Emotional intelligence skills for sales consists of six specific skills that enable high performance throughout the sales cycle.
Salespeople are in the business of making people happy. From small sales to big ones, the sales process is a trade of money for something that solves a problem or makes our lives better, easier, more effective, efficient, or just more beautiful.
That’s why emotional intelligence is essential for increasing sales. In order to get to that magical moment where the seller and the buyer are both happy, the salesperson must remain in control of their own emotions and remain aware of the buyer’s emotions at all times. That takes emotional intelligence.
How Emotional Intelligence Operates in the Sales Cycle
In the sales cycle, as in life, our emotions naturally waver and vary. Good salespeople are conscious of the nuances and shifts happening on every side and know how to deploy their own emotions strategically to build trust and make a buyer happy with a purchase.
In coaching terms, we call that consciousness emotional awareness. Emotions are highly activated during the sales cycle. People love the feeling of buying something, but they don’t like the feeling of being sold something. These contradictory emotions have to be navigated during the sales cycle in order to complete the sale.
Emotional intelligence skills give the best sales representatives an arsenal of tools to respond in the moment to the customer’s needs. They empathize when customers voice their problems. They project confidence when answering objections. They inspire customers to envision their life with a better solution.
The same emotional dynamic exists at every level of sales, whether the problem is relatively small (i.e. what to wear) or relatively large (i.e. what technology is best to diagnose rare diseases). The ability to sense and influence how other people feel lies squarely in the realm of emotional intelligence skills.
The Six Emotional Intelligence Skills for Sales
Over four decades, researchers[1] have investigated specific skills that lead to success in different kinds of sales situations.
Of the six emotional intelligence skills that are consistently found in high performing salespeople, three are foundational, contributing to high performance in all sales. These three emotional intelligence skills are relevant to every level of sales complexity, including short term sales. They are:
Self-Regard: self-confidence and self-acceptance, essential for building credibility and trust.
Self-Awareness: knowing what you are feeling and why, knowing what others are feeling and why, essential for the ability to empathize.
Emotional Self-Expression: finding the right words for the right person at the right time, the proverbial salesperson’s gift of gab.
Two more skills are relevant to sales of medium complexity. They are:
Optimism: the ability to remain confident after rejection.
Independence: the ability to set goals and hold oneself responsible, and an intrinsic desire to learn and improve.
One last skill is found in superior salespeople in tech sales or other highly complex sales.
Interpersonal relationships: the ability to develop relationships that are mutually satisfying and to use empathy to build rapport over the long term.
Together, these six skills provide a complete skillset for handling emotions in most sales situations. If the skillset is incomplete in any way, sales can falter. If the salesperson’s confidence wavers when answering questions or objections, the buyer instinctively reacts and may become skeptical and move on to another solution. If their self-regard or awareness falters at any point, the sale can sour quickly. If they ruminate over rejection and spend time mulling over failures, their future sales rate tends to spiral downward.
Each of these six emotional intelligence skills for sales unlocks a different aspect of the sales cycle, from interest, to learning more and building trust and credibility, and finally to closing. Star salespeople master all of them as they learn techniques that help them reach or exceed sales targets time after time.
How Emotional Intelligence Shows Up in the Sales Process
In each sales situation, these six emotional intelligence skills for sales contribute to the success of the sales process and the completion of the sale.
Self-Regard: Across all sales situations, successful salespeople are concerned with trust and credibility, which are a natural outgrowth of confidence and self-regard. The appearance of confidence can help boost sales in some short cycle sales, for example, the proverbial used car salesperson. Or at least, it used to. We can see by consumers’ preference for apps and websites over encounters with used car salespeople that few buyers are fooled anymore by salespeople who pretend to be confident. The posing, the overcompensating, the sometimes aggressive tactics are all out dated in an era where authenticity is highly valued. True self-regard allows a salesperson to convey an honest appreciation of the product or service, and so to project authenticity, sincerity, and authority which are inherently trustworthy.
Emotional Awareness: Because the sales process is fluid and never plays out the same way twice, excellent salespeople tune into the customer moment-by-moment to feel where they are and intuitively respond to their needs. Higher performing salespeople understand how the customer is perceiving them at any one moment, and senses how the customer is feeling about the product or service. Good salespeople can predict what their customer will say or do in response to information or a comment. This is the core of emotional awareness, which provides the foundation for all the other skills needed.
Emotional Self-Expression: This is the emotional intelligence skill that gives rise to the gift of gab in superior salespeople. It is the ability to express themselves and tout their product’s advantages, even when the conversation gets emotional. This skill helps salespeople address the customer’s most important desires and concerns sensitively and with tact, and to select or screen the right information at the right moment to soothe customer concerns and build trust.
Optimism: Even the highest performing salespeople face rejection. Optimists remain confident in the face of obstacles. When a lead doesn’t work out, optimists see the failed sale as the customer’s loss. They let it roll off and move on quickly to the next opportunity. Pessimists get stuck in rumination over wasted time or failures, often blaming themselves or their abilities, or wasting time in unproductive self-criticism. Many studies find that optimists, who don’t take things personally and move forward quickly, are most likely to be the highest performing salespeople.
Independence: Although some salespeople work in teams, most often, the sales process is a one-on-one conversation. As such, salespeople need more independence than people who gravitate toward more collaborative jobs. As an emotional intelligence skill, independence is defined as the ability to set your own goals and hold yourself responsible. Independence also includes an intrinsic desire to learn and make improvement for self-betterment, which leads to increasing success in any job, especially sales.
Interpersonal Relationships: If you have ever found a good real estate broker for a rental or a house, you have seen how some people quickly establish trust and even intimacy. A similar dynamic is at work in highly complex sales such as medical or pharmacological sales and equipment, specialized security technology, or enterprise level software that requires customization on a large scale. High performing salespeople in these complex, high-stakes situations know when to empathize with the buyer and when to project confidence and authority. Often, salespeople at this level build relationships with customers over years, creating a history of satisfying desires, delivering on promises, and generally being as much a friend as a business associate.
Using Emotional Intelligence to Increase Sales
Although some people are just naturally higher in emotional intelligence than others, everyone can improve their emotional intelligence through coaching and training. One-on-one coaching for a sales manager can help diagnose blind spots, find the right solution, and support managers as they develop their own emotional intelligence. Coaching also helps managers develop emotional intelligence among the people under them.
Training sessions for a sales team helps everyone learn how emotional intelligence operates in a sales situation. A presentation to a team gives people a way to talk about skills that are often difficult to talk about, and helps people self-assess their own weaknesses and start working to improve. It’s a good place to start with a new team or a team that needs a refresher in building strong bonds and trust.
If you want to build a high performing team sooner rather than later, using emotional intelligence assessments during the hiring process can help you identify people with the emotional intelligence skills they need to succeed. Companies like the US Air Force, L’Oréal, and Met Life have all used assessments in the hiring process to build high performing sales teams and increase retention. It’s far more cost efficient to screen candidates before you hire them than to find yourself with a low performer later.
Schedule a call today if you are ready to discover how emotional intelligence can increase you and your team’s sales.
[1] This article is based largely on competency modeling and research done by Martin Seligman, Lyle Spencer, Lyle, Jr., and Signe Spencer, and Korn Ferry.