Rapport Building & Using Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success
As I explain in my new book, Close Deals Faster: The 15 Shortcuts of the Asher Sales Method, most buyers are driven by emotions and gut feelings rather than a careful, rational analysis of the pros and cons of your deal. Building rapport with the client and using your emotional intelligence can lead to sales success. This makes the first hurdle any salesperson must overcome to be to get the other person across the desk to like you, otherwise, even if you have the best deal, you will be rebuffed.
Emotional intelligence for sales success is as necessary as IQ. In fact, I have seen plenty of seemingly uneducated salespeople outperform those with expensive degrees plenty of times. The former possessed emotional intelligence, which is far more relevant to our profession than book smarts.
The Four Levels of EQ
Basic EQ: Self Awareness. This is fostered by taking the APQ so you understand your own personality and its extremes.
Professional EQ: Using the knowledge gained in Level One, you become adept at stretching your extremes to avoid blind spots in general interactions with others.
Sales/Relationship EQ: After having mastered general relationships by stretching your extremes, Level Three involves stretching anywhere you are outside the ideal range for your specific sales job.
Influence/Leadership Expert EQ: Level Four means you can influence the relationship with match/mirror and NLP techniques. It requires you to be highly attuned to others’ personalities as well as your own.
As you can guess, mastering emotional intelligence for sales success will transform more than just your career. It can help all of your relationships, even outside of work.
Building rapport
Someone without a strong EQ will cause a break in affinity when dealing with others who are dissimilar to him or her. It is hard for a quiet person to feel comfortable around a loud mouth, for example. And a hyper, aggressive personality will likely start picking on a very soft personality, at least mentally. The end result is a low affinity condition, which is nearly impossible to sell in.
The salesperson with strong EQ will, if he or she is naturally a loud mouth, tone it down around the quiet person. If the salesperson is quiet, he or she will s-t-r-e-t-c-h themselves out of their comfort zone by smiling more, making solid eye contact, and deliberately increasing their pace to match the aggressive personality.
You will note that emotional intelligence for sales success requires abandoning fixed ideas about self, or the egocentric thought that “people must accept me for who I am.” Instead, sales require that you go out of your way to relate to others on their terms.
When you make it all about the buyer, you build rapport easily.
To learn more about building rapport, and how to sell to the emotional, rather than rational, brain, please order your copy of Close Deals Faster: The 15 Shortcuts of the Asher Sales Method today!
