Beyond Active Listening: Listening Styles and Sales Effectiveness

As a successful salesperson, you already understand the value of effective listening, and may have sharpened your skills through formal training in “active listening” techniques such as mirroring, probing, and paraphrasing.

If you’re skilled at these techniques, you’re likely to rank among the better listeners that your customers regularly encounter. But you can be even better if you understand and practice the less well-known concept of listening styles.[1]

In essence, there are four possible ways of listening to another person speak:

Relational listening is concerned with how the other person feels, and the goal is to understand them emotionally and to make a connection.

Analytic listening focuses on fully understanding the other person’s content–their argument or point of view, without judging it.

Task-oriented listening is about trying to quickly grasp the other person’s point and relate it to one’s own purposes for the conversation.

Critical listening judges the validity of the other person’s content by evaluating their logic and assessing their evidence.

As you read these four descriptions, you may have had a flash of recognition about your own tendencies. People tend to have a preferred or habitual style of thinking, and this colors what they hear and understand, and at the same time may affect how they are perceived by others. But these styles are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and any individual can consciously choose which style to use.

When to vary your style

Which style is most appropriate or effective? It depends.

What are you trying to accomplish in the conversation? Sometimes the other person just wants to vent and be heard, and the relational style works best, while the critical style could easily cause a rift between speaker and listener. Other times, especially with complex ideas, the analytical style might be best. Even the task-oriented and critical styles, which might seem impatient or rude, may apply depending on the situation. In fact, each can even be useful at different points during the same conversation.

And that leads us to how to deploy these styles appropriately in a sales conversation. Depending on where you are in the sales call or sales cycle, if you know which style is most appropriate at the time, you can increase connection, understanding, and even positioning. Let’s take a look at the typical tasks you need to accomplish during a sales conversation:

When you first meet a potential customer, there is usually some brief time to establish common ground. This “non-business” part of the meeting may seem to be irrelevant to the actual purpose of the call, but that attitude ignores eons of behavioral evolution. First impressions count for a lot, and one of the most important things that people size up—rapidly and unconsciously—is similarity and warmth. You can use the relational style to listen for commonalities and establish rapport. Moving too quickly to business may turn off the other person, particularly if their own style is also relational. At the same time, you need to focus on their mood, to ensure that you don’t go on too long when they’re showing signs of impatience.

As you move into the body of the sales call, you don’t turn off the relational listening radar, but you do shift your emphasis towards task-oriented listening, minus the impatience. At this stage, you are asking questions and then listening for information that relates to your call purpose. For example, if you’re looking for needs that you may be able to address, you will be listening for indications that they may have known problems, opportunities, changes and risks. The caveat is that you can’t be so focused on specific targeted needs that you miss hints about unexpected needs.

When you’ve heard needs that you can address, you may feel the urge to listen critically, as you formulate your pitch about how you can solve their problem. But it’s better to hold off and go into the analytical listening mode, to diagnose and better understand their issues before you launch into your prescription.

As the conversation progresses, you can use both relational and task-oriented listening to pick up buying signals, such as indications that they are thinking ahead to implementation, or concerns about how to get agreement from other stakeholders.

Critical listening, with its emphasis on searching for flaws in the customer’s thinking, would seem to be least appropriate for customer conversations. But there are times when you may need to correct their perceptions or statements. Don’t forget that selling can go both ways: the customer may be trying to sell you on a particular point of view as well. If they bring up an invalid objection, you can’t let it slide. They may have incomplete information, or they may be testing you, so you must listen critically to be able to respond appropriately. And of course the negotiation stage is where you may need your critical listening the most, to be able to counter their arguments designed to undermine your negotiating position.

Listening style affects your responses

So far we’ve examined listening styles as they relate to what’s going on in our minds as the customer is talking. But how we listen also makes a visible difference to the customer, because it influences our response to what we hear. For example, if the customer says, “I just think that switching to a new system will be too complicated for our team.” Here are possible responses:

Relational: “It’s a big decision, so it’s normal to feel a bit nervous about it.”

Analytical: “What specific aspects of the implementation concern you the most?”

Task-oriented: “We have a dedicated team that specializes in ensuring a smooth transition.”

Critical: “Your concerns are unfounded. The processes you’ve seen in the past are totally different.”

It’s a skill that takes practice

You might think that listening styles are just a matter of “different strokes for different folks”, but sales conversations are like swimming the individual medley in the Olympics—you can’t win without being able to master each stroke. We all have tendencies or habitual listening styles, but ultimately style is a choice, and a skill you can work on.

Here’s a small experiment you can run: next time you speak to a customer, pay attention to your own thoughts and responses to gain an awareness of your own style. Then, gradually expand your own range by consciously switching between style. Finally, try varying your responses and paying attention to the difference it makes.

[1] See, for example, “What’s Your Listening Style?”, by Rebecca D. Minehart, Benjamin B. Symon, Laura K. Rock, Harvard Business Review, May 31, 2022.