In order to be successful in sales, you need more than just a good product and a strong work ethic. You also need emotional intelligence (EQ). EQ allows you to understand and empathize with your customers, which can help you close more sales. In this blog post, we'll discuss how EQ can help you boost your close rates and what to do if you don't have high EQ.
EQ Sales is a Complex Selling Skills master class that teaches sellers to leverage a new psychology of selling to close large accounts. Emotional intelligence in sales is an important success factor that's often overlooked.
Learn about EQ sales and how it can help your reps. Sellers have needed a strong sense of emotional intelligence, and while this remains important, now a seller’s IQ is equally, if not more, important.
Sales reps that use emotional intelligence (EQ) increase close rates by 12%. Here we share how you can teach emotional intelligence to salespeople.
EQ Sales is a complex set of skills that goes beyond the emotions we feel. It’s about understanding how emotions impact buying decisions and using this knowledge to influence buyers.
When salespeople can read the emotional signals of their customers, they are able to adapt their approach and build trust, which leads to more closed deals.
Teaching emotional intelligence in sales is not about sharing a list of do’s and don’ts.
It’s about helping your reps understand how their emotions affect their interactions with customers, and then giving them the tools they need to use this knowledge to close more deals.
- Sellers need to understand their own emotions and the impact of those emotions on others.
This is where self awareness comes in - understanding what you are feeling at any given point, why you feel that way, and how your feelings influence interactions with customers.
- Reps need to be able to read the emotional signals of their customers. This includes understanding what emotions people are displaying, what those emotions mean, and how to react.
- Sellers need to know how to use emotion to build trust. When salespeople can understand the emotions of their customers, they can create a connection that leads to more deals, rather than the opposite.
- Reps need to be able to manage their own emotions so they can stay effective in all types of situations. This means being aware enough not only understand what you are feeling, but also how it impacts your interactions with customers and colleagues.
When sellers have a strong understanding of these concepts, they’ll be able to adapt their approach and build trust with customers, leading to more closed deals.
EQ is defined as the ability to perceive, interpret, respond to, and cope with one's own emotions, as well as the ability to influence buyers' emotional responses.
Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management are the four specific components of EQ competencies.
Self-awareness
There is no such thing as a flawless person. Everyone has their own set of characteristics, strengths, flaws, generalisations, inabilities, and blind spots.
The main distinction between individuals with high self-awareness and those who don't is that those with high self-awareness are first aware of and observant of their own strengths and weaknesses.
This means that a salesman with a high level of self-awareness understands how they feel emotions and how those emotions effect them.
They can 'identify' how they are feeling at any one time and the messages these feelings are sending.
Most of us find this challenging since emotions are normally experienced at a subconscious level, and we rarely have a flash of awareness that says, "This is what I'm experiencing, why I'm feeling it, and what I need to do with it."
Quality salespeople understand that self-awareness is addressed in the context of the environment in which they are working.
They know when to talk and when to listen, when to ask for additional information and when to back off, when to demand commitment and when to give the customer time to think things over.
Consider sales circumstances where you and the person you were working with weren't quite on the same page.
At the time, did you understand your own drivers? Were you conscious of how you felt? Or did you place blame on the other person for your failure to move forward?
Self-awareness is essential for laying a solid basis for improving your EQ Sales.
Self-management
When you're conscious of how you've created your emotions in a circumstance, you may work on moderating what can be disruptive emotions in some cases.
Have you ever witnessed or experienced these emotions in a sales situation, either in yourself or in your customer?
These factors, among others, might derail a sales conversation and influence your overall assessment of a scenario.
Self-management is also known as self-regulation or self-control, and how well you handle this aspect of EQ is critical to your long-term success.
You must be completely conscious of what your emotions are saying you in order to gain reasonable control and rise above them to become, if you will, a detached observer, gaining a new perspective and being more realistic in your thoughts and feelings.
Salespeople that are good at what they do are able to recognise what their emotions are trying to tell them.
They comprehend why they are experiencing this emotion and can decipher what it is trying to tell them. They can then use their more rational, thinking brain to pick the appropriate emotional reaction.
Social awareness is important.
This is the capacity to apply EQ in a way that positively and gradually interacts with others.
Many of the salesmen we work with are obsessed with the sound of their own voices, as if they need to feel more important than the buyer.
The desire to feel significant is one of our most basic human desires. It strokes our ego and helps us feel good about ourselves when someone thinks we're significant.
When you focus on the buyer and their needs, salespeople with high levels of EQ in Social Awareness can make them feel valued. How are we going to do it?
Listen carefully and intently. Because you are really interested in them and their problems, the consumer develops an emotional attachment to you when you listen to them.
Look for something that will go well with them. This must be genuine, not patronising. When you come across something worth commenting on, do so because you are really interested rather than to ingratiate yourself.
The quality of our buyer relationships can make or break present and future business possibilities. This can be boiled down to influencing abilities, dispute resolution, teamwork, and leadership style.
The way you emotionally impact a buyer can often break down the resistances that lead to objections.
Buyers can see sales techniques manipulating a mile away, therefore influencing is more subtle in that it allows the buyer to steer the conversation in such a manner that it appears to be their decision to buy rather than your ability to sell.
Dealing with conflict or disagreements is important for sustaining and building a relationship because it moves the dialogue forward by focusing on areas of agreement rather than exposing inconsistencies.
You begin to exchange ideas on how to overcome areas of worry as your relationship progresses, and you work together to discover answers.
As you emphasise future solution-value rather than short-term price gaps, conflict becomes a source of solution-generation and benefit-creation, and it can create harder resistance to price conversations.
As you work together as partners to create greater results, teamwork can help you achieve more in supporting your buyers' goals.
By providing backup when needed or failing to follow through on commitments made, your company's support crew can create or destroy the connection with your clients.
The way you lead yourself, your support team, and your suppliers has a significant impact on the customer relationships you retain.
Your level of leadership can influence what the future status of the relationship between you and the client will be whenever you face any problems or setbacks in the sales process
You provide actual value to the client by leading via problem-solving and decision-making, both now and in future dealings.
Let's put all we've learned into practise. How would a salesperson with a high EQ react differently to someone with a lower EQ?
Here's an illustration:
Your prospect has stated that he is not yet ready to make a decision because he needs to consider more possibilities and conduct market research.
He likes your proposal, but he has to be sure he's making the proper choice.
A person with low self-awareness and self-management may respond by questioning what they have done wrong so far in the sale, allowing the prospect to believe there are still alternative possibilities.
Low EQ people are more likely to seek sensible solutions, so they can ask, "What else do I have to do to get your business?" or 'Is cost a concern for you?'
At this point, rational thinking may not be exactly appropriate, thus the low EQ salesperson may rely on specific logical judgments to figure out how to proceed with the sale.
He could miss the true meaning of how the prospect feels, and the conversation could proceed in the wrong way.
The salesman with a high EQ considers the social and relationship factors that would make the prospect feel better in this situation. A salesperson with a high EQ would be able to:
"How do I react to this right now?"
"What would be the greatest way for me to respond to this?"
"How could he say such a thing?"
"How can I persuade him to keep us in mind while comparing us to the competition?"
"Is there anything else I can say to add value to our solution?"
Do you see how a deliberate reaction is preferable to a quick response?
When a salesman has a high EQ, he or she considers the consequences before stating them.
It demonstrates that most decisions are made emotionally rather than logically, thus we examine the prospect's circumstance and assist them in making decisions without haste.
'People act on emotion and rationalise with logic,' as the saying goes.
Because today's purchasers are more capable than ever of making logical selections on-line and elsewhere without the help of salespeople, the emotional connection you can build with decision-makers is becoming an increasingly important differentiator when you eventually make contact.
As purchasers look for value in areas other than pricing, developing your emotional intelligence is increasingly recognised as one of the most important abilities you can focus on. ‘
You may become that differentiator by honing these talents and demonstrating to your clients that you are a true partner who is important to their future operations.
