Does Your sales team have a high EQ?
Emotional Intelligence (EI)is defined as a set of emotional and social skills that collectively establish how well we:
- Perceive and express ourselves
- Develop and maintain social relationships
- Cope with challenges
- Use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way
Believe it or not, someone’s Emotional Intelligence Quotient (referred to as EQI) is actually a predictor of success in life and work. If you have ever heard yourself saying, “That guy can really read a room,” or “I don’t know how she does it, but even the toughest customers will buy from her every time,” then you are describing a rep who probably has a strong emotional intelligence in the areas that matter for their field and market. While it seems like all of us need improvement in this area-the truth is that some of us need to develop it more than others.Emotional intelligence is all about awareness and attention to emotional state.
Here are some examples to help you recognize a few aspects of Emotional Intelligence on your team:
You have a rep who tends to side completely with the customer base. If the customer has even the tiniest of issues with the product, the rep will blow it way out of proportion.
He is overusing his empathy skills and could use some work developing other EI skills likeassertiveness, independence and problem solving.
Your rep comes off as arrogant and overly confident and she ignores feedback from others.
She is overusing her assertiveness by behaving aggressively and needs to develop empathy skills, social responsibility (fairness in the transactions of life) and emotional self-awareness.
Your rep fixates on a problem and is very black-and-white with her thinking; even when a solution is readily available to her.
From an EI perspective, this rep has a low flexibility index and would benefit from learning to develop more stress tolerance and improving flexibility and a skill called reality testing-which is the capacity to remain objective.
As you are assessing the development and hiring plan for your team, pay attention to how your best producers develop relationships with customers, how they view the world, handle stress and communicate their thoughts and emotions to others. Although it’s tempting to focus solely on past experience, know that you will get more bang for your buck if you focus on hiring and developing emotional intelligence skills in your team.
“An ROI study conducted by a debt collection agency found that collectors who were hired according to the company’s new emotional intelligence model achieved 163% against target the first year. Even those who were low performers and were trained in EQI brought in 80% against target within 3 months.”
Source: MHS multi-health systems 2011.
Coaching Assignment:
Ask yourself questions about the emotions you are feeling today.
So, for example, if you are feeling anger or frustration ask yourself what it really might be about and what might be underneath that feeling. Or, if you are feeling elation, joy or relief ask yourself what lead up to that feeling and when was the last time you experienced that emotion. Noticing our emotional states is the road the developing improved emotional intelligence’s.
B’s Best Resources
The research is clear and Emotional Intelligence Testing is gaining popularity. Like all scientifically validated assessments, the EQI 2.0 is purchased through a licensed distributor (that’s us!).
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