Imagine This
Rhea walks into a furniture store. A salesperson greets her and asks what she’s shopping for today. Rhea says she needs a new couch, so the salesperson escorts her to the living room section and showcases some options.
Rhea listens to the salesperson out of politeness, but privately wishes they would leave her to explore the couches alone. The overeager salesperson doesn’t notice Rhea’s lack of eye contact, crossed arms, or toes pointing away. They badger Rhea with questions about her space, budget, and style preferences.
Exasperated, Rhea finally interrupts, “I’m really just browsing today. I’ll let you know if I need help.” The salesperson smiles and says they understand. But Rhea notices they hover nearby as she tests out different couches. “That’s it, I’m going somewhere else,” Rhea tells herself and leaves the store.
So, what went wrong? The salesperson failed to read Rhea’s emotions and respond appropriately. They also lacked self-awareness about how they were coming across to the customer.
This is just one of many examples illustrating the importance of emotional intelligence in sales. In this lesson, you’ll find out what emotional intelligence is and why it matters. You’ll then learn four skills you can develop to increase your emotional intelligence as a salesperson.
In this video, you’ll learn what emotional intelligence is and how it relates to sales. You’ll then learn four skills that contribute to emotional intelligence—empathy, self-awareness and self-regulation, delayed gratification, and self-motivation or resilience—and how you can develop them.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Often abbreviated as EI or EQ, emotional intelligence describes your ability to identify, understand, and manage your emotions and others’ emotions.
Hover over each card to reveal what a person with a high EQ can do.
Regulate Their Own Emotions
Regulate Their Own Emotions
Read Others' Emotions
Read Others' Emotions
Why Is Emotional Intelligence Important in Sales?
Emotions can significantly influence a buyer’s purchasing decisions. That’s why salespeople who can effectively read and appeal to buyers’ emotions have an advantage. And, since salespeople must often deal with rejection, handle objections, and maintain their composure when working with difficult or demanding clients, they need a high level of emotional maturity.
- By contrast, a salesperson with a low EQ may quickly burn out, give up, or lose their cool (and the deal) when situations or prospective customers get difficult.
“Emotional intelligence is a way of recognising, understanding, and choosing how we think, feel, and act. It shapes our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves.”
J. Freedman
How Do Salespeople Develop Emotional Intelligence?
In the following sections, you’ll uncover the four most important skills for developing emotional intelligence in a sales context. Get an overview of the four skills below, then continue when you’re ready to learn more:
- Empathy. The ability to imagine a situation from the customer’s point of view and understand or share their emotions.
- Self-awareness and self-regulation. The ability to identify your emotions and manage them appropriately for the situation.
- Delayed gratification. The ability to invest your time and energy upfront—without immediate results—so that you can reap bigger rewards later.
- Self-motivation and resilience. The ability to stay motivated, persist, and bounce back in the face of rejection, challenges, or failure.
1. Empathy
To cultivate empathy, you need to build your capacity to understand the customer’s situation and place yourself in their position.
Expand the rows below to learn a few tips to embrace empathy in sales.
What Is Empathy—and Why Is It Important?
Empathy refers to a salesperson’s ability to understand and share a customer’s feelings. Cultivating empathy helps salespeople:
- Build rapport and create a positive customer experience. Approaching a sales conversation from the customer’s point of view naturally creates a more tailored and customer-centric experience. Empathy helps you focus on serving the customer instead of selling a product.
- Understand customers’ needs. Setting aside your personal agenda allows you to truly listen and understand the customer’s values and needs.
- Detect unaddressed objections. Reading a customer’s body language— and putting yourself in their shoes—can also help you unearth and address hidden objections.
How Salespeople Can Cultivate Empathy
To cultivate empathy, you need to build your capacity to understand the customer’s situation and place yourself in their position.
Expand the rows below to learn a few tips to embrace empathy in sales.
Ask Direct Questions
Check-in with the customer regularly. Pause the conversation and invite the customer to share their reactions, feelings, and feedback. Don’t assume you know what they think or feel. Instead, you might ask:
- “How does that sound to you?”
- “What are your thoughts so far?”
- “Would that solve the problem?”
- “How does that fit with your needs?”
- “How are you feeling about … ?”
- “What’s your initial reaction?”
- “Are we on the right track?”
- “How does this compare to what you envisioned?”
- “Does that feel reasonable/fitting/fair?”
From there, continue to discuss and try to understand what the customer feels and why. Create space for the customer to bring their perspective to the table.
Listen When the Customer Is Speaking
Just asking questions isn’t enough; you also have to listen while the customer is speaking. Don’t interrupt, finish their sentence, or think about what you’ll say next. Set aside any distractions—and focus.
Observe the Customer's Nonverbal Communication Cues
While it’s important to listen to what the customer says, you should also listen to what they don’t say. Observe the customer’s nonverbal communication cues. For example:
Pay attention to their tone of voice. What’s the customer’s tone of voice? Take note of when they sound excited and enthusiastic versus stressed or indifferent.
Watch their eye contact. Eye contact (or a lack thereof) can signal whether a customer is engaged.
Read their body language. Also, pay attention to the customer’s body language. Leaning in or turning towards you is a sign that you’ve said something that interests them. By contrast, a customer who backs up or whose toes turn away from you may be ready to bolt. Crossed arms, tapping or fidgeting, putting a hand over their mouth, sighing, or yawning can indicate boredom or disinterest—and allow you to change course.
Do Your Homework
Here’s another tactic to help you imagine the situation from your customer’s point of view: Do your homework. Research the customer to learn more about their personality, values, interests, background, situation, and needs. The more you know, the easier it will be to understand and approach the conversation empathetically. Show up to the meeting with context.
Put Yourself in the Customer's Shoes
And that leads to our final and most important tip, which is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Set aside your personal objectives, and take up the conversation from the customer’s perspective. If you were the customer:
What would be helpful?
How would you want to be treated?
Why would the product or service interest you?
What would you need to feel confident about a purchase?
What questions or concerns might you have?
What would you care about most, and why?
Use these insights to tailor your sales pitch and even predict potential questions or address objections upfront.
2. Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation
What Are Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation?
While empathy focuses on understanding others, self-awareness and self-regulation centre on understanding yourself.
Hover over each card to learn more.
Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness
Self-Regulation
Self-Regulation
How to Develop Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation
So, how can you become more in tune with your emotions and manage them effectively?
Expand the rows below to learn more:
Name and Acknowledge Your Emotions
Human beings experience emotions. Suppressing your emotions or pretending they don’t exist won’t make them disappear. A healthier and more productive approach is to recognise and name your emotions as they arise.
Take note when you feel your jaw clench, for example, or hear a sense of urgency in your voice. Pause and identify the emotion you feel. Are you annoyed, angry, or worried? Do you feel discouraged, pressured, or anxious to make a sale? Try to describe your feelings without judgment. Tackle them from a place of detachment and curiosity.
Why it works: Simply acknowledging what you’re feeling can give you a greater sense of control and undermine the emotion’s power over you.
Identify Your Triggers
Once you’ve named your emotion, ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way?” Or, “What might be triggering this feeling?” Do your best to uncover the source of troubling emotions. Maybe the end of the quarter is looming, and you’re worried that you won’t make your sales quota. Or, perhaps you suspect a prospective customer isn’t serious about buying, so you feel angry that they’re wasting your time.
Sometimes, you’ll find that an emotion’s trigger has nothing to do with the customer or your work. Maybe you didn’t sleep well the past couple of nights or family issues are on your mind. Even so, identifying the source of your emotions can help in a few ways:
You may be able to change, control, or avoid the trigger.
You may realise that a trigger is unrelated to the current situation, allowing you to let the emotion go for now.
When you understand why you feel a certain way, it can give you a greater sense of control and diminish an emotion’s intensity.
Pause Before Responding
If you find yourself in an emotionally charged situation, try pausing before you respond. For example, imagine that a prospective customer asks, “I can get the same product for half the price from X competitor. Why in the world would I buy from you?”
Immediately, you notice a negative emotion arise: irritation. You feel irritated because the prospective customer doesn’t understand the difference between price and value. Recognising this, you decide to pause for a few seconds and collect your thoughts before responding:
“That’s a great question. And if getting a short-term deal is your top priority, you’re right, we’re not the best fit for you. We focus on creating products that deliver long-term value. Would you like me to explain why our products provide more long-term value for your upfront investment?”
Why it works: Pausing helps you avoid automatic and emotionally driven reactions. Instead, you can think before you speak and choose to respond in a way that will produce the best outcomes.
Practice Self-Care
As a general rule, taking care of your physical and emotional health will make it easier to practice self-regulation. When you’re tired, eating poorly, stressed out, or otherwise unkind to your body or mind, you’ll likely find managing your emotions difficult. So, do your best to sleep well, eat well, and live well. Rest when you need it, fuel your body with healthy foods and movement, and make time for activities that you enjoy.
Tip: Sales can be a demanding line of work. Set healthy work-life boundaries and consider practising yoga, mindfulness, or meditation to reduce stress.
- Did you know that empathy can help you develop greater self-awareness, too? By noticing a customer’s response or imagining yourself from their point of view, you can get a better idea of how you come across to others.
3. Delayed Gratification
What Is Delayed Gratification?
Delayed gratification describes a person’s ability to resist immediate and lower-value rewards in favour of long-term and higher-value rewards.
Contributing funds to your retirement account is a classic example of delayed gratification. By reducing your spending money today, you can fund your future needs—and you’ll earn more over time through long-term investing.
How Does Delayed Gratification Relate to Sales?
Larger deals typically take longer to close. Midsize and larger deals may take up to a year or longer before the prospective client commits to buying. Salespeople must possess the ability to stay motivated and invest in building these long-term relationships—even if they don’t see results right away.
How to Improve Your Ability to Delay Gratification
Delayed gratification is a form of self-regulation. Here are two ways that you can regulate your internal reward system:
- Think long term. When the hours of fruitless emails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings feel like a waste of time, keep your eye on the long-term prize. Reflect on how today’s efforts set you up for future success. Develop a long-term plan or strategy, and invest in building relationships with promising prospects.
- Celebrate milestones throughout the sales process.Reward yourself for reaching various milestones in closing long-term deals. For example, you might celebrate making a new connection, re-engaging a prospect in conversation, gaining access to a decision-maker, or successfully moving a prospective buyer to the next stage in the sales pipeline.
4. Self-Motivation and Resilience
What Are Self-Motivation and Resilience?
In sales, self-motivation and resilience describe your ability to remain positive and persist when confronting setbacks or failures.
Let’s face it—rejection goes hand in hand with sales. Prospective customers may hang up on you, ignore you, or choose a competitor. And rejection, if not managed effectively, can wear on your morale and make you feel inept.
How to Stay Motivated and Build Resilience
So, how can you bounce back and increase your resilience? Manage your expectations and approach setbacks with the right mindset with the help of these tips:
- Set realistic expectations. Rejection and failure come with the sales territory. Don’t expect that every potential buyer will be a good fit, or that every pitch will win. Instead, accept and normalize setbacks as part of the sales process.
- Build or lean on your support system. Talk to your coworkers, mentors, or other sales professionals in your network. Make a habit of exchanging tips and encouraging one another.
- Approach challenges as exciting learning opportunities. Finally, find value in the journey instead of the destination. What could you try differently? What can you learn or take away from a setback? Focusing on how you can improve your skills and experiment with different selling tactics can keep your spirits high.
Check Your Understanding
Check your understanding of what you can do to boost your emotional intelligence as a salesperson by completing this sorting activity.
Drag and drop each tip into the correct category.
Summary
Developing the soft skill of emotional intelligence can produce tangible results. By learning how to recognise and manage emotions in yourself and others, you can build rapport, identify potential buyers’ needs, and appeal to their emotions. You’ll also increase your capacity for handling rejection and responding to emotionally charged situations effectively and professionally.
- Accept responsibility for your sales outcomes. Emotionally intelligent salespeople don’t blame poor outcomes on the prospective customer or situation. Instead, they look inward and brainstorm ways that they can do better.
You’re almost done with the course! Recap your relationship-building skills in the upcoming summary in the next lesson.