoppable force. In sales, this is the moment you find yourself leaning forward in your chair, nodding, saying, “Absolutely” and “Mmm-hmm,” and furiously scribbling notes. 

The sixth and final mode is deep listening. Deep listening occurs once the nuance around a message has been both acquired and reflected fully, bonding speaker and listener. Getting to this place isn’t easy, whether you’re making time to read poetry or connect with a client. Sometimes we all feel like we’re working in a vacuum, separated from the needs and realities of others as a function of our internet-mediated age. Yet there is enduring worth to the work that we’re willing to put in. To quote Sean Thomas Dougherty’s poem, “Why Bother?”:

Why Bother?

Because right now there is          someone
Out there with
a wound                                          in the exact shape
                                                              of your words.

Every poem has six ways in which it needs to be heard. So does every person. We don’t often put “poetry” and “sales” in conversation but, this month, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

We can help your team with both the science and the art of sales. Reach us at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, coaching, and consulting.