Active listening is on nearly everyone’s Top 10 List of the traits of successful salespeople. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition, “Active listening is a communication technique that is used in counseling, training, and conflict resolution. It requires that the listener fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said.”
Let’s focus on the section that requires listeners to concentrate, comprehend, respond and remember. In my opinion, every seller that intends to achieve great things must harness and cultivate these skills. They are critical aspects of a true dialog between two parties. This leads me to the first part of the “active listening” definition where the context is shared. I’m referring here to the words “counseling” and “conflict resolution”. You may be asking, what do these have to do with sales? Everything!
If you have already embraced Consultative Selling you know where I’m going. After all, sales consultants are counselors of a sort. By asking good questions, they elicit business challenges and problems that need to solved. Like a counselor, they need to concentrate and comprehend fully on those issues and their implications. And then respond appropriately and remember what’s been uncovered before proscribing any solution. Now factor in the “conflict resolution” part of the definition and two ways we can look at it. You can argue that every sales situation is a kind of conflict where the goal is to persuade or change something about the current situation. The other, is that the active listener’s responses have triggered recognition by the speaker of situations and problems (conflicts) that need resolved. Either way you look at. The best sellers ask well, listen actively and remember to thrive.