EI Improves Sales Performance

Sunday, January 22 2023

Emotional Intelligence can be improved through meditation, reflection, journaling, and other self-awareness methods. These activities help us to observe, understand, and connect with our emotions. Greater self-awareness can increase our emotional intelligence (EI) and lead to an improvement in sales.

EI is the ability to identify and manage our own emotions, as well as identify and influence the emotions of others. It is a concept that is becoming more and more prevalent in conversations about leadership, sales, and teamwork.

EI & Sales

Being aware of our own emotions can contribute to improved self-confidence because as any experienced salesperson will tell you, confidence is key to sales success. The ability to regulate our own emotions helps improve perceptions of our trustworthiness and integrity, important attributes for the professional salesperson. Understanding our own emotions and those of others helps us to display more empathy. In turn, this helps us to ask wiser questions, suggest better solutions, and handle objections more effectively.

Ways to Become Stronger

Emotional intelligence can be strengthened, which will yield greater professional and personal success.  In order to improve your EI you can practice:

  • Meditation or mindfulness
  • Journaling
  • Taking responsibility for your feelings and behaviours
  • Staying calm
  • Paying attention to body language and behaviours of yourself and others
  • Identify your strengths and weaknesses
  • Laughing at your own flaws
  • Thinking before you act
  • Responding rather than reacting
  • Taking time to analyze why a person acted the way they did
  • Acknowledging the feelings of others
  • Identifying what motivates others
  • The Platinum Rule rather than the Golden Rule – “Treat others the way they want to be treated.

Behaviour change is not easy, so working to develop your emotional intelligence can be particularly challenging.  Start by picking a realistic goal that you can achieve.  Then create an action plan.  You may choose to start out by identifying one specific emotion, say anger, and recording in a journal when you observe that emotion. Pay attention to how changes in your emotional intelligence affect your ability to sell and your sales results. Celebrate successes.  Don’t give up, you will become more emotionally intelligent and increase your sales results if you put your mind, and your heart, to it.

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