The 3 Key Listening Skills Your Sales Team Should Practice During a Sales Visit

In order to be effective, salespeople need to develop a number of key skills. For us the one that stands out above all others is active listening. After all, it is their responsibility to listen to understand the issues that the prospect is having so they can formulate a strategy to help and support them.

So, what are the three common types of active listening and what should they consider?

#1; Support Listening

Your sales team should encourage your prospect to talk so they can learn about their role, responsibilities, and the challenges they and their business are facing. By asking open questions, the prospect should do most of the talking. The salesperson can use the opportunity to collect as much information as a possible while avoiding the temptation to interrupt. The salesperson should listen carefully and show that they understand what is being said without distracting the prospect from continuing to speak.

#2; Responding Listening

Responding listening is centred around relationship building. Along with the information gathered, your sales team needs to show that they are interested in the prospect, what they have to say, responding with curiosity and discussing how they can help them in the future. It’s important therefore that your salesperson concentrates on the prospect and uses dialogue that puts them at ease and shows empathy.

#3; Retention Listening

Lastly, there are situations where your sales team may not be personally engaged in dialogue and are not able to build a relationship with the prospect. Here they should use retention listening skills to listen out for facts and hard information that they will find helpful going forward.

Along with these three active listening techniques, one useful exercise that we recommend before moving on to the next stage of the sales process is to summarise what the prospect has said so that they know they have been listened to. Then, we suggest that your salespeople specifically highlight the needs from the issues the prospect has revealed, together with any solutions that they can provide to assist them.

We hope you find this article useful and if we can help you in any way, or if you’d like to ask us any questions, feel free to give us a call on 01625 380820 or connect with us on LinkedIn. 

Selling bespoke complex technical products doesn’t have to be hard. As a B2B technical sales consultancy in Cheshire we’ve many years’ experience in technical product selling, primarily in the energy, engineering, and manufacturing industries. Our skillset includes proposal development, internal and external sales, project management and business development. We’re also great at leading and motivating sales teams to be their best.

Our sales training and coaching services can help you to put into practice the contents of this blog and we also offer a range of sales consultancy and sales representation services. So please get in touch for a free consultation. We’re here to help you!