Paraphrasing – Your Key To Engaging Dialog and Sales Success

This is a supplementary post to this one on Active Listening.

According to Wikipedia, paraphrasing is a “restatement of a text or passages, using other words.” To restate: keep the meaning intact but say it how you would say it.

Incorporating this skill in to your repertoire requires constant practice. But the effort will pay dividends in spades. People you talk to will feel that you truly understand and empathize with them and they will open up to you with new information and confidences you would otherwise never have had access to.

In fact, an entire school of psychotherapy known as “Rogerian Psychotherapy” relies on the artful application of paraphrasing during therapy sessions. They call it “Reflection” and it covers both paraphrasing and feeling feedback which I discuss in a separate post.

As you develop this skill, you’ll start to hear your prospects say things like, “you’ve hit the nail on the head” and “that’s what I meant to say.”

How To Use Paraphrasing Techniques

You have just seconds after your dialog partner (prospect) has completed his or her thought to distill the meaning to its bare bones and repeat it back in a way that shows you’ve internalized it and made it your own. This means using your own words- words that show you have a nuanced understanding of what was said.

To have this ability, you need to engage the active listening thought process as soon as your conversation begins. While you can paraphrasing for just single sentences, like:

The above example is an example of paraphrasing just one sentence. However, to really become a master of this active listening skill, you want to get to the point where you can sum up not just one sentence, but entire strings of thought that may have been expressed over the course of many minutes of conversation.

I’m a paint by the numbers kind of guy and I learn best when a process is laid out clearly for me. Maybe you’re the same way.  So, here is the process of paraphrasing broken down step-by-step:

1. Pay attention – take notes: If you’re making a sales call, make it a practice to jot down notes by hand. Underline, circle, and asterisk key points as you go. THIS IS KEY. While using your keyboard might be tempting, if you’re working at a computer, you won’t have these annotation options to help you quickly make sense of your notes. Besides, the clickity-clack of a keyboard can be highly irritating to listen to (and the sound does carry- even over noise-cancelling headsets).
2. Create a narrative using the key points: Connect the dots. Review the key points you highlighted and connect them. What is your prospect telling you? Sometimes, you’ll be able to cut through minutes of smoke and mirrors and get right to the heart of the matter.
3. Verbalize: Don’t just repeat what the prospect said (parroting), but use your own words. This should come naturally if you’ve followed steps 1 and 2.

Stay In The Moment

To gain the full benefit of paraphrasing and active listening in general, you need to be able to track the thread of the conversation with your notes and mental summations, while still reacting in real time to your dialog partner.

If your prospect cracks a joke, asks a question, or says something remarkable, you need to react to it right away. Don’t become so preoccupied with your note taking that you break rapport. However, the great thing is that after you’ve dealt with the new conversational development, you can use paraphrasing to quickly retrain his or her focus on the business at hand without seeming abrupt.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Like any skill, practice makes master. As you progress from deliberate use and practice to second nature, you free up brain cycles for developing other skills and tracking other information that is relevant to your sales process.

While you won’t necessarily use the product knowledge and situation-specific information you learn from project to project or from job to job, mastery of basic active listening skills will give you a head start in any situation requiring communication and persuasion.