The number one complaint prospects have about salespeople is they talk too much. Also, business leaders’ common complaints about salespeople aren’t meeting their sales quote; it’s typically related to things like a bad attitude, not being a team player, or being overly aggressive with prospects. Soft skills resolve all of these issues. However, most leaders focus on hiring new sales team members based on hard skills like industry and selling experience.
In this episode, we’ll be talking about how emotional intelligence and soft skills produce hard sales results with Colleen Stanley, a sales trainer and the president of SalesLeadership, Inc., a sales development firm. She will talk with us about how to build high-performing sales teams through the power of emotional intelligence.
Personality traits like ambition, passion, drive, and competitiveness will take a salesperson far, but it’s not enough for elite levels of sales success. Even industry expertise or mastery of effective sales strategies will not consistently produce results. While basic sales skills are necessary, emotional intelligence and soft skills, like assertiveness and emotions management, are what enable top salespeople to customize their expertise and strategies to the needs of prospective customers. Improve the soft skills of your sales team members by hiring and training for them.
Most people go to work reacting to external circumstances or others behavior instinctively rather than intentionally. We are proud of some responses and regret others. The key to changing our responses is becoming aware of them. We can do this by taking time to pause, reflect and evaluate our behavior, what triggered it, how others responded to or perceived us, and what we want to do differently going forward. Becoming aware of ourselves, especially when selling, enables us and our team to clearly draw the line between ourselves and others during interactions and respond productively.
It’s easy to assume the sales process ends when someone completes a purchase, but it’s not. Your customer service or client success team is essentially in charge of reselling your customer every month. Some companies, especially those with in-depth client onboarding or setup processes, may require team members typically in back-office roles to become client-facing. If your team has well-developed soft skills, this is an opportunity to deepen your relationships with clients and further separate yourself from your competitors.
Today on the podcast, we have a special episode courtesy of our friends at the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. BELAY CFO Lisa Zeeveld sat down with Mark Cole recently to co-host an episode of the Maxwell Leadership Podcast about how to get time back as a leader.
In this Bonus Next Step, Tricia and LZ share how to identify and prioritize your most important emails so they don’t get lost in the mix.
Communication is a critical part of leadership. But managing email can be tedious and frustrating for busy leaders. In this episode, Tricia and LZ will discuss their strategies for email management and reaching “inbox zero.” Leaders will get new ideas about how to manage email, how Tricia and LZ delegate to their virtual assistants, how they prioritize their emails, and a lot more!
