Emotional Intelligence in sales

Sales is more than closing a deal. There are other influencing factors at play. Your attitude. Your mindset. How you handle pressure. Your awareness of the client and what's actually going on in their world.

Different people have different interpretations of emotional intelligence. I see it as understanding and controlling your own emotions, while also being aware of your prospect's or client's emotions.

So how does that help you generate more sales?

What is emotional intelligence in sales?

Strip away the jargon and it comes down to two things happening at once.

The first is managing yourself. Noticing when you're frustrated, tired, or desperate for the deal, and not letting any of that leak into the conversation. The second is reading the other person. Picking up on the pause before they answer, the word they chose, the thing they didn't say.

Most sales training focuses on what you say. Emotional intelligence is about everything surrounding what you say, and it's usually the part that decides whether the deal happens.

Self-awareness: how you show up to every meeting

Your attitude, your energy, your tone and how you show up to every single meeting.

Not the big deals. All of them. The smaller clients. The ones who request yet another meeting. The ones who need yet another follow-up. People can tell when you're off. They rarely say it out loud. What happens instead is you follow up and hear nothing back, and you tell yourself they got busy.

Some of them did get busy. Plenty of them just decided you weren't that interested in them. If you want to know what that looks like from the other side, I've written about what's really going on when clients ghost you.

The fix isn't complicated, but it does take discipline. Before a call, check where your head is. If you've just had bad news or a difficult conversation, take five minutes before you dial. That five minutes is worth more than any script.

Resilience: what happens after they say no

There's a lot of cross-over between resilience and emotional intelligence. Resilience is what you do when you get ghosted, or when someone says no.

Do you give up after one attempt like 72% of people? Do you stop after three like 90% of people? Deals regularly take four attempts. Enterprise deals and big corporates can take over 30 touch points.

The reason most people stop isn't laziness. It's that the silence feels personal and they'd rather not feel it again. That's an emotional problem, not a process problem, which is exactly why more CRM automation never solves it. If you're unsure where persistence stops and pestering starts, here's how long I chase a prospect for.

Empathy: listening properly, then responding properly

How you listen matters. How you respond to what you've heard matters more.

Too many people listen and then start selling anyway. They've been waiting for their turn to talk rather than paying attention. You can hear it happening on a call. The prospect finishes a sentence about a problem they're having, and the answer that comes back is a product feature.

Prospects want you to solve their problems. They don't want to be sold to. The people who generate the most sales understand this, and it's why they ask another question when everyone else launches into the pitch.

Staying calm when you get rejected on price

Watch what happens to most salespeople when someone pushes back on cost. They start speaking faster. They begin listing reasons why they're worth it. They remind the client of everything included, instead of finding out why the discount is being asked for in the first place.

Staying calm changes the whole conversation. Slow down. Leave a gap. Silence gives everybody time to process what's just been said, including you.

The first time you sit through that pause it feels deeply uncomfortable. After twenty or thirty times it feels normal. I've gone into more detail on the mechanics of this in my posts on handling objections and on why discounting rarely ends well, and on closing a sale without resorting to pressure tactics.

Reading what people actually mean

Here's the exchange I hear more than any other.

You ask, "How happy are you with your current supplier?" They reply, "Fine."

Most people accept that and move on to the next question. "Fine" is not an answer. Nobody who is genuinely delighted with a supplier says "fine". Listen to how they say it, too. There's a difference between a cheerful "fine" and a flat one.

It's perfectly acceptable to push back. Try: "Something tells me they could be doing better. What more do you want from a supplier?"

Nine times out of ten, something comes out. Response times. A person who left. A price rise nobody explained. That's the opening, and you only got it because you didn't take the first answer at face value. Then you ask again. "How long has that been going on?" You're not interrogating anyone. You're showing that you were listening, which is rarer than it should be.

What AI can't do for you

AI can give you options. It can't tell you which one to choose.

It can't sit across a table and notice that the finance director stopped making eye contact when you mentioned the implementation timeline. It can't tell you that the person nodding along has already decided and is being polite. When a deal is coming up against a deadline and you're avoiding the phone, AI won't push you, motivate you or talk you round.

I use AI daily and it's genuinely useful for research and admin. What it can't do is the human part, which happens to be the part that closes business. I've written more about why so many sales teams are missing their targets while investing heavily in tools - link to confirm.

Signs your sales team is short on emotional intelligence

If you manage a sales team, this rarely shows up as a training request. It shows up in the numbers, and it usually gets blamed on something else. A few patterns worth watching for:

• Deals go quiet after the proposal and nobody can explain why
• The same person keeps losing on price, no matter how the pricing changes
• Follow-up stops after one or two attempts and gets logged as "not interested"
• Discovery calls run to time but nobody comes back with anything you didn't already know
• Your most technically capable salesperson is not your best performer

That last one catches people out most. Product knowledge and closing ability are not the same skill, and the gap between them is almost always emotional.

Can emotional intelligence be trained?

Yes, though not from a slide deck.

You can't read your way into reading a room. What works is practice with feedback: live roleplay, someone watching how you handle the pause after a price objection, someone telling you that you talked over the prospect twice in ten minutes and you didn't notice.

That's how I run group sales training and it's why the sessions look nothing like a PowerPoint presentation. People change how they sell when they've felt the difference themselves, not when they've been told about it. For individuals who want to work on this one to one, the coaching programmes go deeper over a longer period.

Emotional intelligence is one of the most important skills in sales right now, and one of the few genuine differentiators left.