Business leaders’ most common complaint about salespeople isn't that they don’t meet their sales quota—it’s typically something related to people skills like a bad attitude, not being a team player, or being overly aggressive with prospects. Meanwhile, the number one complaint prospects have is that they talk too much.
Soft skills resolve all of these issues. However, most leaders focus on hiring new sales team members based on hard skills like industry and selling experience.
In this episode, Tricia and I will be talking about how emotional intelligence and soft skills produce hard sales results with Colleen Stanley, a sales trainer and the president of SalesLeadership, Inc., a sales development firm. She will talk with us about how to build high-performing sales teams through the power of emotional intelligence.
Personality traits like ambition, passion, drive, and competitiveness will take a salesperson far, but it’s not enough for elite levels of sales success. Even industry expertise or mastery of effective sales strategies will not consistently produce results.
While basic sales skills are necessary, emotional intelligence and soft skills, like assertiveness and emotional management, are what enable top salespeople to customize their expertise and strategies to the needs of prospective customers. Improve the soft skills of your sales team members by focusing on them in your hiring and training them.
Most people go to work reacting to external circumstances or others behavior instinctively rather than intentionally. We are proud of some responses and regret others.
The key to changing our responses is becoming aware of them. We can do this by taking time to pause, reflect and evaluate our behavior, what triggered it, how others responded to or perceived us, and what we want to do differently going forward.
Becoming aware of ourselves, especially when selling, enables us and our team to clearly draw the line between ourselves and others during interactions and respond productively.
It’s easy to assume the sales process ends when someone completes a purchase, but it doesn’t.
Your customer service or client success team is essentially in charge of reselling your customer every month. Some companies, especially those with in-depth client onboarding or setup processes, may require team members who are typically in back-office roles to become client-facing.
If your team has well-developed soft skills, this is an opportunity to deepen your relationships with clients and further separate yourself from your competitors.
Emotional intelligence plays a vital role at every stage of the sales process.
It’s easy to get defensive when prospects challenge you on price or to quickly cave and offer discounts in response to pressure. Those are examples of the fight-or-flight response—something salespeople learn to avoid when they build their emotional intelligence.
Build—or update—your sales team training program with training and resources on soft skills using our Emotional Intelligence Resource List and Sales Team Training Guide.
This guide covers some of the activities, resources and tools we require our team members to complete to develop their soft skills and become world-class salespeople. Whether it affirms what you’re already doing, gives you a new tool to use, inspires new approaches, or provides a starting point, we believe you’ll find it helpful.