Listening Skills For Salespeople

Active Listening - Try it today; give away the power of speaking.

By:  Dennis R. Kyle, CEO, b2b Sales Trainer & Consultant

       Positive Results

Communication skills are the defining attribute of a top sales person. There are five parts to great communication skills. Listening, Questioning, Body Language, Speaking, and Interpreting.

These are also components of Intellectual Sales Process™ For New Business Development which also happens to be a currently running public seminar where I will be speaking.

Listening Skills

This article will help you with your listening skills.  Listening to a person when they talk shows commitment, caring, interest, respect and builds rapport. I have yet to find a top-producing sales person who doesn't have superior listening skills.

Have you experienced someone acting like they are listening, but you can tell their eyes are not in focus and they are not truly listening? When you ask them to repeat back what you said, they have a difficult time. People even think they are listening and may be able to repeat what you said but they have not truly understood you.

If you, as the salesperson, are not fully active in listening to your clients and prospects, you will miss opportunities at the least and encounter angry customers at the worst.

There are three different states of listening:

1. Passive Listening
2. Intermediate Passive Listening

3. Active Listening

Passive Listening

Passive Listening (failure to pay attention to verbal and non-verbal communication, basically absorbing very little information):

This phase of listening could also be named, 'I Don't Care About You' or 'OOPS I Didn't Catch What You Said'.

I got semi-cured of this years ago when I was young and on a sales call. For the life of me, I couldn't remember the gentleman's name I was selling to. So I performed what I call the 'Stick Foot in Mouth Trick.' You probably know what I'm going to say. I grabbed my piece of paper confidently looked down attempting to make it look as though I was being organized and asked, "How do you spell your name again?" He responded, "That would be B-O-B" Talk about embarrassing. My wit quickly...