SALES FORCE EFFECTIVENESS

THE ABILITY of sales professionals to be able to stay focused on the sales process, lead generation, assessing opportunities, identifying solutions, building sponsors, and closing qualified opportunities depends alot on how well they use their talents, character strengths, and manage their emotions.

Discover Your Sales Strengths (Warner Business Books, 2003), written by Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano from Gallup, conducted research that shows that customer satisfaction and future recommendations are based on an emotional connection with the salesperson. Customers who like their salesperson are twelve times (12) more likely to continue to repurchase.

Sales success comes from managing our emotions. The following list of emotional intelligence competencies are key for sales roles:

1. Empathy is recognizing, understanding, and appreciating how other people feel. Empathy involves being able to articulate your understanding of another’s perspective and behaving in a way that respects others’ feelings. There are three kinds of empathy:

a. Cognitive empathy — understanding how the customer thinks about the problem. This means perceiving their mental models of the world. You’ve got to listen and ask the right questions.

b. Emotional empathy — sensing how the other person feels about what you are saying and doing. Emotional empathy holds the key to rapport. It tells us, for instance, when a sales pitch is falling flat.

c. Empathic concern— caring about helping the customer. Studies by companies of their star salespeople find that the most successful don’t just make a sale. They actively help the customer solve problems, becoming a consultant to them.

2. Assertiveness involves communicating feelings, beliefs, and thoughts openly, and defending personal rights and values in a socially acceptable, non-offesive, and non-destructive manner. Lack of Assertiveness might affect salespeople when closingdeals.

3. Self-Awareness includes recognizing and understanding one’s own emotions. Salespeople who are aware of their own emotions, whether they are nervous or confident, how they project themselves, have a better chance of being able to adapt to the situation.

4. Optimism is an indicator of one’s positive attitude and outlook on life. It involves staying hopeful and resilient, despite occasional setbacks even when the customer says “No”.

5. Problem-Solving is the ability to solve problems where emotions are involved using emotions. Sales people with high problem-solving skills can help a customer make an informed decision.

6. Reality Testing is the ability to remain objective by seeing things as they really are. The more accurately a salesperson reads the customer, the better able he or she should be to adjust tone and words to customer needs.

7. Impulse Control is the ability to resist or delay an impulse, drive, or temptation to act and involves avoiding rash behaviors and decision making. Salespeople tend to speak more and are not good at listening to the customer. They are very prone to discounting under pressure.

High Emotional Intelligence sales reps are able to enjoy their own work, stay at the work place longer, and sell more products or services to the people that really need them, thus stimulating customer loyalty and promoting the human values of the brand they represent.

Focusing on sales metrics, sales pipeline management, and sales training is not enough. Sales Managers need to work with the entire salesperson’s mind, heart, and sales skills. If you are interested in aligning sales execution and creating a high-performance sales team, visit the AlliancesHub website to learn more about our “Sales Force Effectiveness” Program.