Sales and Selling with Emotional Intelligence

“53% of customer loyalty – customers who choose to buy from a company repeatedly – is not the result of the product, company or service, but the behaviours salespeople use when selling.“

CEB – The Corporate Executive Board

“37% of salespeople are consistently effective. What’s more, some of the behaviours of the remaining 63% actually drove down performance.”

Harvard Business Review

“Top performing salespeople are 12 times more productive than an average performer. About one third of the difference is due to technical skill and cognitive ability, while two thirds is due to emotional intelligence.”

Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence

The ability to regulate emotions helps improve perceptions of trustworthiness and integrity – incredibly important attributes for the professional salesperson.

Understanding emotions and those of others helps us to display more empathy, helps us to ask wiser questions, suggest better solutions, and handle objections more effectively.

Salespeople with high levels of emotional intelligence are able to reflect on their own emotions and adjust them to best fit with the customer and the situation that they are dealing with.

They can anticipate and plan sales interactions to help ensure the customer feels valued and confident in dealing with them.

Salespeople with high emotional intelligence are more capable of managing and adapting their own emotions to support and influence the emotions of their customers in a subtle way that brings about positive interactions and builds relationships.

• L'Oreal sales professionals hired based on their emotional intelligence outperformed their peers by $90,000+ at the end of the first year.

Customers or clients are buyers who purchase based on emotions and justify their choices with logic.  Today, customers are able to justify their decisions online and elsewhere without any input at all from salespeople.  However, good selling is about the connections you make, how well you work through objections, and how confident that you make your customers fell that will help you to make the sale. 

Delivering on your promises, maintaining authentic relationships and helping your customers navigate internal disagreements helps to keep them loyal.  Emotional intelligence is the critical competency that underpins all this

Salespeople with high levels of emotional intelligence are able to reflect on their own emotions and adjust them to best fit with the customer and the situation that they are dealing with.

They can anticipate and plan sales interactions to help ensure the customer feels valued and confident in dealing with them.

Salespeople with high emotional intelligence are more capable of managing and adapting their own emotions to support and influence the emotions of their customers in a subtle way that brings about positive interactions and builds relationships.

This course will help you improve your understanding of emotions and emotional intelligence in selling. Included are a range of practical tools and techniques for applying emotional intelligence in sales interactions with clients and customers.

Customers come in all shapes and sizes. Understanding the nature of each individual customer's needs will improve your sales and ensure optimum customer care.

When you learn skills to respond rather than react to behavioural differences, you conserve energy for what is really important - fulfilling customer's needs.

The course will help you to differentiate the needs of customers and plan strategies to meet those needs.

This highly practical course is unusual because it considers emotional intelligence as a fundamental part of selling.  

The course doesn't cover prospecting and ways to get a sales appointment, these require the use of emotional intelligence in other ways! 

The course covers the way that you engage with customers before, during and after a sales meeting through the application of emotional intelligence to make authentic decisions and build quality relationships.

The course provides a step-by-step approach to applying emotional intelligence principles to your sales process focusing on working with the emotions of your customer and how these influence their social interactions. 

The course will help you to develop your skills in asking questions around needs, listening, presenting your product or service and handling objections underpinned with emotional intelligence. 

Within this course, you learn how to

• Recognise the importance of emotional intelligence in selling and how you can use it to build your relationships with your customers

• Determine how your attitude to selling influences your sales success

• Identify the emotions that drive the selling process and how to work with them effectively

• Describe your uniqueness in terms of what you are selling and how you sell it

• Discover emotionally intelligent ways to sell through needs-based selling

• Examine ways to handle objections with confidence

• Identify the four social interactions style that drive customer / client behaviour

• Explain how to work with and sell to each social interaction style for maximum success

• Solve problems for your customers / clients by becoming a trusted resource and advisor

The course is being continually refined and updated to ensure it remains current and relevant.  Feedback is always welcome. 

All PDFs can be completed online and are Section 508 / ADA Accessibility compliant.

All videos are High Definition recorded in 1080p.

All videos have grammatically correct English captions.

Course updated - April 2025