Soft skills, such as communication, empathy, critical thinking etc., play a significant role in any professional career, especially when it comes to sales. Even though you may not find these as eligibility criteria in job descriptions, these soft skills serve as an important parameter in recruitment as well as in retaining the job. Emotional Quotient (EQ) or emotional intelligence is one of the most critical elements that can impact your performance and career drastically.
EQ refers to the awareness of one’s own and others emotions. Empathy has come to the limelight in this pandemic situation as one of the essential values in professional life. EQ is just the parameter of empathetic behavior. In sales, it is important to adopt an empathetic approach to understand the buyer and close the deal. Therefore, EQ has been recognized as an essential parameter to judge performance in sales. Fortunately, EQ is one of the rare soft skills that can be developed with the help of guidance. Most sales leaders are instructed to teach their teammates the virtue of emotional intelligence in order to drive productivity.
5 Ways Sales Leaders can strengthen EQ of their team
Emotional intelligence has been forecasted as one of the most significant job skills for the near future. It has been observed that higher EQ has proportional relation to high performance. Sales leaders can help their teammates develop EQ to drive performance.
Emotional Awareness of Intelligence
Most employees hardly know the definition of EQ. It is important to make the sales reps understand the meaning and importance of emotional intelligence. Sales leaders can organize online training or provide useful links to their teams to acquaint them with the concept of emotional intelligence. Leaders may also purchase some popular books on EQ. Some of the popular yet pocket-friendly books on EQ are Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ ( Daniel Goleman), Emotional Intelligence: Mastery – A Practical Guide To Improving Your EQ (Eric Jordan) and EQ Applied: The Real-World Guide to Emotional Intelligence(Justin Bariso). These books will help your sales team articulate the fundamentals of EQ and how it can affect their performance.
Teach Through Application
Tough challenges can invoke an emotional response. Building scenarios to bring forward emotional response is a great way to develop EQ. These scenarios can be rejection or objections. Sales leaders can demonstrate the importance of EQ and how to apply it to deal with such situations. It is undeniable that the EQ application can help when a client is derailed from the buying journey. Therefore, sales leaders must pinpoint where EQ comes into play in their sales process.
Show your EQ as an example
Sales leaders are great when it comes to leading by example. Leaders should keep practicing what they preach. You cannot teach someone something that you don’t master. Analyze your EQ skillset gaps through stress tolerance, reality testing, empathic approach and decision making. Sales leaders must know their EQ skill gaps and work to improve them. Sales reps learn from how sales leader handle or deal with specific situations.
Assessment of EQ through relevant metrics
If you do not measure a skill through appropriate metrics, that skill cannot be analyzed and improved. Build metrics to judge the EQ of your team through actions and outcomes. Quantifying EQ-based actions will help you in setting the correct metrics. Keeping a scoreboard open to your teammates can help develop EQ, improve sales behavior and enhance buyer experience. Consequently, this will contribute to revenue generation.
Develop a Sales culture that prioritizes EQ
Company culture plays a significant role in driving employee productivity. Similarly, sales culture in a sales team is undeniably important. Prioritizing EQ as an integral part of your sales culture will help your team develop EQ and apply it to enhance their performance.
Final Thoughts
Emotional Intelligence is such a soft skill that can fetch profits more than you can expect. This skill can not only help sales reps to bounce back from setbacks but also help in building strong internal and external connections. Sales leaders can strengthen the EQ of their teammates through simple exercises to make them resilient and top performer.