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Selling with Emotional Intelligence

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Selling with Emotional Intelligence

5 Skills for Building Stronger Client Relationships

Kaplan Publishing,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

"Know thyself" is good advice for everyone, including sales professionals. "Emotional intelligence" is smart business.

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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • For Beginners

Recommendation

Ever since Harvard’s Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence in the mid-1990s, experts in numerous fields have adopted his notion of E.Q. - emotional intelligence - as opposed to I.Q. - intellectual intelligence. Although E.Q. is most commonly applied in the fields of management and leadership, its strongest natural link may be to sales. Some sales professionals say buyers make decisions based as much on their emotional response to the salesperson as on their opinion of the product itself. Although he doesn’t offer as much direct sales advice as the title might promise, author Mitch Anthony provides sales professionals with E.Q. tools they can use to compete more successfully. The content of the book is often fresh and original, although occasionally the author seems to be plowing fields of thought that he has tilled before. One of the book’s strongest sections deals with applying the fundamentals of emotional intelligence to negotiations. getAbstract.com recommends this book to sales professionals who are seeking new perspectives that can lead to higher commissions.

Summary

A Fish Story

When a man on a train sees a fellow passenger eat an entire herring except for the head, which the passenger pockets, he can’t restrain himself from asking, "Why did you put the head of a fish in your pocket?"

The passenger explains that fish is good for you, and that the healthiest part of the fish is the brain. So, he saves fish heads for his children.

After thinking about this for a while, the first man offers to buy the fish head for a dollar. He eats it and then turns to the man who sold it to him. "Hey, wait a minute!" he says. "I could have bought a whole fish for less than that!"

"See," replies the other man. "You’re smarter already."

Closing sales of all kinds (not only of fish heads) is as much a matter of emotion as of logical analysis. Cultivating emotional intelligence - how you respond to various situations based on your understanding of your emotional tendencies - is crucial to your success as a sales professional. Your ability to control your emotions will affect your sales results.

Take the ARROW Test

Nowhere is the tie between emotions and business success as clear as it is in sales. Buyers often complain...

About the Author

As president of the training and communications consulting firm Advisor Insights, Mitch Anthony has made more than 2,500 presentations to companies in the financial services and insurance industries. He is the author of Storyselling for Financial Advisors.

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