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Making EQ your success factor in marketing is the way you use what we heard last week from Susan Dunn and put it to work. You know when you meet people who have a very high IQ Intelligence Quotient, they can sometimes do stupid things? It has been shown that people who are successful are much more likely to be emotionally intelligent than have a high IQ. This turns a number of academic assumptions on their head, because in so many ways it is how we handle our emotions that makes the difference.

I believe there are a number of parallels between EQ and NLP that makes it useful to understand the reasons behind and the application of EQ in our marketing.

BEST CHOICES

When clients have a choice to make, they will make the best choice they can and will often choose the course of action that causes them the least emotional exhaustion and stress. The more competitive a situation becomes the more important it is to make the right emotional decisions. When a seller has to face his or her own emotional conflict or annoyance they will be forced to face their own assumptions and prejudices before they can reach a successful conclusion. When we handle a marketing or selling process the ease and pleasantness of the way we do it relies on our skill at making the client feel comfortable and at ease. The most successful people will have learned and developed these skills while others may have no idea where to start or how to proceed. As we heard from Ari Galper and Rich Schefren, the objective is to build a relationship based on trust, without making the client feel they have been manipulated or unfairly influenced.

Emotional intelligence in marketing and selling must include a number of factors in any selling process, not just the decision to buy. The skill level we develop must keep pace with the products and services we offer so that our emotional intelligence is able to overcome the reticence come clients will have in dealing with a sales person. Clients like people like them, people they can trust and like attracts like.

YOUR CLIENT’S AGENDA

The emotional agenda of a client will be based on three main requirements:

1. How much do I need or want what is being offered or sold?

2. Does the sales person or marketing material know what they are talking about?

3. Are they being too pushy and putting me under pressure?

These requirements act as filters used by the client of deletion, distortion and generalisation and we must have ways to be aware of and answer the questions to make a positive impact and impression.

To make that impression you must:

1. Always be finding ways to prove and improve what you present and offer.

2. Clients have their own personal agenda that they expect you to know about.

3. The only reason they will talk to you is if you can offer them the needs, wants and wish lists to solve their problems.

WHAT YOU OFFER YOUR CLIENT

An interesting thought is a little word game. If I gave you the letters

SE_ _ ING

What would you say are the two missing letters?

Many salesmen will offer LL as the two letters to make the word SELLING, but a more emotionally intelligent person would suggest RV to make SERVING the outcome.

If your objective is selling without serving then you may only be looking for a fast buck, whereas if your objective is to serve the needs of the client you are acting to build a relationship with your client, which will last much longer than the initial sale.

To be a good sales person you must be:

• Assertive but not too pushy
• Conversational but not too dominant
• Full of energy but not manic
• Not destroyed by criticism but sensitive to concerns
• Able to see the other side without getting drowned in the problem

Remember last week we identified some of the competencies involved in emotional intelligence. They were:

• Flexibility
• Intentionality
• Empathy
• Intuition
• Non-verbal communication
• Resilience

Let’s take each one of these and see what it means.

FLEXIBILITY

When you are faced with a problem, one of the best ways of dealing with it may be to think of another way it can be stated or addressed. If one approach does not work, try and find another that will give you the result you need.

INTENTIONALITY

You need to know as much as possible about the reasons your client wants or needs a particular product. What is their intention, what are they trying to achieve, what do they expect to get out of it?

EMPATHY

Knowing how your customer feels about something is a great asset when you are building a relationship. To put yourself in their shoes and see the map of the world from their point of view is important.

INTUITION

Intuition moves on from Empathy in the way of knowing how other people and clients are thinking, without reasoning or knowing exactly ‘how you know’. As your relationship with a client is built you will be more able to know how they are thinking. This is something that can only come with time and is not part of an arms length way of dealing with a client.

NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION

This goes back to our pacing, mirroring and building rapport a client when we adopt a posture or a use of body language to build the realtionship and move into their environment.

RESILIENCE

This is about how you recover, bounce back and find your feet again in the face of failure and rejection, without losing faith in your future success. When something does not work you must be able to understand what happened, find a way to deal with it and carry on in a new way.

These are some of the competencies you can learn about in Emotional Intelligence. Susan Dunn’s course is a good place to make that happen. If you have any thoughts, opinions or experiences in EQ to share with us please leave a comment.

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Next week we are going to look at a subject which is very important, all about testing. The feedback I have from the Words Bursting On The Page post makes me think that now is a good time to have a hard look at what testing means, can do, and why it is a vital thing to do.

Daniel Goleman wrote a bestseller Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence which laid down the foundations for understanding the importance of EQ. I hope you can see now how EQ fits with NLP and that learning how to apply these principles to your marketing is a valuable and worthwhile exercise. Using this knowledge is part of making EQ your success factor in marketing.

Tags:   competencies · emotional intelligence · EQ · nlp1 Comment