I’ve been thinking lately about my friend, an award-winning salesman at the family business, and why he was asked year after year to speak to new sales recruits. Over lunch one day I asked him what it took to excel. He smiled, knowing I was curious like everyone else because he was quiet, even shy, and he rarely spoke unless spoken to. I had always thought sales must have been difficult for him and I admired him for getting out there anyway. He must really love it, I thought, to stay at it. That was before I realized just how good and how strategic he was.

“I listen and I watch what’s important to people. I notice when they get excited about one of our products,” he answered. ”It’s all in the body language.” Then he told me a story about calling on a customer with his boss and how he was able to suggest the one floor covering the retailer agreed to buy. This was after his boss’s sales pitch fell flat; the customer said he wasn’t interested in any of the products. ”How’d you DO it?” his boss asked, as they drove back to the office. ”I watched his eyes light up when you pointed to that item in the catalog. He didn’t say anything but he responded with his eyes,” my friend answered.

So what do you and I do in E-marketing as we sit alone in front of a computer? When we don’t have those eyes and ears in front of us, when there is no body language to read? Can’t we learn something from this personal sales call - about the value of listening and watching - and use it to customize our message in this ever changing world?

First of all, there are basic approaches we can take. We can create crisp, sincere and to the point marketing copy that reaches out the way a firm handshake and eye contact do in one on one meetings. But how do we read the needs of our individual customers and prospects so we can match all the little things that push their buttons? It’s harder to pick up these clues through a computer. In the future everyone will have streaming video, and it will be easier, but until then, we need to pick up clues from other channels - clues about style, content, tone and underneath it all, the customer’s ‘pain,’ what he considers his most critical need, the one thing he needs us to satisfy.

Starting with e-mail, we watch, listen and learn the best we can. E-mail is not the best medium and channel for conveying tone. It’s so easy to misconstrue meaning, especially when emotion creeps into the message. But we can learn a great deal through a customer’s response pattern – his rhythm, momentum, energy and degree of receptivity to suggestion. Isn’t this listening and watching? A little more indirectly, but it’s no different than reading body language, i.e. between the lines.

We need, always, to ask our client what’s important. We may not get a direct answer because people may not always be able to identify their pain or admit what it is. But as Randy Siegel believes - consultant, coach and former PR executive ( http://buildyourleaders.com/) - people do, in fact, tell us in some shape and form what their needs are. If we raise our antennae to pick up accurate signals in our conversation with them, we can use our intuition to decipher the clues we uncover.

We can also listen by observing clues we pick up through their channels of marketing and sales: their web site and print publications, their phone calls and meetings with us; the people and organizations they value such as their partnerships, colleagues, mentors, and even their web links. It is safe to wager they expect as much from us as they do of themselves.

In these hot summer days, when the world is a humid haze and we still have miles to go before that deep, well-earned sleep – Robert Frost style - why not sit back and listen to “e-mail speak,” with a glass of iced tea by the computer. We have nothing to lose by learning new ways of listening and watching, except missing a chance to enable a new friend in achieving his dream. And that would be unfortunate.