The Process of Listening

T.M Jayasekera

Listening is not merely hearing. It is a selective process. It is not something that can be imposed on to you. We always have a choice to listen or not to listen. But if we do decide to listen, then we have to follow several steps if we are to make it effective. sometimes we fail to understand the dynamics of listening. It is much more than hearing. Hearing is only one part of listening. Hearing is the physical process of receiving sound waves and transmitting them to the brain. The process of hearing is a complicated set of actions that begins with the sound waves hitting the eardrum that makes it to vibrate and together with some other actions will send some impulses to the brain. Hearing is a complicated physical process. Listening on the other hand is a mental process of receiving, attending to, and assigning meaning to external stimuli. It includes hearing but there is much more to it than hearing. Listening has several other parts such as filtering, selection, processing, comprehension, analyzing, and providing meaning to the impulses received.

It is a state of receptivity that permits understanding of what is heard and grants the listener full partnership in the communication process, The failure behind a great deal of poor listening is the failure to understand the complexity of the listening process, Our biggest difficulty is to find out what to listen but we usually try to absorb all the words forgetting what those words stand for.

Obviously you cant listen to sounds that you cant hear or receive. Only those sounds that you hear can be taken up for listening. As several stimuli bombards at the same time you need to focus on some and leave out others, Focusing also is not enough to complete the process. You have to assign meaning to the stimuli received, Only when you assign meaning to the sounds received the listening process is complete. Thereafter you have to decide whether you need the store the message received or not. You decision to store the message only guarantees learning.

Selling Skills - The pay off in your territory

Hafeez Rajudin

Your face to face selling skills provide the pay off in your territory. You sell when you contact consumers and when you contact the retailers.

In your face to face conversation with retailers and consumers, your product knowledge, selling skills, and your company's marketing tools are all focused to accomplish the overall sales objective: that is, to increase the sales of your company's products.

Planning the sales call

Planning starts with setting objectives. Objectives are the specific tasks you want accomplished during the call. Once objectives are set, the way to accomplish them must also be planned.

Advantages of setting objectives

1.       Setting a good objective or objectives for a sales call gives you several advantages.

2.       It enables you to do a better job of planning the call.

3.       It saves time.

4.       It gives you a yardstick to determine whether or not the call was successful.

5.       Most important, it increases your sales success rate - more of your calls will be successful calls.

Examples of call objectives

In a typical call, you might have several objectives. Your main objective, for example, might be to get the retailer to increase the inventory of your "Product A". You might have an equally important objective, to get the retailer to display poster of "Product A-Sold here" sign.

Characteristics of Objectives

An objective, to be really useful, must have certain characteristics:

1.       It must be specific.

Which point of sales material (POSM) do you want to place? What distribution gaps are you going to fill? Be specific as to quantities, brands, number of displays, etc.

2.       It must be ambitious

If the call is worth making aim high. On the other hand be realistic. Don't set impossible goals.

3.       Keep the objectives action oriented

State the objectives in terms of what you want the retailer to do as a result of your call, not what you intend to do during the call.

4.       Your objective must be customer oriented

It is the nature of our business that what is good for our dealer is also good for us. By tailoring your objectives to assist the retailer in building business, you will also be strengthening your relationship with him.

Communication Technologies for Organization's Success

By Poongothai Selvarajan

The world communication is derived from the Latin word communism meaning "Common". When we communicate with others, we try to establish commonness with others. We try to share information, an idea or a concept in our interaction or interface with the other person. Communication is thus a process of achieving, understanding between people.

In general all person to person communication has three basic goals.

1. To ensure that the receiver understands the communication exactly as the sender intends it to be.
2. To generate a response some action or change in the knowledge and behavior of the receiver.
3. To help build relationship between people.

All communication involves flow of information, One way communication informs the receiver, Two way communication is exchange of information. There is no such thing as one way communication today it is always a two way process involving transmission and reaction. A two way communication which goes to create an understanding is what is important in today's context of communication - one that establishes and builds lasting relationships between people.

The personal exchange through words, telephone, fax, e-mail, television, books, advertising etc. are all examples and means of communication in business. Some of these are preferred by some people - and some business over others.

However which of these to be used for is depending on the following three considerations.

1. What is that has to be communicated?
2. How many people have to be communicated with?
3. What is the cost of the communication?

In addition to the above three, there is another important consideration - personal preference of the communicator. Therefore, the communicator's preference will also be a salient feature in communication channel.

Managerial Stress and Your Heart

By Dr. K Kuhathasan

Recent study undertaken by a professional body reveals that out of all occupational diseases, occupational stress related heart disease is the number one killer in Sri Lanka. Death due to occupational related heart disease exceeds the total number of fatal industrial accidents. On an average, only 50 fatal industrial accidents are reported annually. On the other hand, over 100 occupational stress related heart disease deaths are reported annually.

Psychological and physical causes

A significant part of the health problems reported by managers can be attributed to psychological as well as physical causes. Stress on job combined with fatigue can cause not only psychological illness, but according to a large number of studies, they can also contribute to a wide range of minor complications and serious physical illnesses including heart diseases and gastric ulcers. Stress at work is not always easy to define or to identify. The human body is designed to react to certain stimuli by an increase in the activity of a large number of different organs.

An occasional reaction to external stimuli, is certainly not harmful, but may be a necessity to the proper functioning of the physical system.

The problem arises, however when a constant stressful state is encountered without the possibility of recovering from it. For many such a situation of stress exists almost continually at their place of work.

Varying levels of stress can be identified in many different jobs, managers who have to meet deadlines and those who have to often meet public demands are more prone to be affected by stress. Jobs which demand constant thinking impose almost constant stress. Stress of this nature over a period of time can cause a high degree of nervousness and irritability and often the development of physical symptoms such as loss of appetite, chest pains, insomnia, headaches, backaches, toothaches, pains in the neck or shoulder, skin rashes and irregularities in the menstrual cycle in the case of women.

What causes stress?

Learn to Listen and Listen to Learn for Continuous Success

By T.M Jayasekera

'Please ! listen to me! Please! I beg of you!'. How many times we may have heard this message in our day to day lives. How many times we may have ignored this request or not heeded to it. If we really analyze this and go deep in to it we will understand that inability to listen is the cause of most of our problems in our work life, personal life and family life. If we can listen to others we can easily understand them and solve most of the problems of interaction with others in addition to gathering knowledge completely free of charge. It has to be kept in mind that the golden rule of friendship is "to listen to others as you would have them listen to you".

Most of us have witnessed people quarreling  arguing and fighting, with each other owing to poor listening. In addition, we are well aware of how couples have separated, Governments have collapsed, organizations have crashed, accidents have occurred, countries separated, wars have begun, and people have killed each other due to poor or no listening. This is only a few. The list is very large. On the same token we have witnessed people reconciling, prospering, peacemaking, developing and doing many good things through effective listening. Therefore it is necessary for us learn more about this magic word "Listen" and about the art of learning through listening.

Research as well as experience has shown that successful businessmen have always listened to their customers their employees, their advisers and all other important stake holders who had some say in their businesses whereas the major reason behind the failures of most of the unsuccessful businessmen have been identified as poor listening. Failure to listen has been identified as the root cause of failure of many great leaders in business as well as in day to day life.