What Is The Right Balance of Listening and Talking?

Listening is essential in sales. When sales deals turn sour it is usually because the salespeople involved were not listening to what the buyers were telling them or they were misinterpreting what the buyer was saying.

Your primary goal as a salesperson should be to listen carefully, to learn about and understand the prospect’s problems so that you can sell your solutions.

By asking questions and listening to the prospect you build awareness of the problem, as well as ownership of the solution. These are two vital ingredients of your sales success.

A Senior Manager — Buyer in a Multinational Corporation put it like this: ‘The Executive Suite can be a lonely place. If we trust the salesperson and feel they will listen, we tend to open up.’

Do You Listen, Before Talking?

Contrary to popular opinion great salespeople are not great talkers, but great communicators. The key difference is the ability to listen.

The eternal debate in selling surrounds the proportion of time the salesperson should spend talking, as opposed to listening. Is it 70:30 or 50:50 in favor of the salesperson?  Does the ratio change over the course of the sales cycle, with the buyer expected to do more talking at the earlier stages?

One thing is clear you cannot arrive at a sales meeting and expect to ask lots of questions and spend your time listening. On the other hand, you absolutely cannot spend most of the time talking. There is a delicate balance to be struck.

The rule must simply be to start a conversation that genuinely engages the buyer. Again the magical words are ‘conversation’ and engagement — thinking this way naturally ensures the right balance of listening and talking.

Posted by Ray Collis on 11:29 pm. Filed under 4. Listen, Before Talking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry