Why Emotional Intelligence Matters in Building High-Performance Sales Organizations
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN on how competitive things have gotten in the world of sales. The bad news is that it’s only going to get more competitive with the impact of technology, artificial intelligence, and a global economy. Successful companies always look for new and better ways to disrupt their market and serve their clients. They invest their money in improving technology platforms to ensure that products and services are delivered in the fastest, most convenient manner for clients. More dollars are spent on branding and marketing, trying to win the attention of prospects in a busy, distracted, 24/7 world.
These are all certainly a wise use of resources, but there is one more approach to winning business that is often overlooked by many sales organizations. That approach is to fully incorporate emotional intelligence into your hiring strategies, sales training methodologies, and sales leadership practices.
I am sure there are some sales leaders reading this and shaking their heads, wondering how soft skills, emotional intelligence skills, can produce hard sales results. Rather than pontificate on the benefits of emotional intelligence, let me ask if you’ve experienced any of the following challenges in your role as a sales leader.
• Your sales team is discounting, selling on price, even when your company offers a better value. And this is after you’ve enrolled your sales team in a negotiation skills workshop.
• Your title is vice president of sales or sales manager but some days you feel like your business card should read kindergarten teacher or psychotherapist. Daily sales drama eats up too much of your valuable time.
• Your sales team talks too much and listens too little, even though you’ve taught them a great questioning model.
• You’ve emphasized the importance of salespeople offering new insights and new ways of thinking to prospects. But your sales team can’t share any insights because they aren’t motivated to learn them.
• You were a top sales producer but your sales team isn’t embracing what you teach and coach. You’re wondering if it’s you or them.
• The sales team is hiding behind email and text communication rather than talking to live, human beings.
Some of these challenges occur because of ineffective selling skills. And many, as you will learn in this book, are due to a lack of soft skills, emotional intelligence skills.
Learning and applying emotional intelligence skills in your day-to-day role as a sales manager will dramatically reduce or eliminate the sales management challenges mentioned above. It’s time for a new perspective. It’s time to incorporate emotional intelligence into your sales leadership processes.
The Sales Leadership Insanity Loop
We live in the information age. Salespeople and sales managers have access to more selling tools and knowledge than ever before to be successful. We can listen to sales podcasts, attend webinars or live sales training and management courses, and read informative blogs.
But according to CSO Insights, the research arm of Miller Heiman, achievement of quota for salespeople continues to hover around 53 percent. Why? There isn’t one answer. However, in my work with hundreds of sales organizations, I find the biggest reason is that sales organizations work on the wrong end of the problem when faced with sales performance issues. They are stuck in the insanity loop of sales management, one where they keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.
• Sales managers only vet new candidates for their industry experience and selling skills—what I refer to as the hard skills, Sales IQ. But they don’t interview for soft skills, emotional intelligence skills, Sales EQ. As a result, sales managers hire culture misfits that wreak havoc on the company culture and core values. Your new hire is great at selling but not great at playing well in the sandbox with others.
• When a salesperson misses sales quota, a sales manager’s first response is to teach more hard-selling skills, consultative selling skills. These skills are important, and we teach a lot of them. But is the salesperson not asking enough questions during a sales call because he doesn’t know the questions to ask? Or, is it because he needs to learn better impulse control and self-awareness to understand when and how he gets triggered during a meeting resulting in a product dump?
The best sales teams are led by sales leaders who teach, coach, and master both the consultative selling skills (Sales IQ) and soft skills (Sales EQ) to accelerate sales results.
Where’s the Proof?
Research conducted by the Corporate Executive Board uncovered key traits found in the most successful salespeople. One of the traits found in the most successful salespeople is the skill of assertiveness. But assertiveness is not a hard-selling skill, a consultative selling skill. It’s an emotional intelligence skill, one that helps a salesperson state what she needs nicely in sales conversations to create partnerships, not “vendor-ship” relationships. Assertiveness is the soft skill that supports the consistent execution of hard-selling skills, helping a salesperson say and do the right things during a sales call.
Steven Stein and Howard Book, authors of The EQ Edge, have collected extensive research from their work with successful CEOs and leaders. Not surprising, their data shows that the most profitable leaders consistently score high in two emotional intelligence skills: empathy and self-regard. Empathetic leaders are good listeners. They have the ability to read the emotional temperature of their employees. Their ability to connect and relate to their teams helps them retain top talent, avoiding the high cost of turnover.
Leaders possessing high self-regard are aware of their strengths and weaknesses. This awareness and confidence helps them avoid blind spots that derail good decision-making and careers. Sales teams like and trust these leaders because they have no problem quickly admitting when they make a mistake. Vulnerability and honesty build trust, great teams, and profitability. But how many sales leaders have engaged in training or coaching to develop their emotional intelligence skills? The answer is not enough.
Why Read This Book?
For too long, hardworking salespeople and sales managers have not earned what they are worth. Salespeople get flustered on sales calls because emotions, rather than effective sales and influence skills, start running the meeting. Many forget to bring important soft skills to a sales conversation, blowing the sales meeting in the first five minutes because they aren’t reading the emotional temperature of their prospect or customer.
Low self-awareness = low other awareness = no connection = no sale
On the other side of the sales equation, I’ve encountered salespeople earning big money—accompanied by great stress. They don’t enjoy the sales profession as much as they could due to their lack of emotional intelligence skills. They fall into the trap of working harder-not-smarter, which leads to fatigue, burnout, and dropout. Both scenarios create unnecessary turnover, forcing sales managers to spend more time interviewing new salespeople than time developing their current sales team.
It’s the insanity loop!
Sales managers get derailed coaching salespeople because emotions, not effective training and coaching skills, start running the coaching conversation. They aren’t aware of how they show up to coaching conversations, often creating the defensive behaviors they dread when delivering well-intended feedback. Sales managers forget to bring empathy to a coaching conversation. They immediately dispense advice without thinking about the salesperson’s emotional state around this particular sales performance challenge.
Sales and Sales Management Should Be Fun
We often spend more time at work than we do with our families. Developing your sales team’s emotional intelligence skills makes your life as a sales leader easier and more enjoyable. Emotionally intelligent sales teams achieve the fun quota and the sales quota. These sales teams learn and master the soft skills, ones that often aren’t taught in grade school, high school—and certainly not in traditional sales training or sales management training. Skills such as:
• Empathy and how to make emotional connections that accelerate trust, improve relationships, and increase closed business.
• Emotion management, which limits nonproductive fight-or-flight conversations with prospects, customers, and members of their own team.
• Stress management skills, which decrease frustration and increase productivity.
• Self-limiting belief systems that often rob salespeople of achieving their best in life.
• Self-awareness and other awareness, which eliminates repeated mistakes in building relationships and achieving sales goals.
• Embracing failure and feedback. Mastery is not achieved without feedback or failure, and improved self-regard skills improves the ability to accept both.
Emotionally intelligent people are refreshing people to work with because they don’t get caught up in the game of blame and excuses. High EQ salespeople don’t blame outside circumstances for their failures. They are competitive, confident, and humble salespeople who own their successes and their failures. These individuals are introspective, always asking the question, “What do I need to do to change, grow, and improve? How am I showing up in my relationships and conversations?”
It’s time for a new perspective in sales and sales leadership. It’s time to incorporate emotional intelligence skills into your sales hiring, training, and leadership processes.
Let’s get started.