[MUSIC] What's one trait that makes a salesperson much more likely to succeed? High emotional intelligence or EQ is what will help you find success. Emotional intelligence encompasses five areas, self-awareness, empathy, social skills, motivation, and self regulation. For an SDR, emotional intelligence is crucial. Let's learn why EQ matters in sales. Hello, I'm Andrae Washington. I'm here to talk about emotional intelligence in the SDR role. We'll cover five aspects of EQ and why they matter to SDR, self awareness, empathy, social skills, motivation and self regulation. Why does EQ matter in sales? Simple, there's a significant overlap between EQ and having a growth mindset. Self-awareness helps with asking for feedback and understanding where you're at in the process of your development. Empathy helps you understand the people around you, whether your peers, managers or prospects and how they feel, where they are emotionally and mentally. Sales is extremely hard, so there will be people on your team that are having a difficult day. And it's important for you to be able to understand where they are at. Then on the other side, you need to understand your prospects. They have busy and frustrated jobs. And often you might reach out to them when they're in a bad mood. Maybe they got passed over for promotion or got yelled at, or bombed a project. You can remove yourself from the situation by refraining from any knee jerk reactions and trying to step back and assess what's really going on. Let's dive a bit deeper into self-awareness and how it can help you in sales. Use self-awareness to analyze your strengths and weaknesses, as well as how to find more opportunities to grow. Here are some other ways that you can do this. For example, determine what kind of role you find exciting. Monitor your interactions with others on your team to look for opportunities for feedback. Notice your strengths. When are you doing your best work and how can you replicate the conditions to maximize your productivity? Communicate with your teammates and see opportunities for you to improve your work. So how do you strengthen your self awareness? One way is to cultivate an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Closely monitor your feelings and how they affect your world. Identify what you are feeling and what that feeling means. Another key aspect of emotional intelligence is social skills. It's really important to be able to read a room as a salesperson as well as be able to pick up on the vibes of your prospects. You have to communicate very effectively through written, verbal and nonverbal methods. Much of our communication is nonverbal. People with high EQ are going to pick up on those subtle cues. Let's say you're in the middle of a presentation, and you notice that your prospects completely checked out. Somebody with strong emotional intelligence won't just keep going on with the presentation, they would stop and say, hey, Dylan, I notice that this stuff maybe isn't hitting home for you. I want to make this meeting as impactful as possible. How can we talk about this topic in a way that would be important to you? It is essential to have those social skills as well as empathy so that you can properly read the room and understand people and pick up on nonverbal cues. It's the same thing with your boss. You walk into the office and you'd like to ask for a raise. You've been in the role for a year and you've been crushing it. Now is the time, you open the door and you see that your boss has just gotten off a really bad call. It's obvious they've had a rough morning too. Is this the right time to proceed with your boss and continue to ask for a raise? Probably not, if you don't have high emotional intelligence, you're not going to pick up on that. You're going to walk in, sit down and say, hey, what's going on? I think I should get a raise, but somebody that has good social skills and those nonverbal communication skills would be able to identify and pick up on the boss not having a good day. They would choose to come back at a later time and proceed with the conversation when it made more sense for both parties. And then when you do ask for a raise the next day or a week later, your manager is most likely going to be more receptive to your offer. Another pillar of emotional intelligence is motivation. The SDR role is hard. You come in and you're making a lot of calls. You're sending tons of emails and you're getting a bunch of rejections. How can you push through that? One big thing is to keep your eye on the prize. What are you working towards? Why did you want to be an SDR in the first place? Why did you want to get into tech? What is really driving you personally to succeed? When you're frustrated and when someone yells at you on the phone, remember there will always be another call, another email, and another prospect. Let the low points go and focus on celebrating the small wins. Stay motivated and good luck. Finally, we're going to talk about self regulation. Sales has lots of ups and downs. Your metrics often reset on the first of every month. You could be on the top of the leaderboard at the end of the month on the 30th, hitting 200% of your quota, and then you're back on the bottom on the 1st of the month, starting at zero with everyone else. And who knows if the next month will go as well. You need to be able to self regulate those highs and lows. If you become frustrated, you can't put any of that out there to the prospects or to your coworkers to be able to feel or perceive. You have to be cool, calm and collected. If your frustration surfaces in a sales role, you're just likely to dig into a deeper hole. Turning off your prospects. And it's the same thing when you're on top of the world and you set 13 meetings in two weeks and you're the number one person on the leaderboard. Remember, don't gloat or tell everyone how you're the best. That's also not what people want to hear, and that's not a good teammate either. That's why self regulation is essential. Emotional intelligence matters. It is a central aspect of what we do here at SV Academy. With EQ, you can become a professional with excellent communication skills, empathy, and self-awareness, while also being open to challenges, self motivated and driven. To recap, we've covered five aspects of EQ and why they matter to the SDR role, self-awareness, empathy, social skills, motivation, and self regulation. Good luck. [MUSIC]
