Active listening is foundational to successful selling. It helps you truly understand their customers’ needs, build strong relationships, and consistently achieve sales success.
According to Gong Labs research, top sales performers have a talk-to-listen ratio of 43:57. That’s right – they listen more than they talk. In this study, top performers were selling an average of 120% above their quota, and they did it by focusing less on presenting technical features and specs and more on getting customers to open up about their problems through better listening.
Active listening means suspending your thoughts to focus fully on understanding what you hear. In contrast, Passive listening is hearing — the physical process of receiving sound waves being transmitted to the brain. Active listening is essential to building rapport with customers. (See here for the Complete Guide to Building Sales Relationships.)
Active listening means being fully present and engaged in a conversation. It involves giving your undivided attention to the speaker, whether a potential customer, a colleague, or a team member. Active listening requires genuine curiosity and a desire to understand the other person’s perspective, challenges, and goals.
Active listening is one of the soft skills that can be developed through practice and conscious effort. SBI’s sales training programs, including Comprehensive Selling Skills™, teach active listening as a skill every salesperson can develop.
Unfortunately, many sales professionals are poor active listeners. They believe they need to do all the talking because of anxiety or stress, or they have no clear road map for the sales call. They may also just selfishly focus on what they want, not what the buyer wants.
For many salespeople, it’s easy to focus on what to say next instead of what the other person is saying. This is a common problem if you are reading off a script or a list of questions you want to ask instead of engaging in a natural conversation. Compounding this problem is the fact that we can think four to five times faster than we can speak, so our minds are often racing ahead, not focusing on what the customer is saying.
Active listening is a behavior, not a trait — top performers maintain consistent listening behavior across conversations because they practice a deliberate technique, not because they’re wired for it.
Active listening has four discrete steps that can be trained — intent to understand, full focus, clarifying questions, and paraphrasing to confirm.
The hardest step is mindset, not technique — most listening failures happen before the meeting starts, in the seller’s mental setup, not in the conversation itself.
Paraphrasing is the move that proves the listening was real — saying it back in your own words demonstrates understanding in a way that nodding and note-taking cannot.
Here are the four steps to becoming a better active listener.
The first step of becoming a great active listener is to make a conscious decision to understand what the other person is saying. Understanding the speaker’s meaning goes beyond just hearing the words. Focus on what the speaker is trying to communicate.
That means paying attention to the words the buyer is saying, and their tone of voice and body language. This means you must concentrate on all the verbal and non-verbal information the speaker shares with you.
Critical to this first step is shifting your mindset so that the goal of the sales conversation is to understand the buyer’s situation rather than to advance your sales agenda. That means taking a few moments before the call to identify the gaps in your knowledge about the buyer’s situation, and going into the call in full listening mode, not product pitching mode.
Step two is the discipline of full attention. The seller-brain is constantly thinking ahead, what to say next, what objection to anticipate, or which slide to discuss. The buyer can hear the difference between someone listening and someone waiting for their turn to talk.
Focusing 100% on listening means the salesperson neither interrupts nor finishes the buyer’s sentences. Interrupting tells the speaker that you are not listening to them. When the buyer pauses, wait a beat before responding, long enough for the buyer to add the second thought they were about to add. The most powerful active-listening behavior is the comfortable pause after the buyer’s sentence ends.
Interruptions can also be caused by environmental and mental distractions. That means turning off the ringer on your cell phone and ignoring texts. If you are meeting virtually, turn on your camera and don’t multitask on a second screen.
Asking questions shows the speaker that you are listening to them. You should also focus your eyes on the buyer. Another way to show you are listening is to take notes. By giving the speaker these visual cues, you are confirming that they have your undivided attention.
Asking questions also helps you to confirm your understanding. Verify your understanding by asking clarifying questions. This will help you eliminate any ambiguity. For example, “If I understand this correctly, you are concerned about…Is that right?” Or “When you say, ‘the rollout went poorly,’ what does that mean specifically?” Remember, wait until the buyer has finished their thought or wait for a logical pause before checking for understanding. That way you won’t interrupt his or her train of thought.
The final step is to repeat what the customer said in your own words. It is not enough to listen to a buyer. The buyer must also feel that you understood what they said, which happens when they hear their situation reflected back accurately.
Paraphrasing also gives the buyer the chance to correct or refine, which is when the most accurate version of their situation usually surfaces.
For example, “Let me make sure I have this right. What you’re describing is that the team is hitting their activity targets, but the deals aren’t converting at the rate they used to. Is that right?” The buyer either confirms (and the seller now has confirmed understanding to work from) or provides clarifying information.
Any salesperson can become a better active listener by having an intent to understand, fully focusing on listening, asking clarifying questions, and paraphrasing what they heard from the customer. Like any other selling skill, this selling superpower can be practiced, improved, and coached.
Are some of your salespeople “naturally good listeners,” while others struggle? That’s a skill gap, not a personality difference. SBI’s Comprehensive Selling Skills™ program teaches active listening as a skill that every salesperson can develop. Schedule a consultation to learn how we can help your team build active listening into the way they sell.