Early in my sales career, I traveled frequently with Harold Anderson, my sales mentor. Harold had been around long enough to know something I was still learning: knowing your product was important, but knowing when to stop talking could be even more important.
One of those lessons came during a sales call at a hospital in southern Indiana. A pathologist was considering a clinical microscope equipped with high-quality objectives, a camera system, and polarizing-light accessories that could be used, among other things, to examine the crystals associated with gout. It was an impressive system, and I was eager to demonstrate everything it could do.
The pathologist was friendly, knowledgeable, and, as it turned out, already mostly sold. He had my quotation. He had studied the brochures—this was long before a customer could pull up specifications, reviews, and demonstration videos online. What he wanted now was to see the microscope for himself.
So I presented.
As I worked through the demonstration, he occasionally stopped me. He would point out a feature he particularly liked or explain why something about the microscope would be useful in his work. I was smart enough to let him finish. Then, with all the enthusiasm of a young salesman determined to make his case, I jumped right back into my presentation.
He would tell me another reason he liked the microscope.
I would listen.
Then I would start selling again.
The pathologist was practically telling me why he wanted to buy my product, and I kept explaining why he should.
Harold sat nearby, sometimes grinning, sometimes looking increasingly perturbed. I noticed neither expression. I was too busy giving what I thought was a very good demonstration.
When it ended, I packed up the microscope and its accessories, and Harold and I headed down the hospital corridor. I was exhilarated. The sale seemed like a done deal, and I wanted to talk about it. Harold tried two or three times to cut me off, but apparently I had not yet exhausted my supply of words.
Finally, he looked at me.
“Walls have ears.”
I didn’t fully understand what he meant until later, when we were safely away from the hospital and having lunch.
Harold had a way of teaching that could be almost parable-like. Rather than simply telling me what I had done wrong, he asked a question.
“When a customer is telling you the features and benefits of your product, or why he likes it while you’re giving your demonstration, Brad, do you know what to do?”
I must have given him a rather dumb look. I had no idea where he was headed.
Harold waited.
Finally, I said, “I don’t know.”
He smiled.
“Shut up!”
I have remembered those three words for more than forty years.
Harold wasn’t merely teaching me a sales technique. When customers tell you why they like your product, they are giving you information no brochure can provide. They’re telling you what matters to them. They’re also teaching you what may matter to the next person you meet. My job at that moment wasn’t to demonstrate how much I knew. It was to listen closely enough to learn something.
Harold eventually returned to our conversation in the hospital corridor. Talking business within a customer’s workplace, he explained, could damage a reputation or a relationship. You never knew who might be standing around the corner, walking behind you, or sitting behind a partially open door.
“Remember,” he told me again, “walls have ears.”
It took me years to appreciate that Harold had taught me two different lessons about silence that day.
There are times to stop talking because someone else is telling us something worth hearing. And there are times to stop talking because what we have to say doesn’t need to be said there—or perhaps doesn’t need to be said at all.
Harold understood something else that I didn’t recognize at the time. He practiced the very lesson he was teaching me. He could have corrected me in front of the pathologist. He could have interrupted my demonstration and shown his young salesman how it was supposed to be done. He didn’t. Even in the corridor, he didn’t deliver the lecture I probably deserved. He waited until lunch, when we were alone.
We aren’t always very good at that kind of restraint. Someone tells us about a problem, and we rush to solve it. Someone shares an experience, and we counter with one of our own. Sometimes we’re so busy preparing our response that we stop hearing what the other person is actually saying.
I’ve spent much of my life communicating—in healthcare, sales, teaching, public speaking, and now writing. Words have served me well. I love them. I’ve built much of my professional life around finding the right ones.
But a mentor sitting across from me at lunch in southern Indiana taught me that knowing the right words isn’t always enough.
Sometimes wisdom lies in knowing when not to use them.
Harold told me to shut up.
I’m still listening.
