The best definition of listening I have ever heard is: “Listening is not doing anything that interferes with seeing.” At first, this may sound strange, but if you’ll consider its implications, it is an extraordinary statement.

Our first article in this series on listening examined what you might do if you found yourself alone, in the center of a dark forest in the middle of the night. Imagine how you would listen intently, with every ounce of energy you could muster. You would be on high-alert, the equivalent of DEFCON 1, the military’s highest alert status. Nothing could distract your attention from your surroundings and your predicament.

This heightened awareness, in fact, would involve all your senses. You would listen intently to sounds around you and sounds in the distance. You would strain to see anything in your surroundings. Your sense of smell would alert you to any familiar or unusual fragrances. You certainly would feel anything around you that you touched, or touched you. Perhaps you would even taste danger! 

Intensely aware and sensitive to your surroundings, you would be prepared to react instantaneously to any emergency or threat. This same state of readiness would allow you to seize an opportunity for safety or escape. Even a brief lapse of attention could mean the loss of a chance to respond to an emergency or threat, or to take advantage of an opportunity.

You would not allow distractions of any kind that might threaten your security. It’s not likely that you would let your mind wander.  You probably wouldn’t, for example, think about gathering wood to build a fire, or picking wild blackberries for tomorrow’s breakfast. You would, instead, continue listening intently, employing all your senses for clues that might threaten or guarantee your survival.

Consider applying this behavior model to your sales interactions with prospects and customers. Instead of formulating responses in your mind as your conversational partner
speaks, what might happen if you simply listened to the speaker, employing all of your senses to actually see him or her?  What might happen if you allowed yourself to remain on DEFCON 1 alert status during your interactions with customers?

When sales leaders and senior managers push their sales teams to “market” on behalf of the organization, something is wrong. Salespeople aren’t marketers, and successful marketing doesn’t require salespeople to step into a marketing role.   

Professor Peter Drucker, widely regarded as an extraordinary thinker on business and management, regarded marketing and sales as antithetical. In fact, contrary to popular thought, he did not consider them synonymous or even complimentary. 

According to Drucker, the aim of marketing is to know and understand the company’s customers so deeply that when they see the company’s product or service offering, it so clearly fits what they want that they are ready to buy. There is no need for traditional selling in this scenario – there is only a customer ready to buy and a company that either stands in the way or facilitates the purchase. In an ideal world, where marketing functions optimally, selling becomes superfluous. 

In the business-to-business environment, the job of the marketing group is to fill the top of a company’s sales funnel with high quality, bona fide prospects that are ready to become customers.

Assuming your products and services meet the actual needs of your customers, failure to fill the top of the sales funnel points directly at a problem in the marketing department. The marketing folks may not truly understand what their customers want and need or the marketing messages may not directly impact what customers want to accomplish, fix or avoid.

When the marketing department does its job successfully, selling, in the traditional sense, becomes superfluous, as Professor Drucker states. Does highly effective marketing, then, portend the end of professional selling? Hardly.

The good news for the sales professional is that successful marketing changes the role of the salesperson in an organization. Unburdened with marketing tasks, the professional salesperson can concentrate on developing skills that uncover hidden sales opportunities and that help facilitate and grow customer loyalty.