Of course, when conducting a sales chat, you don’t hear any audio. But you can ‘listen’ to the emotions and feelings conveyed by the prospect's replies. That’s what active listening is all about, and it’s a game changer.  

Let’s start with a definition: 

Active listening is the practice of listening to a person while providing feedback, indicating that you both hear and understand what is being said.

Luckily, this critical skill can be acquired and perfected through study, repetition, and reinforcement.

Active listening serves a greater purpose than just letting the speaker know you are still present in the conversation. A good active listener is playing multiple roles and achieves many goals within each conversation, including:

Successful selling is the result of effective information gathering. Sales agents who know more about their potential clients win the deal. If you can guide the conversation toward the prospect’s goals, roadblocks, and ambitions, it becomes much easier to close a deal.

Active listening isn’t a new conversational technique explicitly designed to better engage listeners in the internet age. But it does resonate particularly well with our brains nowadays.

Perhaps that’s because of the indirect nature of mass communication. Email, texting, and social media have made actual real-time conversations more scarce. As a result of this void, conversational speakers have become more prone to what psychologists call the “shift response.”

In a nutshell, shift response is when a listener redirects the conversation back to themselves. You can use this natural impulse to keep their prospect in the conversational “driver’s seat.”

The more prospects chat, the more you learn about their needs and desires. Additionally, they will begin to feel more comfortable with you, knowing their circumstances and wishes are understood.