62% of Salespeople Aren’t Proficient in Active Listening. The Average Score Doesn’t Show It.
AI Summary
Sales leaders often assume that a competency score in the mid-70s is a passing grade. Objective Management Group’s assessment data on Active Listening, also known as Staying in the Moment, shows the average score has held steady at 77-78% for six consecutive years, with 2025 landing at 78%. But averages flatten distribution, and the distribution here is the real finding: only 38% of current salespeople are proficient in this competency, and the average score for currently employed salespeople assessed in 2025 was 75%, below the six-year trendline. A stable average is not the same as a solved problem. This article examines what that gap actually means for teams that depend on composure under pressure.
A Score That Hasn’t Moved in Six Years
Most sales leaders have a moment they can picture immediately: the rep who had a great coaching call on Monday and fell apart on Wednesday. Maybe they snapped at a prospect, went quiet when an unexpected objection was raised, or they just rambled without letting anyone else speak up. It rarely shows up on a scorecard. It shows up in a lost deal that everyone agrees “just didn’t work out.”
Sales is one of the more emotionally taxing jobs a person can hold. Industry surveys have found that roughly two-thirds of sales professionals report significant work-related stress tied to quota, rejection, and unpredictable outcomes.1 Separate research on emotional intelligence and job performance has found that the large majority of top performers, across professions, score high on emotional intelligence (EI) measures, with EI accounting for a substantial share of what separates strong performers from weak ones.2
Given how much weight is riding on a salesperson’s ability to stay composed, it would be reasonable to expect Active Listening to be a competency organization that have made real progress on. It has not moved.
Six Years, One Point of Movement
Objective Management Group assessment data shows the average Active Listening score has been flat since 2020:
| Year | Average score |
|——|—————|
| 2020 | 78% |
| 2021 | 78% |
| 2022 | 78% |
| 2023 | 78% |
| 2024 | 77% |
| 2025 | 78% |3
Six years, one point of movement. Stasis like this is arguably the harder problem to solve than decline would be. A declining score at least tells a story: something changed, something broke, fix that thing! A flat score across six years of hiring cycles, coaching investment, and shifting sales environments suggests sales leaders have not found a lever that moves this number at all.
If an organization has been waiting for the market, better hiring tools, or generational shifts in the sales force to naturally improve active listening, six years of flat data says that wait is not working.
The Average Is Hiding the Real Story
Beyond the average, only 38% of current salespeople are proficient in Active Listening. That means nearly two out of three salespeople fall short of the bar for reliably staying composed under pressure, even while the average score sits comfortably in the high 70s.
This is the pattern that averages are especially good at concealing. A single flat average can be produced by a population that is mostly proficient with a few weak outliers, or by a population where the bulk of people cluster just below the bar the whole competency is measured against. The 38% proficiency rate confirms it is the second pattern. Most salespeople sit consistently below the threshold that separates “not cutting it” from “actually reliable” when it matters most.
A scorecard that reports an average score without a proficiency rate is telling half the story, and it is the half that makes the problem look smaller than it is.
Currently Employed, Still Not in Control
One layer beneath that headline number is where the real story is. The 78% figure reflects the average across all Active Listening scores across assessments in 2025. When we narrow the data set to currently employed salespeople, the average drops to 75%.
These are salespeople already on the job, presumably have received training and still averaging below the norm on a competency directly tied to how they perform under pressure, handle rejection, and manage high-stakes conversations.
If sales leaders are relying on tenure as a proxy for emotional control, the data suggests that proxy does not hold. Tenure and a paycheck are not evidence of composure.
What High-Performing Organizations Are Doing Differently
Organizations that treat Active Listening as a coachable, measurable skill, rather than a fixed personality trait some reps have and others don’t, tend to build it directly into manager development rather than leaving it to individual resilience. A flat six-year average tells us that leaving active listening to natural disposition or informal coaching, is not producing improvement on its own.
The organizations pulling ahead here are the ones building moments of discomfort into role-play and coaching cadences: live objection handling, real-time deal reviews after a loss, and manager feedback delivered in the moment rather than reconstructed a week later.
None of this requires new technology or a new hiring pipeline. It requires treating the 62% of the sales force that isn’t proficient as a development problem worth solving directly, rather than a personality trait to manage around.
Final Thoughts
A stable average score has a way of feeling like reassurance. Six years of 77-78% reads as “nothing to worry about here” to a leader scanning a dashboard next to more volatile metrics. The proficiency data says the opposite: fewer than four in ten salespeople are good active listening, and it doesn’t get better with experience on the job.
The competency most directly tied to composure under pressure has not meaningfully changed in six years, while everything around sales, the pace, the scrutiny, the length of buying cycles, has changed considerably. Waiting longer will not close that combination on its own. Closing it takes organizations that stop reading the average and start building around the proficiency rate.
References
- American Institute of Stress, cited in “Why Sales Is the Most Stressful Job: Proven Coping Strategies for 2026.”LeadCRM, 2026.
- TalentSmartresearch on emotional intelligence and job performance, cited in “Emotional Intelligence in Sales Success.” Goodmeetings, 2024.
- Objective Management Group. Finding Statistics Tool. Average Competency Scores and % of current salespeople proficient in competency from 1/1/2020 – 12/31/2025.