Researchers first coined the term emotional intelligence back in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the ideas entered the mainstream.
In that regard, Dr. Denise Trudeau-Poskas wrote in Forbes about the importance and power of “soft” skills that can be framed around the rubric of emotional intelligence.
The author describes emotional intelligence as social management, social awareness, personal management, and personal awareness. She shares that research has established a direct correlation between emotional intelligence so defined and the bottom line in any company where people are working with other people.
So given that Sales is a domain where “people are working with people,” we thought it might be worthwhile to spend just a little time thinking about how you would go about building the topic of emotional intelligence into a sales training effort.
First, let’s take a look at a limited subset of the competencies that could fall under the rubric of emotional intelligence when applied to the area of sales.
Adaptive Thinking. Coming up with creative and innovative insights that provide a unique approach for linking your solutions to the customer’s challenges.
Computational Thinking. Being able to translate a vast amount of data into useful information that helps monetize the value of your solution.
Emotional Management. Being able to leverage emotional information to achieve greater buy-in from others in the decision-making process.
Self-Awareness. Perceiving and understanding one’s strengths and weaknesses to achieve enhanced productivity and performance.
Confidence Expression. Creating a sense of trust and perception of genuineness among sales team colleagues and customers.
So let’s suspend any disbelief about the usefulness of being able to design a sales training effort that could help increase one’s emotional intelligence and speculate on the type of changes to traditional training design that might be necessary to develop an effective training effort.
Here are some ideas we believe would merit exploring:
Personalization replaces customization. If you go back 15 years or so, many sales training programs were generic – that is, the program content was the same across markets and companies. Today almost all companies and vendors have shifted to customized programs. To effectively address emotional intelligence, one would need to make a further shift from customized designs to personalized designs where skill development is tailored to each individual.
Coaching becomes the dominant delivery mode. The traditional training design is classroom training, followed by reinforcement through sales management coaching. With emotional intelligence, sales coaching needs to play a more central role where a sales manager and salesperson can conduct an initial assessment of developmental priorities and fine-tune a personalized developmental approach. It also means the learning can become ongoing versus event-based.
Learners assume greater ownership. The training department cannot effectively direct learning. The sales manager cannot tell a salesperson which competencies they need to work on or independently assess progress. Each salesperson needs to assume ownership of the learning process and seek guidance and support from others. The company and management do need to support such efforts.
Do you think there is merit to develop a training capability that addresses competencies falling under emotional intelligence? Should sales training or sales enablement groups spend the time and effort given the need to develop the traditional skill areas? If the answers are yes, what pre-work would be needed? For example, what type of development would sales managers need to play their role?
When attempting to answer the “is it worth it” question, it is worthwhile to consider that Sales is a personally challenging job. Burnout in the position is relatively high, as is turnover. It is also true that developing a sales team that can differentiate itself in the market is becoming increasingly important. So would developing emotional intelligence help address these challenges?