Note Taking - White paper

A short article on the importance of note taking and some techniques you can use to help.

“Can you repeat the part of the stuff where you said all about the things!  ” Homer Simpson

Note taking is a skill. Not writing, you’ve already learnt that one. Note taking is different. It’s about recording the important and filtering out the unimportant. When I first started selling as a compliant 23-year-old I was told to take notes on my sales meetings, so I did. I used to return to the office with eight or nine pages of accurate and specific detail of what was said by whom and when. Trouble was I didn’t have time to look at the customer and pay attention to non-verbal signals. I also came to learn that two thirds of what I’d written wasn’t very useful.

“Where a man was taught no special thing, it was all done by feel, so listen, so learn.” Deep Purple.

The key to note taking, of course, is listening. It’s hard to write the most important things if you don’t hear them or comprehend their meaning. You need to choose to listen and adopt the techniques that develop active listening. These include; echo listening, where you repeat every word the customer says in your head exactly - to remove the distraction of your own thoughts, asking follow up questions to understand more, using the customer’s words and phrases, summarising, pacing body language, identifying trigger words and using continuation words.

Once you have developed your ability to listen there are a couple of options for effective note taking.

Left brain or Right brain?

In no way a scientific piece of research, but what I have found in my practical experience is that some people find a left-brain logic to note taking the easiest to accomplish. The left-brain logic is to set out note taking as below.

This left-brain approach can be very effective. Its principles are that you plan your conversation at the top of the page (objectives, key questions funnels, details of that meeting etc…) and then capture factual information on the left (data - places, names, times, quantities etc…) and opinions and views on the right (triggers - what people say and what they might mean), before summarising key points at the bottom. 

What if you don’t like left-brain?

One of my delegates called Stephen, once said to me, “it’s doesn’t work for me, I just don’t think like that,” which got me thinking about a different approach.

When I presented the idea of ‘mind mapping’ to Stephen his eyes lit up and it worked well for him, maybe it’ll work for you?

Using mind maps.

Have a look at these Youtube videos to give you some more insights.

     www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzmKQ-OEKY 

     www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlabrWv25qQ

There are scientific principles around mind mapping that include; use of pictures to create links in your brain, colours, non-linear branches and associations drawn between each part.