Emotional intelligence, also known as Emotional Quotient (EQ), is the power of understanding someone else’s thoughts and feelings.
A doctor with a high EQ can empathize with their patients. A teacher with a high EQ can understand their students. And a salesperson with a high EQ can relate to their customers, hear their pain points, deal with them in the best way – and give them a better customer experience.
It’s easy to imagine how having a high EQ could lead to professional success – and increased earnings. It’s a key skill in today’s highly competitive environment.
Here are some ways you can harness the power of EQ to help propel your sales forward.
EQ Builds Customer Relationships
Quality relationships make business happen. Selling involves emotionally influencing a buyer – not by manipulation but through genuine understanding.
Disagreements are a huge part of the success of relationships. Addressing them correctly is important for keeping relationships healthy. Good EQ helps you focus on areas of agreement rather than exposing inconsistencies. It allows you to exchange ideas on how to overcome conflict and discover answers together. This can lead to building trust in sales and sowing the seeds for a long-term partnership.
EQ Can Support You Handling Rejection
Working in sales necessarily involves rejection, but it doesn’t mean that this is easy. Salespeople with a high EQ recognize that being told “no” isn’t something they should take personally. Instead, it’s a rejection of their product or the organization they represent. Repeated rejections are less likely to stress out emotionally intelligent people.
Instead, they see it as an opportunity to better their skills and think of lateral ways of making sales – building a SaaS landing page to do inbound marketing in addition to direct sales, for example.
EQ Helps to Build Rapport
There is not just one way to build rapport in sales and improve customer engagement metrics. To interpret the signals the customer is sending and adjust the pitch properly, it takes someone who is emotionally sophisticated. For example, if the customer appears to be friendly and wants to talk, the salesperson can adopt a more casual tone. But if the client likes to be addressed by their title, a more respectful and official tone is called for.
EQ Can Decrease Staff Turnover
Hiring staff can be as easy as getting a cheap VoIP plan, but letting people go; that’s the difficult part. Also, firing employees wastes the time and energy you spent making your team gel, which can then negatively affect the customer’s sales experience. It’s difficult to get your ideal sales team, but when a team works well together, it is unstoppable.
Suppose you focus on EQ in the hiring process. In this case, it’s far more likely the team will understand each other and the customer’s needs, and it’s less likely you’ll have to fire anyone. Smaller staff turnover means you can concentrate on increasing sales and spend less time on onboarding.
EQ Helps Us Take Action
People who are rational think a lot, but people who are emotional take action. For example, a rational individual may take more time to consider a purchase, but an emotional person will simply make the purchase.
Selling is all about the customer’s feelings – emotions are proven to make people buy more. They control the way that we think, behave, and act. These instincts come into play when people make purchases. Salespeople with this know exactly how to behave when they encounter an emotional buyer.
EQ Encourages You to Manage Yourself
Your own level of self-awareness can have a significant impact on how a customer views you. You can have more influence over prospect contacts and their outcomes if you can detect your own emotions and their potential impact.
What were you thinking about the last time you made a sale? What was going through your mind? Were you weighed down by personal or professional concerns? Every day, we all face pressures that affect our mood. Taking note of your emotional state, on the other hand, can help you identify how and why your emotions affect a call.
You must be completely aware of what your emotions are expressing to you in order to gain reasonable control and rise above them to become a detached observer. The goal is to gain a new perspective and become more realistic in your thoughts and feelings.
Salespeople who are good at what they do are able to recognize what their emotions are trying to tell them. They comprehend why these emotions are occurring and can decipher what it is trying to say to them. They can then use their more rational, thinking brain to pick the appropriate emotional reaction.
How Can You Improve Your EQ Skills?
Here are three ways to improve your emotional intelligence skills and increase your sales:
Respond, don’t react
When there is a conflict, it’s easy to just react emotionally. But a higher EQ is more likely to mean that you will remain calm and not make rash judgments that could lead to even worse problems.
Try to respond slowly to any conflict situation. Remember that your adverse reaction is destined to have bad future consequences, but show some restraint, and you’ll be remembered and respected in the future.
Be Sure to Always Be Friendly and Approachable
Always give positive feedback to your coworkers and employees. Smile and give out a positive impression. Also, make use of the relevant social skills, based on your interactions with others. You must have strong interpersonal skills and be able to communicate easily with others if you are emotionally intelligent.
EQ Leveraged
There’s a distinction to be made between hearing and listening. Rather than waiting for their chance to speak, someone with a high EQ listens. They grasp what is being said before responding.
Also, pay attention to nonverbal communications and gestures during a sales conversation. Understanding paralinguistic features and thinking about pragmatism can help to avoid misunderstandings, demonstrates respect for the speaker, and enables the listener to respond correctly.
