Since the 1960s, emotional intelligence (EQ) has been recognized as a critical component of both personal and professional success. However, many organizations focus primarily on developing sales skills in their sales teams while neglecting emotional intelligence skills.
Here’s why developing emotional intelligence in sales is important and how it affects sales performance.
What is emotional intelligence (EQ)?
Emotional intelligence, also known as emotional quotient, is the ability to be aware of one’s own emotions and the emotions of others and to manage them in a productive and empathetic manner.
Daniel Goleman, the science journalist who introduced the idea of emotional intelligence in the 1960s, divided EQ skills into five categories:
- Self-awareness
- Self-regulation or self-control
- Social skills
- Empathy
- Motivation
Together, these five emotional intelligence skills comprise the building blocks of a healthy and productive approach to life and work.
Why is emotional intelligence important in sales?
Emotionally intelligent sales professionals perform better than their colleagues who are not emotionally intelligent.
To understand why this is so, let’s take a look at how the 5 types of EQ affect sales performance.
- Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to identify and understand your own emotions and the impact they can have on your actions and on other people.
A self-aware salesperson is better able to manage their time and energy around emotional states. They are less likely to annoy or annoy a potential customer with their own negative emotions. And they bounce back from disappointment and rejection faster than sales reps who ignore or are unaware of their negative feelings.
- Self-regulation or self-control
Self-regulation, also known as impulse control, is the ability to control and adapt your own emotions to suit the situation or to avoid upsetting others.
A self-regulated salesperson is able to avoid bringing negative emotions, such as fear, anxiety or irritation, into sales conversations. They are better able to adapt their behavior to the needs of the job. And they are able to generate enthusiasm and long-term motivation to fuel their job performance.
- Social skills
Social skills are the ability to have social awareness, make meaningful connections, build relationships and maintain relationships over a long period of time.
A sales professional with strong social skills will be successful at prospecting because they are able to maintain a larger and stronger network from which to draw sales opportunities. They will be good at collaborating and cooperating with their peers. And they will know how to understand micro-reactions and make adjustments to their own behavior to get the results they want.
- Empathy
Empathy is the counterpoint to self-awareness. It is the ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions and the willingness to respond to them productively.
An empathetic salesperson is good at judging how the customer or prospect is feeling so they can adapt their approach and steer conversations in the right direction. Empathy also helps the salesperson visualize the customer’s experience to better understand their needs, goals, and pain points so they can address them in the most effective way.
Note: For a salesperson to be effective, empathy levels should not be too low or too high. Too much empathy can cause a rep to be overly sensitive to the feelings of others, which leads to avoiding certain important steps in the sales process, such as:
- Asking who else is involved in the decision-making process.
- Questions about budget.
- Ending the sale because they feel the other person may find it rude, pushy or confrontational.
- Motivation
Motivation is the internally generated desire to accomplish a task or achieve a goal.
Sales people with strong motivation get more done in a day. They respond better to rejection and seek training and opportunities to improve their skills. They embrace new behaviors and activities that help them achieve their goals. They listen to coaching and apply it to their work. And they pursue promising leads and opportunities more assertively than their peers.
How to develop EQ in your sales team?
Fortunately, emotional intelligence is a set of skills that can be taught and developed to improve sales team performance.
Emotionally intelligent sales professionals are:
- Aware of their own strengths and weaknesses.
- Resilient and able to bounce back from setbacks and losses.
- Able to establish and maintain strong internal and external connections.
- Assertive in getting what they need to get the job done.
- Eager to learn and apply new skills to improve their performance.
- Able to generate their own internal motivation.
- Skilled at recognizing the behavioral styles of others and adapting their own styles to suit them.
Attending the Emotional Intelligence in Sales course, will help you and your team to fructify the skills and competencies of EQ, in Sales performance.
See more about the course here.
