Chapter 14 - Talking Past Each Other

The author provides a few examples to illustrate the bizarre concept of people "talking past each other" - in which they alternate speaking, but it's like they are reading sentences from two separate books. (EN: The phenomenon is very strange but sometimes does occur when two people wish to talk about different things and both adopt the tactic of ignoring what the other says, hoping they will give up trying to say it. I've never seen this go on for more than a few exchanges before someone makes an explicit demand to discuss their topic of choice.)

This pattern of speech is illustrated in a fake dialog between a salesman who is attempting to describe features of a product that the customer does not care about, ignoring the questions the customer is asking. Essentially, the salesman is delivering a canned pitch and treating the client as if he's interrupting.

He refers to another common social phenomenon of being at a table with a group of people who are having a conversation about something you don't understand or care about - and suggests that this is exactly the position that a prospect is in when a salesman continues to speak about something the client is not interested in.

It is a careful balance - while success requires you to listen to the client and speak to their concerns, you cannot allow the client to completely dominate the conversation and maneuver it away from the sale. But so long as they continue to talk about problems that your product can solve, pay attention and do not interrupt them.

He returns again to the notion that good communication isn't about talking, but listening, and the pattern in which you listen to the prospect, say something relevant to their concerns, then set the next topic for them to react to, generally steering the discussion toward the strongest points of your sales pitch.