How Emotional Intelligence Can Encourage High Performance and Differentiate Sales Teams

Emotional intelligence helps sales teams’ understand prospects as people, not just numbers. But how, exactly, does emotional intelligence encourage high performance?

Key takeaways:

• Your sales team can understand the emotions of prospects better if they understand their own emotions
• People will listen to you and possibly buy from you if they feel you understand their needs
• Self-motivated salespeople can easily overcome rejection and use it as an opportunity to improve their skills
• Mastering emotional intelligence is one of the ways to bond emotionally with prospects and drive sales
• If one member lacks motivation, it affects the performance of the entire team
• Prospects will open up if they feel they’re as important as the service or product you want to sell

In a field as competitive as sales and marketing, your team needs skills to help them stand out. Consumers are looking for salespeople who understand their needs and can connect with them – this is where the problem is. It’s no longer about quoting figures and facts from research but building relationships with prospects.

Consumers have different personalities and reactions – one size can’t fit all. So how do you ensure you’re not just pitching a product or service but building lasting connections? The solution is to master the art of emotional intelligence (EI). This guide will take a closer look at EI and how it leads to high-performing salespeople.

Understanding emotional intelligence

EQ, or the emotional quotient, is the ability to recognize, understand, and control your own emotions as well as understand and influence the emotions of prospects. Simply put, it refers to how you feel, why you feel that way, and how to regulate your feelings to communicate with prospects. Unfortunately, one of the mistakes salespeople make is focusing only on their prospects emotions while ignoring their own.

However, when you understand your emotions better, you can appeal to the feelings of the person you’re trying to sell to. Whether you sell products or offer services, EI will bridge the gap between salesperson and prospects. In the following points, we’ll describe how this works.

Five types of emotional intelligence and how they differentiate sales teams

Daniel Goleman, the American psychologist who made the concept of EI popular, outlined five aspects:

• Self-awareness
• Self-regulation
• Self-motivation
• Empathy
• Social skills

Let’s take a closer look at each of these points.

1. Self-awareness

When you’re self-aware, you can recognize and understand how you respond to the people and events around you. In addition, self-awareness helps you identify how your feelings, attitudes, and values affect your performance. Hence, you have an idea of your abilities and weaknesses and how they can influence your work in sales.

How does this affect the sales you make? First, you’re less likely to allow negative emotions such as anger to prevent you from communicating with prospects. Remember, people might not want to buy what you’re selling if you project negative energy or emotions. Sales personnel who lack EI have a hard time controlling their emotions, so bouncing back from rejection becomes almost impossible.

It’s important to note that when one person in your sales team lacks self-awareness, the whole team’s performance is affected. On the other hand, when EI focuses on teams instead of individuals, you can meet targets faster and more efficiently.

2. Self-regulation

Let’s face it – sales and marketing can be stressful. With goals and objectives to achieve, physical and mental burnout is sometimes very real. That’s why self-regulation is essential. Once you’re aware of your emotions, the next thing you need to know is how to regulate them. High EQ allows your sales team to handle stress and manage disappointments and prospects effectively.

Self-regulation doesn’t prevent you from experiencing strong emotions; instead, it helps you avoid making impulse decisions while on the job. Managing your emotional state is necessary for convincing prospects to trust your service or product.

For example, if you’re trying to sell a product to prospects, and they’re not paying attention. Without EI, you may find that their actions trigger a negative response from you that will drive them away. EI helps you adjust your emotions to suit the occasion. So instead of getting angry at a prospect, you can maintain an open and enthusiastic front by keeping your feelings in check.

3. Self-motivation

A good sales team should be able to rise above every challenge they’re faced with. However, the work environment can be demanding, and without self-motivation, reaching targets and achieving goals can become difficult.

People with low EI will view daily tasks as impossible feats to attain because nothing pushes them to keep moving, which will affect how many sales they make a day. Even if only one sales team member lacks self-motivation, it slows down everyone else.

Also, it’s important to use rejection as an opportunity to assess each other and improve skills; this is where EQ comes in. Self-motivated salespeople are more open to criticisms and corrections. As a result, they can get more done compared to their colleagues who aren’t self-motivated.

4. Empathy

Empathy is the ability to step into someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes. It requires that you temporarily forget who you ‘are and try to think or feel like your prospects.

You should note that your prospects are human beings with feelings, so you should know how to adapt to every situation. People will listen to you when they realize that you understand them.

When talking with prospects, your sales team should not just produce well-rehearsed lines. Instead, they need to apply empathy by understanding that every prospect is an individual with different emotions and reactions. They should adjust the conversation to fit each particular prospect.

Also, empathy builds loyalty and trust. Prospects will see salespeople as friends, not as people looking to make sales. In addition, empathy draws prospects into the conversation, making it easy for them to ask questions and seek clarification.

Everyone wants to be understood, and prospects are no different. What will differentiate your sales team from others is their ability to connect with prospects on a personal level.

5. Social skills

Social skills allow us to manage emotions effectively when interacting with prospects. Salespeople with social skills can choose which feelings to project in their interactions with potential customers. For example, a salesperson with social skills will keep a smile as they talk with a prospect, even if the prospect is rude or annoying, to achieve a positive outcome.

Salespeople with good social skills don’t just talk to prospects but are also good listeners. In addition, they’re likely to reach a broader customer base because they’re masters of communication. They can tweak their message to fit the personality and emotional needs of the prospects.

Apart from hard skills, the members of your sales team need to be equipped with EI to connect with prospects, properly regulate their emotions, and stay motivated despite the rejection and stress the work comes with.

At MetaGrowth, we help you train and build sales teams that stand out from your competitors. With our tried and tested methods, you’ll end up with a results-oriented sales team.

We’ll also help you create a digital library of your training processes so you can have access to them whenever the need arises.

Are you ready to build a world-class sales team? Contact us today.