Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Quotient can be described as the ability to understand and manage your own emotions and influence the emotions of others. We are all born with varying degrees of emotional intelligence but the good news is we can absolutely improve our emotional intelligence. It is a key foundational skill that we can start to work on at any stage in our lives however if we are working as an SDR or BDR or early in our sales career, it is the perfect time to start focusing on our EQ. But why should we bother?
Have you ever been overcome by nerves before an important meeting or presentation? Have you ever messed up an important call due to feeling overwhelmed. Have you ever felt that feeling where you just want the floor to swallow you up so that you can exit your current situation as quickly as possible? All of these are normal emotions that we can feel during everyday life and also during work interactions. Our ability to manage these emotions comes down to our level of emotional intelligence. Being able to manage our own emotions better and also influence the emotions of those around us will make life and work a little easier as we will have less of these uncomfortable emotions but it will also help us to focus on what we want without getting disrupted by emotions. This will allow us to be more successful as Sales and Business Development Reps. As you can imagine there is a lot encompassed within emotional intelligence so let’s take a look at the five key elements:
Self Awareness
Self Awareness is all about being able to recognise our own emotions and the impact that they have on others around us. In order to improve self awareness, we must be able to monitor our own behaviour, notice when emotions arise and correctly identify which emotions we are dealing with at any given moment. This may sound simple but considering most of our emotional reactions are automatic and somewhat involuntary, it can take some practice to start recognising and identifying our own emotions.
As an SDR there are many opportunities to improve our self awareness and infinite benefits to doing so. In order to start improving this element try some of the following:
- Document how you feel before, during and after any work task e.g meeting/phone call/presentation
- Ask for constructive feedback from peers/manager after any interactions such as a presentation or a phone call
- If you feel overwhelmed, nervous, anxious, flustered or any other uncomfortable emotion, take note of what is happening at the time
- Observe others around you, identify people who seem to be calm, cool and collected and those who do not, ask for advice from those you want to be like e.g. “How do you stay calm in a high pressure meeting?”
- After you have documented your emotions, look for trends/patterns for when your uncomfortable emotions take over and create a plan to improve your emotional management during those events by self regulating.
Self Regulation
Self Regulation is all about being able to control our impulses and reactions. It means that we can manage our disruptive emotions so that we can remain calm and rational. As you can probably see, self regulation is an extension of self awareness but please don’t disregard the importance of self awareness. We cannot improve something that we are not aware of. Many people are in a rush and try to skip past developing self awareness and jump straight to self regulating.
As an SDR, we feel so many impulses and disruptive emotions that are uncomfortable. Life would be a lot more pleasant if we can learn to self regulate. The funny thing about this element is that knowing when and where your disruptive emotions show up is one thing but actually managing and controlling those emotions is another challenge entirely. Personally, I’ve always felt the heat when a prospect challenges me with an objection. Although I know objections trigger my disruptive emotions, sometimes I still cannot help but give in to the impulse to ‘people please’ in the moment. This is something I have learned to manage but it took a lot of practice. Here are some things you can do to help you to improve your ability to self regulate;
- Slow down – very often impulses take over and everything speeds up. It is almost as though we’ve been swept up in the moment before we even know it. A simple way to slow things down is to incorporate pausing into your verbal expression. For example count two seconds before responding to an objection
- Name the emotion – when appropriate, this technique is so simple, it is hard to believe it works, but it does. For example if we are in a conversation and the manager catches us off guard with a statement or question, we can quite literally respond by saying “Oh I wasn’t expecting that, you caught me off guard, let me think” this allows us to slow things down, take control of the situation and reduces the chance that our impulse to say the first thing that comes to our mind will take over.
- Reality Check – it is hard to do this in the moment for sure but it is a skill worth developing. If we feel a certain way we may need to conduct a reality check. By this I mean, asking ourselves is this as serious or scary or difficult as we initially thought? Emotions are triggers for potential threats but they are not necessarily threats. Consider this, if we take prospect rejection personally, ask ourselves, is this actually personal? Most likely it is not, we’ve managed that emotion and we can get back on track to achieve what it was that we set out to achieve, unaffected by the rejection. To begin with, we can conduct reality checks whilst reviewing situations where we got caught up in our emotions and work towards being able to do it in the moment.
- Identify & Reduce Triggers – we have probably already identified common triggers where our disruptive emotions try to take over, if we know them we can start to create ways to reduce those triggers. If we know we get really nervous right before presenting, a simple remedy may be taking some deep breaths before presenting. Or the old chestnut of “imagine the audience naked” I never really got that one myself, but do whatever works for you.
Motivation
I think we are probably all aware of what motivation is but many people seem to think that motivation is something that comes and goes, not something that we can control or improve. I disagree, there are a number of things that we can do. But firstly let’s refresh on why motivation is important for SDRs. Let’s be honest, Sales/business development is a tough gig full of repetitive tasks and rejection. One of the biggest challenges is to stay motivated. If we can maintain motivation though, we are more likely to put in consistent effort which usually produces consistently good results and target attainment. So what can we do to improve motivation?
- Delayed Gratification – at some point we decided that we wanted this job and although we may not feel like doing one of our many mundane tasks right now, reminding ourselves of the greater goal, will make it just a little bit easier. And it will make waiting for the reward that much more bearable.
- Develop our Assertiveness – very often motivation is not the problem, but disruptions from others make it difficult for us to stay on task. By learning to push back, say no and prioritise our tasks we can become more assertive. This can feel uncomfortable at the start but there is no shortcut, we can only become more assertive by…being more assertive. Look for opportunities to do this where the risk is perceived as lower at the start. It’ll soon become clear that nothing bad really happens, we just gain more control over our day, week and lives.
- Time Management – closely related to being assertive, being able to manage our time plays an important role in improving motivation. We’ve already addressed managing disruptions from others however we also have to manage our own distractions. For this I suggest working in defined blocks of time distraction free followed by giving ourselves a mini reward right after we have completed the block of time. Also scheduling our day how we like to work is important here as much as is possible within our job.
Empathy
Empathy can sometimes be misinterpreted as simply having the ability to consider things from another person’s perspective. It is that plus being able to understand and experience the feelings of the person in that situation. I believe this is the most under utilised skill in sales. Every single human being naturally considers himself and his own situation first. Very often sales people sell from their own perspective and from that of their company. We’ve all had a sales person try to sell us something we don’t want because it is ‘best in class’ or ‘no.1 in the world’. He/she is trying to sell from their perspective, which is that they have the best product ever. From our perspective though, we don’t need it or want it so we couldn’t care less about how good it is. Empathy would have helped the salesperson to understand and experience how we feel and perhaps he/she would have taken a different approach. This is why discovery is such an important stage in any deal cycle for SDRs and Sales Executives. It is impossible to empathise with someone’s situation if we don’t even know their situation. In order to improve your ability to be empathetic:
- Be Genuinely Curious – worry less about the script of questions, our monthly sales metrics and anything else that concerns us. Instead be genuinely curious about the person we are speaking to. Understanding who we are talking to and what they care about is half the battle.
- Listen to Understand not to simply reply. Many of us could heed this advice in our personal relationships as well. By listening to understand we will naturally go deeper and we will get the full picture. Also if we listen to understand people feel heard which is an important element in empathy.
- Ask more open questions – If we want to learn what people care about, they will tell us, we just have to ask questions and then shut up and listen. Very often SDRs and even experienced sales people ask closed questions. They are trying to lead the witness. They know what they want the prospect to say and they try to get them there more quickly by leading them with closed questions. This is unproductive, limits the amount that we learn about our prospects, limits our understanding of them and what they care about and ultimately makes it very difficult to show any empathy.
- Embrace difficult conversations – part of being empathetic is not being afraid to have the difficult conversations up front. If we are in an early conversation with a prospect and we get a sense that they are not fully convinced. Perhaps we feel like they are trying to get off the phone as quickly as possible and we are worried that they won’t show up to the next call. Most SDRs will not address this. By being brave enough to have that conversation, we are leading with empathy and also vulnerability.
It may sound funny to say but there is such a thing as being too empathetic. This can happen to people who feel too much of what others feel and it causes them to avoid asking questions or certain situations as they know that it will be uncomfortable for the other person. It is important to work on striking a balance here.
Social Skills
The final element within Emotional Intelligence is social skills. In order to understand this better let’s consider that emotions are something we feel, social skills are how we choose to convey those emotions or not. Social skills encompass many areas including communication, collaboration, relationship building, conflict resolution and inspiring people. As we are all aware social skills are something which we can all benefit from developing and this is no different for sales development and indeed sales reps. It is no secret that people buy from and work with people they like, so by developing our social skills we are much more likely to be successful in every aspect of our lives. If we have already been developing the other elements of emotional intelligence it will be much easier to improve social skills and here are some suggestions as to how we can do that:
- Stay Calm – since we’ve already developed our ability to manage our disruptive emotions, nothing really phases us, we don’t need to react impulsively. Staying calm in social situations, no matter what is happening, attracts people towards us. People look to us as a leader. Within SDR this could be at an internal or external meeting, the same principle applies. It may not come naturally immediately but if we look for opportunities to remain calm in social situations, we are developing this skill
- Lead with Empathy – another skill we’ve already been developing which will allow us to be more social. When we feel heard and understood by someone, we automatically like them more, we feel drawn to them and their good energy. Be that person for everyone around you.
- Be Curious – you guessed it, another skill we have already been developing but we can also apply this to our social skills. If we show genuine curiosity, people will feel that we are interested and they will feel more compelled to return the favour and be interested in what we have to say which really helps when we are trying to book meetings with prospects as SDRs.
- Be Positive – we’ve all experienced working with a negative co-worker and we all know it is a pain. Don’t be a moany Mike, be the opposite, be the person who brings positivity everywhere you go whether it is with prospects or co-workers. It is a simple mindset change that can really improve our level of influence within social circles and allows us to leverage our social skills for our own gain as well as that of others.
In almost ten years in sales, EQ is not something that any of the companies I worked for have focused on. And it’s not just my employers, I recently conducted a poll with sales professionals within my network and although 79% agreed that being able to manage their own emotions had a significant impact on their ability to be successful, they claimed that less than 10% of all sales enablement they ever received, focused on emotional intelligence. Improving emotional intelligence will absolutely help you to be more successful as a sales development rep, sales rep and in general in any career path you choose for all of the reasons outlined above. More than that though, it will differentiate you from the majority of your peers, as this is not something that most people are being intentional about. Let me know what you are doing to improve your emotional intelligence in the comments, I’d love to hear about your journey so far.
Until Next Time!
Pingback: struggling SDR: How to help Yourself - Welcome
Pingback: 5 Reasons You Need to Lead With Value as a BDR