The Importance of Listening in Leadership and Sales

What are key listening skills of leaders today?

The role of leaders must be to move away from identifying key ideas to convince the team, using persuasive facts which are enthusiastically shared to beat off other facts.  Rather their success as leaders lies in their ability to:

• Listen empathetically to their people, recognising the verbal and non-verbal clues e.g. ‘Thank you for sharing how you feel about his situation, it is helpful to understand where everyone is coming from on this issue’.
• Probe a little deeper for what is not being said e.g. ‘you seem happy/uncomfortable, I would like to learn more’.
• Understand the meaning of the message and capture the key points e.g. ‘here are the points of agreement/disagreement’ or ‘here are the suggested next steps, what do you think’?
• Encourage communication to continue by capturing the points, clarifying the questions and confirming through further meetings.
• Show that listening has taken place by making changes and explaining decisions.

What is a framework for listening in sales?

Success in sales lies in listening and a simple but highly effective framework for this is use all the techniques in this series of videos in order to:

• Get to know the business
• Get to know the person
• Understand the issues and problems
• Clarify the implications of those issues and problems
• And only then introduce solutions to those problems