The 3 Reasons why Emotional Intelligence Can Make Sales People More Successful

In this #SalesInsights post, I’d like to share with you my three reasons why Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is critical to sales success in the current buyer/seller marketplace.

With today’s buyers engaging with sales people much later on in the cycle, the time a sales person has with a buyer is more precious than ever before. There is only limited space in which to build trust, identify insights and communicate their value proposition, and the challenge is that all of these processes rely heavily on the Emotional Intelligence of the sales person.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

To understand why this has such an impact on sales effectiveness, we need to first understand what Emotional Intelligence actually is. It can be broken down into three core elements:

Knowledge of Self – Understanding your own social style allows the sales person to identify their personal behaviours and preferences which impact directly on their relationship with the customer, and therefore on the success of the sales process.

Knowledge of Others – Being able to recognise the social style of others enables the sales person to identify the preferences of their buyers and key stakeholders.

Collaborating Effectively – Once you can recognise your own social style and that of others, the sales person is then able to adapt their own style to suit that of their customers; to ‘adjust’ and control behaviours and emotions to improve outcomes.

Sales people with high Emotional Intelligence are therefore more effective because:

1. They are better at building trust-based relationships – In order to gain the information you need from your customer to create real value for them, you need them to trust you and want to share. Often, those nuggets of information that allow you to create genuine and differentiated value propositions are those which come from outside the standard fact-finding questions. But remember these conversations will only happen when your customer trusts you and wants to work with you.
2. They are better at moving their customers through the buying process – At every point in the customer’s buying process, the sales person with high Emotional Intelligence is more adept at taking the customer to the next stage of the buying cycle. This has the double- effect of both speeding up the process and improving the chances of a favourable outcome.
3. They are better at communicating their value proposition – The high Emotional Intelligence sales person knows how their customer prefers to receive information, this means they are able to tailor the communication of their value proposition to meet these preferences and ensure a much higher chance of that value proposition being regarded positively.

Let us tell you more

To find out more about Emotional Intelligence, take a look at our 1-day Emotional Intelligence workshop for sales people.