[badbug]

Ask open ended questions that get them talking. Avoid leading questions. Avoid yes/no questions. Don't ask if they would buy it (they will lie to be nice). The book mentioned in other posts may help.

You don't need to convince users that you want to help them and this is a useless task. If a user won't talk to you, find someone else to talk to. If you can't find anyone, offer incentives (free lunch meeting, etc).

To listen better, dig deeper into why they are asking for something. Example: I read of a company that kept getting requests for ftp integration. The founders recognized that what the users really wanted was more file based features. The users wanted ftp because that is what they knew. The new features became a big selling point.