What Is EQ And Why Is It Important For Sales?

Emotional intelligence has been recognized as a cornerstone of personal and career success for decades.

Instead of building hard-selling sales teams it is important to develop emotional intelligence skills to have a successful strategy in the long term.

What Is EQ?

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize your own emotions and the emotions of others and respond to them in an empathetic way.  EQ is built up of many skills that you can work on to improve. These skills include social skills, self-awareness, motivation, empathy, and self-regulation.

How does EQ relate to Sales?

A number of studies show that sales professionals with high levels of EQ perform better than those with lower emotional intelligence.

The reasons are due to the 5 soft skills that make up EQ and how they help a salesperson manage themselves and help them relate to a prospect.

Self-awareness:  A salesperson can manage their own time and energy plus their emotional states better with self-awareness. The result is they are less likely to anger or annoy a potential customer with their own negative emotions.

Self-regulation: A salesperson who can manage self-regulation can control emotions such as anxiety, irritation, and fear and avoid bringing them into sales meetings with prospects.

Social Skills: A sales professional with strong social skills can build and maintain relationships with a wide range of people and be successful at agreeing more opportunities for deals from a large and strong network.

Empathy: An empathetic salesperson is able to gather information and judge how a prospect feels, helping them to direct the conversation in the right direction and say the right things to encourage a sale.

Motivation: Motivation is key to being productive and getting more done. Self-motivated sales staff can deal well with rejection and don’t let it stop them, and they’re more likely to train and better their skills.

As we have discussed, emotional intelligence and the 5 key skills within it can be improved by working on them. Read our blog on how to improve your EQ for sales here.

 

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