Increase Sales Blog

After speaking to a group of small business owners yesterday at the Hammond Innovation Center about entrepreneurs and emotional intelligence, I recognized how many individual fail to embrace emotional intelligent selling within their businesses as the answer to increase sales. Also I witnessed once again the ongoing confusion between marketing, selling and the overall sales process. Sales Training Coaching:  Effective marketing is critical to your business and to ignore it will only keep you pocket poor.

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Zig Ziglar stated that “sales is the transference of feelings (I really love this simple definition), then it seems quite logical to be searching for how I can employ emotional intelligent selling into my daily sales behaviors. However a quick search using Google Adwords tool revealed that no one searched for this phrase “emotional intelligent selling.”

Confusion Continues

In marketing the term value based marketing is risen to the forefront of many discussions and has only increased the confusion.  This term is related to value based selling and values based leadership. Emotional intelligence is very much present when value or values are discussed.

With the explosion of social media, emotional intelligence is very much evident and in some cases the lack thereof. The challenge is to understand the value, the inherent worth of your solution, through the eyes (beliefs) of your potential customers (prospects) and customers. This value may or may not be your core values as discussed in many articles specific to value based marketing.  What you believe the value to be may not be the value as perceived by the customer. Sales Training Coaching Tip:  Marketing is all about attracting attention and building a relationship.  To do this well means you are engaged in emotional intelligent selling because you are selling you as a real, caring person.

Selling as well is far more about the capacity for emotional intelligence than specific sales skills. However reading the majority of articles by sales experts, sales consultants or sales trainers, the emphasis is on technical selling skills such as negotiation, asking questions and ignores or maybe presumes that emotional intelligence is present.

Since there is still confusion about the overall sales process as I note in my book, Be the Red Jacket, no wonder emotional intelligence is not appreciated for its role in marketing and selling.

What I am now observing is continued confusion when emotional intelligence is discussed specific to marketing, selling, the sales process and how to increase sales.  Daniel Goleman defined emotional intelligence through the work of Howard Gardner and his own research. Now translating that definition to the business world and especially for those engaged as professional salespeople is probably the source for the confusion.

Simply speaking, the demonstration of emotional intelligence within emotional intelligent selling is all about caring first about others. This does not mean you forget your core purpose for being in business to make money. What is means in my opinion is first you must care about others. Actively listen to what they are saying, observe their body language and determine how you can support and even reassure them.

I recently interviewed Daniel Waldschmidt for a forthcoming article on leadership and business to be published in a Houston/Dallas/San Antonio business journal, NBiz. He shared how one of his VP expressed frustration at a weekly meeting. Instead of going full steam ahead with the busy, chock full agenda, Dan stopped the meeting to determine how he could support this VP.  This was a demonstration of applying emotional intelligence. Dan was applying emotional intelligence selling to one of his internal customers, his employee.

Yesterday, I received a potential sales lead from a sign up for a free sales skill assessment.  He shared that his number one sales challenge was “no sales model to sustain the growth.” Sales Training Coaching Tip:  If you ask a question in your sign up forms, then invest a few minutes to answer each person personally otherwise do not ask any question.

In answering his sales challenge, I wrote:

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