Summer Reading Recommendation

Every summer I recommend one or more books offering high quality information to help sales leaders sharpen or add to their skill set and support their quest to be the type of leader salespeople find motivating to work for.

This summer, sales leaders from all industries should read Colleen Stanley's new book, "Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership: The Secret to Building High-Performance Sales Teams" published by HarperCollins Leadership.

Colleen took time out of her busy schedule working with clients and promoting her book to discuss it with me.

People talk a lot about emotional intelligence. How are you defining it?

If I had to boil it down to one word, I would say it's awareness. The awareness first starts with yourself - the awareness of what you're thinking, you're feeling. How do those thoughts affect your emotions and how do the emotions affect the actions you take or don't take.

But equally important is the awareness and calling it "other awareness" of what others are thinking or feeling. How do their thoughts and feelings affect their emotions and how they show up? Being able to manage both states to me is the ideal of emotionally intelligent people.

It's hard to write a book. We both know this. What motivated you to write "Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership"?

Like you Suzanne, you work with sales leaders and I really found that many of them get set up to fail. We've all heard this story, watched the best-selling movie out there. The top sales producer gets promoted to sales manager. Then they take a sharp right turn. All the skills they've been honing up until this time: prospecting, business development, consultative selling, negotiation skills, don't help them in their new job. They've got to learn new skills which they're often not taught.

So a strong producer gets promoted to sales manager. They don't have / aren't provided with the training they need to succeed. What happens?

They have trouble transferring the knowledge that made them successful. Now they need to coach and train - and then when you take a look at coaching it is very different from training. Many people go to school for four years to be a teacher. People go to coaching classes to get certified. Yet sales managers often aren't privy to either one of them. What I see happening is sales managers often work on the wrong end of the problem.

Can you give an example?

If you've got a seller that continues to engage in a product dump, verbal vomiting - it's the biggest complaint we hear from prospects and also sales managers. The sales manager will unknowingly start teaching the sales questioning model. They'll say, "OK, let's role play this questioning model." What they may need to focus their training on is perhaps emotion management. The seller simply gets nervous and talks too much.

Because when you really study great selling you can ask a question but you're not guaranteed the answer. There's a little bit of ambiguity you've got to get used to, right? So if you're in front of a tough prospect that's kind of drilling you, wants you to get to a solution really fast. That requires emotion management and staying the course.

What's another example?

Other times the seller might let positive emotions take over. The prospect says, "We've heard wonderful things about your company." Suddenly that wonderful questioning model you've taught in role play goes right out the window. The seller moves to providing solutions instead of continuing to ask all the right questions - further qualifying and further diagnosing - which again requires emotion management and staying the course. So the hard skills, what I call sales IQ are important and equally important is the sales EQ. The sales manager is spending time and resources but not diagnosing the root cause of the problem.

What would you like sales leaders to take away from your book?

I want them to ask themselves, "Am I modeling the behavior I expect from my salespeople? Am I asking introspective questions?"

Also, sales leaders need to demonstrate focus. Are they allowing themselves and the sales force to become distracted? It's as simple as banning technology during staff meetings and sales calls. Buyers and sellers feel the distraction.

Colleen, it's always such a pleasure to speak with you and discuss sales management issues. Good luck with Emotional Intelligence. I know many sales leaders will find it very helpful.