Ivan Farber: Every Conversation is an Opportunity

About Ivan Farber: Ivan is a Chief Conversations Officer at Conversations About Conversations. For 30 years, Ivan has worked in marketing, sales, and relationship management in the financial services industry. And his Conversations About Conversations Podcast has over 250 episodes and tens of thousands of downloads. Listen Notes categorizes it as a top 10% global podcast. Also, Ivan wrote his first book Conversations: How to Manage Your Business Relationships One Conversation at a Time based on the lessons he learned from 10,000 conversations. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Ivan.
 

In this episode, Nancy and Ivan discuss:

• How to solve problems through conversations?
• Where do conversations come into play?
• How to use questions skillfully?
• What would be an open-ended question that Ivan recommends?
• How do we train ourselves to become better listeners and stop interrupting and talking in conversations?
• Why is it that so many people are uncomfortable with silence in a business call?
• Ivan’s good example of a consultative opener.
• The idea and purpose of the dessert tray.
• What do you teach your customers about being curious?
• Is there something that's true that almost nobody agrees with you on?
• Do you only work in the financial services industry? Do you have customers outside of that industry?

Key Takeaways: 

• If you saw a psychiatrist every day growing up, but not just that, you also saw a psychologist, it would shape you. And my parents were in the mental health business. And so no doubt it shaped me.
• I do identify 14 different ways to stop yourself from interrupting. And I personally have needed all 14 many times, but it's a discipline.
• Every conversation that we have changes something in our world.
• The model I've created includes a very explicit portion of a conversation, probably the most important portion around learning and exploring.
• You help get people in the door and my job is to make sure once they're in the door, they never leave.
• As a speaker, co-author, coach, and trainer, I do get outside of other industries, but I find that the service industry is probably the best place where I can make a difference because that's where my career has been in services.

“The moment that I owned the pause... was a moment that was very powerful for me. It's something that my mentor helped me with because he'd say when you keep talking and you go fast and you're skating over stuff, especially on the phone, you could lose people. And when you own the pause, especially following a very well-crafted question, you have to let people answer.” – IVAN FARBER

“And I have an acronym for my model. The acronym is CLEAR. And inside of clear, you want to create the conversation, learn, and explore for the L and the E. A is for address and R is for resolve. But really, it's the learning, exploring and addressing, learning, exploring and addressing as kind of a cycle allows you to come up with a resolution at the end of it.” – IVAN FARBER

“I work under five key beliefs. Belief number one is that conversations are how you get, what you need, and what you want in the world. Number two, they're the basic building blocks of our relationships. Number three, being successful in leading people, projects, and all of your endeavors requires very good skill in conversations. So four, they're at the root of all of our success in life. And then five, I believe that better conversations will lead to a better world.” – IVAN FARBER

Connect with Ivan Farber:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-farber-823314/
• Conversations About Conversations, LLC: https://conversations.biz/

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