This document discusses research into how much time salespeople and customers speak during sales meetings. The research analyzed conversations of top and bottom performing salespeople from 22 organizations. It found that bottom performers spoke 76% of the time while customers spoke 24%. Middle performers spoke 69% and customers 31%. Top performers spoke 42% of the time while customers spoke 58%, indicating that the most effective salespeople let the customer do most of the talking during meetings.

1. Sales Tip Two:
Speak less and Listen more
I have asked thousands of sales professionalsthis
question over the past 12 years.
How much time should you speak during a sales
meeting and how much time should your customer
speak, as a percentage?
The answers I receive are as high as 80% the customer
and 20% the sales person.
I then follow this question up with a second question.
Explore your last ten sales meetingswith prospects.
How much time did you speak and how much time did
your customerspeak?
The answers here are very different. In most cases the
sales people speak far more than their customersdo.
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2. To get a definitive answerto this question, we have
conducted research to try to answerthis question, with
meaningful quantitative numbers.
Our Research
Over the past two years, we have analysed the sales
conversations of the top and bottom performers in 22
different organisations, to try to see what the optimal
amount of time a sales professionalshould talk during
sales encounters.
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Whenconducting the research, we assumed that the
top sales performers were operating optimallyand as
such we used the amount of time they spoke as the
optimum.Conversely, we assumed that the bottom
performers were not operating optimally and used the
amount of time they spoke as the worst-case scenario.
RESULTS
The results were not at the high end of 80% listening
and 20% speaking, as proposed by most sales people
during training sessions, but in the case of the top sales
performers, they always listened more than they spoke.
THE ACTUAL RESULTS

3. Sales Person Spoke
CustomerSpoke
76%
Bottom Performers
24%
69%
Middle Performers
31%
42%
Top Performers
58%
As you can see from the research above, the top
performers spoke about 40 % of the time and the
customers spoke about 60 % of the time.