Listening

What will be an ideal response?

Managers need good listening skills. Although people often assume that good listening is easy and natural, in fact it is difficult and not nearly as common as needed. Consultant Bernard Ferrari saw this challenge in a meeting of an industrial company's chief marketing officer (CMO) and the team that had introduced a new product that was not selling. The CMO listened carefully as the engineers explained how great the product Page 443 was. She then asked what customers were saying that might explain the lack of orders. The engineers admitted they had not spoken with any customers; rather, they had been careful not to leak any information while the product was under development and assumed that customers would clearly see its value. Because the CMO took time to listen to the engineers, instead of jumping to conclusions about their product, she and the engineers could devise a plan for them to begin talking to key people at the customer firms, and orders soon began flowing in