Solving 4 Sales Listening Mistakes with Duarte’s Maegan Stephens

After sharing and shoe-tying, listening is something many of us don’t remember learning. And yet, listening mistakes help demonstrate that it isn’t second nature. In fact, listening is one of the hardest skills to refine and maintain. And this goes double for sales professionals courting customers and closing deals. That’s because the road between the pitch and that final handshake is riddled with potential pitfalls. But from the perspective of Maegan Stephens, co-author of Adaptive Listening: How to Cultivate Trust and Traction at Work and one of Duarte’s resident listening experts, there’s a better way. 

Recently, Maegan hosted a virtual deep dive into the costly listening habits plaguing sales professionals and offered tips to help reorient their approach. “The Four Listening Mistakes Stalling Your Sales—and How to Stop Them” provided attendees with simple, actionable tools to center customer needs, reduce missed opportunities, and help meet quotas. As part of Duarte’s ongoing webinar series, Maegan demonstrated how core Adaptive Listening principles can be applied at scale to improve sales and boost performance for teams of all sizes. 

If you prefer to watch the webinar in full, jump to the bottom of this page and click the link. Otherwise, buckle up for an editorialized recap of Maegan’s talk, beginning with a brief aside into the golden ratio of “being seen and being heard” to find success in sales.

The Root of All Listening Mistakes: Talking Too Much vs. Listening Too Little

Cliches of fast-talking salespeople are as old as the frontier and grew in response to an accelerating marketplace. Images of wagons loaded with elixirs evolved into sprawling car dealerships staffed by sharp suits and ringed fingers, door-to-door hustlers, and cold-callers with earpieces looking for a speedy commitment. Equal parts popular culture exaggeration, historical artifact, and unfortunate circumstance, stubborn visions of success still place savvy sellers at the heart of every transaction. However, a crucial participant is missing from the above scenarios: the buyer. In practice, Adaptive Listening aims to make dogged sellers a relic of the past, but the symptoms of this mindset are hard to stamp out. 

Lee Iacocca, golden age CEO of Ford and Chrysler, said it best: “I only wish I could find an institute that teaches people how to listen. Business people need to listen at least as much as they need to talk.” Duarte was just a glimmer in Nancy’s eye when Lee shared this quote, but in the meantime, we’ve made incredible headway toward elevating listening as a discipline and worked to reshape its effectiveness from an audience-first perspective. Maegan and her co-author, Nicole Lowenbraun, spent years studying listening applications and isolated four listening styles and goals that encompass the majority of personal interactions. Once the structure was visible, it was easier to spot potential cracks in the foundation, and where to watch your step.

The 4 Sales Listening Mistakes

Maegan’s talk emphasized how striking the right balance between sharing and absorbing information means learning how to adapt your listening to meet an evolving set of buyer needs throughout a conversation. However, landing and remaining within this Goldilocks Zone during a sales meeting requires a firm understanding of listening’s diverse applications and use-cases. Like reaching for a hammer when you need a wrench, using the wrong listening style can damage the longevity of an otherwise healthy business relationship. That’s why it’s essential to touch base throughout customer interactions and ask yourself: What does the speaker need from this interaction?

To Lee’s point, bringing revenue across the finish line does require a malleable approach that toggles between action and restraint: listening and speaking in balanced harmony. From there, Maegan zeroed in on the four easy fixes she identified for tightening sales interactions and sharpening customer needs. And it started with everyone’s favorite time-filler: small talk. 

Undervaluing Small Talk 

With quotas looming and only so many hours in a day, sales professionals can feel pressured to move interactions along in favor of inking fresh contracts. For eager sellers, these moments can grate on their desire to push customer interactions forward. However, by taking this time to practice Immerse Listening, you’ll get to know your customers on a deeper level and establish lasting relationships. Forming and nurturing genuine human connections in a highly competitive landscape encourages buyers to become loyal repeat customers. Instead of viewing small talk as an inconvenient hurdle, Maegan urged sales folks to practice relishing these moments and absorbing personal information that could be useful later.  

A few helpful tactics include:

• Lean into Curiosity – Use details from their virtual background as a key to unlock a larger conversation. A poster, sports pennant, artwork, or photo can be the springboard to break the ice and start forming a personal connection. 

• Ask Probing Questions – After identifying a visual cue, or if you’ve researched the buyer on LinkedIn, ask about that detail, their alma mater, or any other public information with warmth and be ready to reciprocate with a little bit about yourself. Over time, these details can form a web of connective tissue that will support your professional relationship. 

• Land a Callback – Once you’ve learned about a favorite sports team or pastime, mention it again at the end of the call to show you’ve retained the information. By bookending the interaction with personal touches, the buyer will feel valued as more than just a potential lead. 

Along with developing a deeper connection through small talk, these additional data points can help adapt your listening as the conversation unfolds and meet evolving customer needs. One example, and the second of Maegen’s listening mistakes stalling sales, is to know when to put on your mentor cap to impart industry knowledge that could guide your customer toward making an informed purchase. 

Missing the Mentor Moment

Sales, more so than other aspects of business, is a performance. It’s about doing the right song and dance that gets buyers clapping along to the beat. But inevitably, the last slide hits the screen, and the music stops. What then? At this point, sellers should strive to become an open book for buyer curiosity. Along with allowing space for customers to ask crucial follow-up questions, this time enables sellers to drive home the true purpose of their pitch: To make the customer the hero.  

For this mistake, Maegan emphasized how sellers often fail to let buyers pick their brains for additional information and opt to rush toward getting a quick commitment. This can damage trust by inverting the power dynamic away from the buyer and reducing the relationship to a purely transactional exchange. Instead, sellers should be gracious with customer questions and be prepared to act as experts on the product or service they’re pitching. Here, Discern Listening will help identify gaps in the buyer’s knowledge and where you can provide an easy fix. 

To avoid these listening mistakes, try encouraging the following: 

• Ask them to start at the beginning – By understanding the entire arc of your customer’s problem, you’ll be better positioned to help fill in the gaps in their understanding. This can also help avoid awkward moments and wasted time when you explain something they already know.   

• Invite them to explore options – Knowing what’s on the table for your customer helps identify the parameters of the sale. What conversations have already been had? Are their leaders and team members asking the right questions? Exploring these can guide what information you offer and the types of solutions that could be viable for solving a given pain point.   

• Entice them to uncover WHY – If your customer doesn’t know why they’re talking to you, how are you supposed to help them solve their problem? Like starting at the beginning, this enables you to see the full scope of the buyer’s needs and gets them on the right path toward arriving at your product or service as the solution. 

Demonstrating a firm grasp of your product or service can reinforce another dimension of customer trust and allow buyers to feel discerning in their purchase. Just as you’re aiming to close a deal, buyers are also thinking of their job performance in these moments. They will appreciate the opportunity to appear competent to their teammates and leaders. By setting aside time to exchange personal and sales-specific information, you’ll be better positioned to avoid several listening mistakes downstream of an accelerated pace. 

Jumping to a Solution

Along with sprinting through small talk and missing opportunities to educate your customers, prematurely jumping to a solution without fully grasping your customer’s needs can muddy an otherwise successful sale. This is another side-effect of forced urgency that can be remedied by easing the pace of the interaction and ensuring you fully understand the buyer’s pain points. To help plot your approach, Maegan unpacked Adaptive Listening’s L.E.N.S. framework to identify and sharpen key aspects of the speaker/listener dynamic. Each piece breaks down the interaction further to help cover all your bases before proposing a solution.

By letting small talk take its course and rising to meet any potential mentor moments, you’re ready to diagnose the four aspects of your L.E.N.S. and ask clarifying questions. Otherwise, you run the risk of talking at length about a product or service that doesn’t fit your buyer’s needs. In this situation (and throughout customer interactions), pay special attention to body language, posture, facial expressions, and any additional verbal or non-verbal cues to gauge the success of your pitch. If you clock any signs of impatience in your customer, you’re probably headed down the wrong path in your explanation. 

That’s why it’s essential to give buyers all the space they need to ask questions, double back on clarification, and kick the tires of your product or service offerings to ensure it’s the right fit. Unlike the smooth-talking sales trope we introduced above, a true professional should be accommodating and patient when closing a deal. Moreover, you can’t forget to stick the landing.

Forgetting the Follow-Through

You signed a deal — Congratulations! But you’re not out of the woods yet. Now’s your chance to put a bow on the interaction and position your colleagues further down the funnel for success as they unfurl your product or service. By this point, you’ve had plenty of opportunities to evolve your listening throughout the customer interaction, but adapting in these final moments is essential to bring the sale home. 

In practice, this means ensuring all pertinent information is collected, recorded, and passed along carefully to your colleagues who will deliver the product or service. Simultaneously, you’ll want to keep your listening attuned to last-minute concerns or cues to assuage customer anxieties. This will help the customer close with confidence and deepen your personal connection. Depending on the buyer, this can nudge your listening to any of the four styles to best meet their needs in these final moments. 

As you’re getting the final details in order, consider the following: 

• Prepare to pass the baton – Now that you’ve closed the sale, consider what your colleagues on onboarding, success, or delivery teams need to ensure the buyer continues to have a seamless, white-glove experience. Log all necessary information into your CRM to avoid your buyer being re-engaged for answers they’ve already provided in your sales call.   

• Frame your follow-up questions – Flex your Advance Listening skills by moving the close along tactfully and with proper context so your customer knows you’re asking proactive questions. By sharing that you aim to save them time down the line, this peace of mind will register in the moment and continue to reverberate throughout their experience with your company.

• Show your note-taking – Whether you’re taking notes longhand or logging the interaction digitally on a second monitor, give the buyer a heads-up about why you may appear distracted before you break eye contact. They’ll appreciate the transparency, and the simple courtesy plus your clear dedication will solidify your commitment to care. 

By respecting your buyer’s time and setting team members up for success, you’ve done your due diligence and avoided the fourth costly mistake. Easy right? With practice and vigilant reinforcement, flexing these soft skills can become second nature. But it helps to have regular practice.

For more of Duarte’s Adaptive Listening methodology and a spirited Q&A with host Maegan Stephens, dive into the full webinar recording. Or, if you’re ready to stamp out listening mistakes on your sales team, book a call with a training expert.

When it comes to talking vs. listening, we can help get the balance exactly right.