Sales trainers teach salespeople to give their buyers insights, educate them, challenge them and add value to their lives. None of this promotes sales. Emotional intelligence (EQ) does. To make sales, develop strong interpersonal skills, learn to control your feelings, leverage your buyers’ emotions and manage your relationships with them. Master salesman Jeb Blount teaches salespeople how to use the psychology of “sales EQ” to close deals. Despite some rough language, MicroAbstract finds that salespeople everywhere can learn from his insightful manual.

Take-Aways

* “Sales EQ” is “sales-specific emotional intelligence.” It derives from “empathy, self-awareness, self-control” and “sales drive.”

* A buyer’s emotional experience with a salesperson is more important than product features, benefits or pricing.

* An “emotional wall” separates buyers and sellers. Salespeople can use their sales EQ to knock down this wall to make sales.

* Salespeople should leverage buyers’ subconscious mental processes.

* Buyers’ purchase decisions are primarily emotional, not rational or logical.

* “Ultra-high performers” (UHPs) control their emotions, build interpersonal skills and master human relationships.

* These excellent salespeople perceive and understand buyer emotions and influence them to make sales.

* They have “innate, acquired, technological and emotional intelligence.”

* They flip “buyers’ scripts” by disrupting their expectations.

* “People buy from people they like.”

Summary

The Brown Bag Approach

When he was 23 and new to sales, Art learned a valuable lesson from Joe – his sales manager and a legendary deal closer. Art had been trying to convince the Colaizzi Bakery to lease trucks for its delivery fleet. But Mr. Colaizzi, the bakery owner, said Art’s leasing bid wasn’t competitive.

As a sales professional, understanding how emotions dominate and drive buying decisions is critical to supercharging your income and advancing your career.

Art tried to convince Colaizzi that despite the higher price, his bakery would benefit from the added value of having really good trucks. Colaizzi wasn’t convinced. To him, all truck leases were the same. Art explained the problem to Joe, who took him to the local grocery store and filled a shopping bag. Then they went to see Colaizzi.

People feel more comfortable with you when you interact with them based on who they are – not on who you are.

Joe acknowledged that Colaizzi found his truck rental rates too high and explained, “I came down here to learn more.” Colaizzi was appreciative, but he explained that the fees were higher than their competitors’ prices. Unless Joe could charge less, Colaizzi had nothing else to discuss.

Joe pulled two loaves of bread out of the shopping bag and placed them on Colaizzi’s desk. He asked the bakery owner what the difference was between the grocery store bread and the bakery’s bread, which cost nearly three times as much.

Bulldozing your way through sales conversations while ignoring the human and emotional component inherent in sales leads to disaster.

Excited, Colaizzi stood up and passionately listed his bread’s virtues. He explained that his bakery used better, fresher ingredients, a superior process and a special family recipe. After 10 minutes of listening to him sing his product’s praises, Joe said, “Mr. Colaizzi, that’s exactly what we’ve been trying to tell you about us. We are the Colaizzi bread of truck leasing!”

Disruptive emotions manifest themselves in destructive behaviors that fog focus, derail relationships, cloud situational awareness, and cause irrational decision making, misjudgments and overconfidence.

Colaizzi grinned and shook Joe’s hand enthusiastically. He agreed to lease from Art and Joe. These events occurred many years ago. Art Vallely is now chief operating officer of Penske Truck Leasing. He spends time with every sales training class the company offers so he can help both entry-level and advanced sales professionals improve their skills.

Becoming an “Ultra-High Performer”

To become ultra-high performers (UHPs), salespeople must take charge of their emotions, develop interpersonal skills and control their sales relationships. Unfazed by Colaizzi’s predictable “buyer’s script” messages (your prices are too high, all truck leases are the same), Joe offered an unpredictable response. He produced the two loaves of bread. This intrigued Colaizzi, who wondered what Joe might do next.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth. (Carl Jung)

Joe gently pushed Colaizzi to defend his bread. The baker’s bread speech triggered a “dopamine loop in his brain” that made him feel good. Joe’s explanation, “We are the Colaizzi bread of truck leasing,” created a significant emotional connection. The rapt attention Joe and Art paid to Colaizzi’s explanation made the bakery chief feel important and also obligated to the salesmen. The feeling prompted him to reciprocate, enabling negotiations and leading to a sale.

If you are not likable, you have no chance. Stakeholders don’t buy from salespeople they don't like.

Joe understood that buyers make emotional decisions, which they try to support with logic after the fact. They don’t make “rational, logical decisions.” Thanks to his understanding of psychology, Joe flipped the Colaizzi’s buyer’s script and took command of the “decision process.” He left Colaizzi with only one choice: saying yes.

Everything ultra-high performers (UHPs) do, from developing sales strategy to managing the sales process and shaping the buying process, is all directed toward influencing the decision process. Everything.

Joe knew that for buyers like Colaizzi, “the emotional experience of buying…is far more important than products, prices, features and solutions.” Salespeople at the ultra-high performer level sense, regulate, handle and influence their buyers’ “nonconforming, irrational, human emotions.”

UHP Intelligence

Sales professionals need four types of intelligence to become ultra-high performers:

* “Innate intelligence (IQ)” – You need above average intelligence to become a UHP. But, IQ is a function of DNA, so you can’t really enhance it.

* “Acquired intelligence (AQ)” – People who work hard can maximize their AQ with education and training.

* “Technological intelligence (TQ)” – Sales professionals with TQ are at ease with and adapt to the latest technology. Salespeople without TQ often fall behind.

* “Emotional intelligence (EQ)” – People with EQ control their emotions, and they understand how to affect other people’s emotions in positive ways.

Disrupting Buyer Expectations

Armed with these four types of intelligence, UHPs can disrupt buyers’ expectations by doing something unexpected – like putting Colaizzi’s bread on the desk. In so doing, they can offer “bright, shiny things” that appeal to the brain’s amygdala. The brain automatically seeks patterns. UHPs find imaginative ways to cut through these patterns and flip buyers’ scripts. Like Joe, they change the game and make the sale.

UHPs tune in to the emotions of stakeholders and respond appropriately to those emotions, often adjusting their own behavioral and communication style so other people feel comfortable and at ease.

Using these strategies requires an intuitive understanding of psychology. For example, UHPs know that minor commitments lead to major commitments. They try to get buyers to commit in small ways: agree to another meeting, perform introductions to higher-level decision makers, participate in facility tours, come to a restaurant for dinner, and so on. Such “micro-commitments” enable salespeople to test buyers’ engagement. Micro-commitments help UHPs move buyers through each sequential step of the selling process. Every step on the path to a sale increases a salesperson’s “win probability.”

Sales EQ

When speaking to buyers, be sensitive to their emotions. Listen carefully as they answer your questions. Do they speak openly or control their responses? Are they walled off or transparent? What does their body language say? What can you learn from the inflection of their voices and their level of eye contact?

UHPs never forget that they are dealing with emotional, fallible, irrational human beings.

Don’t just be acutely sensitive. Rely on your Sales EQ – “sales-specific emotional intelligence” – which comes into play at the intersection of “human psychology and influence frameworks.” UHPs with strong sales EQ “leverage human behavior frameworks, heuristics and cognitive biases” to sway buyers. They use the “four pillars” of sales EQ:

* “Empathy” – High performers want to improve their customers’ businesses. These salespeople use empathy to understand their customers’ needs and serve them better.

* “Self-control” – “Disruptive emotions” are a salesperson’s biggest enemy. These forces include “fear, anger, uncertainty, insecurity, impatience, attachment, detachment, arrogance, blaming” and “delusion.” Good salespeople control these negative emotions.

* “Self-awareness” – Ultra-high performers know their own emotional blind spots, strengths and weaknesses. They understand that their behavior and speech affect others and that disruptive emotions sabotage sales.

* “Sales drive” – Few professions are as tough and potentially heartbreaking as selling. If you don’t deliver, you don’t get paid. Ultra high-performer...