Listening and It's Effects On Sales Performance

9 Pages 2173 Words

rson spends forty minutes talking about products or services, nine minutes asking questions, and eleven minutes letting the customer speak. More than half of the time the salesperson is talking to the customer. In actuality what you say is not nearly as important as what you hear. Throughout my research I discovered that there are three different states of listening. The three states are passive listening, intermediate passive listening, and active listening.
Passive listening can be defined as “failure to pay attention to verbal and non-verbal communication”(www.selfgrowth.com). Passive listening will produce poor sales results. Passive Listening takes very little energy and most information can be lost within a couple of hours and as fast as a few seconds. Examples include forgetting a person's name when introduced, not hearing a buyer's true needs, or forgetting critical tasks at a meeting.
If passive listening is such an ineffective listening technique, then why do so many people engage in it? According to www.selfgrowth.com, there are three major reasons why people passively listen. The first reason is that people have hidden agendas. This is very true with salespeople in general. They are so preoccupied with what they are going to say next that they often fail to pay attention to the here and now.
The second reason why people are victims to passive listening is their pre-existing condition. Pre-existing conditions are things that have occupied our mind prior to the conversation. This takes our attention away from the current conversation and forces us to passive listen. This is also very true with ineffective salespeople. The salesperson has a life outside of work and many things can occupy their mind other than the current sale that they’re working on.
The third major reason people pas...