How listening is much more than not talking?

Why listening is regarded a top sales skill

“A good speaker is also a good listener” observed Mercuri’s founder Heinz Goldmann in his classic book on ‘How to Win Customers’, adding “Too many salespeople talk too much and cannot listen” Listening is a top sales skill and is regarded as a superpower by veteran sales professionals.

Stanford Research on Listening and Building Rapport

Below are 5 tips curated from Stanford Graduate School of Business Class Takeaways published in Jan 2026 by Stephanie Blenderman. These tips are based on researched takeaways about listening and rapport from Marketing and StrataCom Professor Christian Wheeler’s course on Leadership Agility

1. Listening is more than not talking – Listening is not only about what you do in your head but also about what you don’t do inside it. Here are the top Don’ts and Do’s from Prof Wheeler

The Don’ts

If you are listening to carefully, you shouldn’t be

• Critiquing the Customer’s ideas or
• Formulating counter arguments or
• Trying to solve problems before understanding them or
• Trying to plan what to say next.

The Do’s

What you should be doing on the other hand is - You must be

• Trying to understand the main points,
• Genuinely appreciating how the Customer is feeling and
• Figuring out why the Customer feels that way.

Listening is the time to set aside our thoughts and give the other person our complete presence

2. Avoid reaching for your phone – Research shows that reaching for our cell phone has a short-term pacifying effect to counter boredom or anxiety. But the action has a negative effect on the speaker. It reduces connection and shows that you’re distracted. It is also seen from research that just having even a turned off phone on the table in front of you, lowers performance on tasks involving cognitive skills. Our attention is currency and it’s a gift we owe to our Customers

3. Ask feel-good follow up questions and listen – Another research finding is that we all like people who ask us questions, especially follow up questions designed to get us to talk more. Good follow up questions include feeling associated questions like:

• How did that make you feel?
• What was that like?

Such follow up questions signal that:

• We are truly interested in the speaker
• We are listening
• We are seeking to understand the other person
• We care about the speaker

4. Look at every listening opportunity as a chance to learn or gain something - Prof Wheeler points out – “Psychologist Richard Wiseman showed that lucky people have more social interactions with other people” This makes them social magnets, creating opportunities that seem like magic. To stimulate our curiosity to learn more about people, Wheeler urges us to think like a thief. We can make it our goal to take something from every social interaction. It could be gaining knowledge, getting a good story, or simply becoming closer to whoever you are listening to

5. Stay positive or at least neutral in your mind while listening – According to research, better relationship satisfaction is achieved through listening with

1. Positivity and agreement in verbal behaviours and
2. Gestures like nodding or smiling in non-verbal behaviours

But there will be occasions when we think that the speaker or Customer is wrong or we simply disagree with what the person says.

Best strategy in such situations is to avoid becoming negative and stay neutral. John Gottman, an expert who studied close relationships found that negative things we think are significantly stronger than good. So when we are tempted to express disagreement or be negative with the other person, it would be good to pause, hedge our disagreements, find areas of agreement with the person and change that negativity to positivity. That can make us outstanding listeners

As Harvard Professor Frank Cespedes reminds us in his book ‘How to Sell in a World that Never Stops Changing’ “Virtually every discussion of selling you have heard, and will hear, will rightly stress the importance of active listening. This skill is rarely innate and must be developed

You can read Stanford Graduate School of Business’ Class Takeaways here

Author Information

Christian Wheeler is The StrataCom Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing at Stanford University where he teaches courses on Marketing Management and Research Methodology. His research has been published in top marketing, organizational behavior, and psychology journals

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