Effective Interpersonal Listening and Personal Selling

Although widely recognized as essential to success, little research has focused on effective listening skills in the personal selling context. This paper reviews effective listening as seen in existing sales and communication literature. Further, it presents both a cognitive process model of the interpersonal listening process and a model that explicates the relationship between listening, adaptive selling and sales performance. In addition, a series of research priorities and research propositions are presented to stimulate future research.