Emotional Intelligence plays a tremendous role in sales, especially now. But first, let’s define what emotional intelligence (EI) is.

According to Daniel Goleman, EI is our ability to recognize, understand and control our own emotions, as well as recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of the people we deal with.

In Goleman’s rendering of EI, we have both self-awareness and self-management, and social-awareness and social management.

Firstly, I would like to talk about a tendency when emotions come up in a selling context. I think that most of our minds gravitate towards the negative possibility which is to say when I think about controlling emotions. I think it's important to be mindful of the fact that there's a positive side as well.

For instance, if I as a salesperson decide to tell a compelling story and I speak with terrific conviction about that story, that is a conscious intention that could be a very positive version of emotional intelligence, as opposed to where the mind gravitates. So, always keep in mind that there are two sides of the coin, the positive one and the negative.

One discipline under self-awareness is self-confidence and one strategy that I find helpful is considering and intentionally marshaling your emotions as they relate to self-confidence. That means that as a salesperson, it’s better to focus on what will happen to my potential client if he/she will not get my service (positive) instead of what will happen to me if I don’t get this deal (negative).

Α better outcome to controlling your emotions under self-management is the idea of empathy. Empathy is really the idea of putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and trying to look at the world from their perspective.

As it concerns social-awareness, one of the disciplines of it is transparency. By transparency I mean that as a seller you gain great credibility by just being just straightforward and showing your cards on the table. The idea of being transparent with the people that you're selling to is a key advantage.

It is really hard to control what we feel each time, but if we could manage to do so on a great level, then the outcome will “pay” us back.

By Konstantinos Vasilakis, Key Account Manager of our super team!