CHAPTER  1

Closing the Knowing-and-Doing Gap

When You Know Better, You Do Better

THE PROFESSION OF SALES has changed dramatically in the last few years. The Internet has made product knowledge a commodity, and the old sales approach of feature-advantage-benefit selling doesn’t work with today’s savvy, well-educated prospects.

Today’s prospects research their potential purchase or vendor, gather the information they need, and start self-diagnosing problems before showing up to a sales meeting with you. Today’s prospects don’t need more details on features and functions because that information is available on the Internet. They ask salespeople more questions, better questions, and harder questions.

In some cases, the selling opportunity turns into a product knowledge contest between the prospect and the salesperson, with each person focused on showing the other person how smart he is, rather than working collaboratively toward a solution. If you show up armed with only pretty brochures, a list of open-ended questions, and a canned PowerPoint, it will become a quick race to selling on price rather than selling value, or it is the start of free consulting.

Innovation used to be a key competitive edge. But that advantage is shrinking as technology allows competitors to quickly uncover best practices and incorporate them into their businesses. Differentiators disappear and many salespeople look and sound alike. In order to win business, they resort to discounting, which is a quick race to zero and establishes a vendor relationship, not a partner relationship.

So what’s a salesperson to do? How do you win business in this new buying environment?

Understanding Emotional Intelligence

Top sales professionals recognize today’s changing business environment and are equipping themselves with emotional intelligence skills. The use of emotional intelligence is relatively new in the sales training world, so when salespeople hear the term, they often ask:

  What is emotional intelligence? (Should I know or care?)

  How does emotional intelligence affect sales results? (Remember, I’m paid for performance.)

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

In simple terms, emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to recognize your emotions, and to correctly identify the emotion you’re feeling and know why you’re feeling it. It’s the skill of understanding what trigger or event is causing the emotion and the impact of that emotion on yourself and others; and then adjusting your emotional response to the trigger or event in order to achieve the best outcomes.

Emotionally intelligent salespeople are strong in both self-management and people management. When a well-informed buyer starts showing off his know-how by firing questions and product knowledge, the emotionally intelligent salesperson doesn’t react to the interrogation and turn into a high-paid answering machine. Instead, she’s able to manage her emotions and apply interpersonal and critical thinking skills that move the sales interrogation to a sales dialogue rather than a monologue.

EI has been incorporated into leadership and executive training for over a decade. The Center for Creative Leadership, located in Greensboro, North Carolina, has a long history of researching great leaders. When they conducted a study of 302 leaders and senior managers using the Reuven Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i), an instrument developed to assess emotional intelligence, their research showed that the most successful leaders score high in self-control, remain grounded when things get tough, and have the ability to take action and be decisive. They are also great communicators. Successful leaders are empathic and listen carefully to understand what a person is saying and feeling.

Top sales professionals know these same qualities that The Center for Creative Leadership found in successful leaders are also important for success in sales. Global Private Banking and Trust salespeople handle the accounts of wealthy clients whose investments go beyond national boundaries.

Their sales team must effectively execute selling skills and also be able to handle the complexities of Canadian and international tax law. This team completed the EQ-i assessment and the results showed that top sales performers scored high in empathy, stress tolerance, and flexibility, similar to top leaders. Leaders buy from leaders, so it makes sense that top performers integrate emotional intelligence skills into their sales process.

In order to understand the power of emotional intelligence, there are two areas to learn about that are rarely covered in sales training programs: the neuroscience of the brain (which we’ll discuss in Chapter 2) and the management of emotions, or psychology.

You may think you need to go to graduate school to understand emotional intelligence, but we can translate it into layman’s terms by going back to high school biology. In that class you studied anatomy (which deals with the structure and organization of living things) and physiology (the study of the mechanical, physical, and biochemical functions) of the human body (and you thought you were just learning about lungs, kidneys, and the digestive tract!). So take this basic knowledge and apply it to the great Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, who earned eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Like many athletes, Phelps is gifted with good anatomy and physiology: big hands, abnormally long torso, and good aerobic uptake. Many people attribute his success solely to his athleticism. However, a fair question is whether he won due to his athletic prowess (anatomy and physiology) or because he was able to manage his emotions during a highly stressful athletic event? Case in point: During the 200-meter butterfly race, his goggles malfunctioned and filled up with water. In fact, he couldn’t see the wall when he touched it with his final stroke. It’s reasonable to assume that most people would have panicked and lost momentum. But Phelps managed his emotions, swam his race, set a world record, and collected the first of eight gold medals.

Did he win because of his physical prowess or because of his ability to manage emotions? The answer is yes to both. His success is a combination of biology and psychology. Now, let’s look at neuroscience and psychology from a non-Olympic point of view.

The anatomy and physiology of the brain together produce what is referred to as IQ, a number used to express the apparent relative intelligence of a person. It is the ability to concentrate, organize material, and assimilate and interpret facts. IQ is important in life and business. It’s often the reason you get a degree and your first job.

A growing body of research indicates that EQ, the ability to manage your emotions, is equally important or more important. EQ is an array of noncognitive abilities. It’s the ability to understand what others need, to handle stress, and to basically be the person that others like to hang around with. IQ will get you in the corporate door; EQ will take you up the corporate ladder. Let’s face it, a good sales competitor in your industry is going to have a decent IQ, just as a good Olympic competitor is going to possess decent athletic ability. The differentiator is EQ. (How many of you have met the smartest guy in the room and didn’t like him, and as a result you didn’t do business with him?)

Emotional Intelligence and Sales Results

So let’s move on to our second question and explain how improving emotional intelligence can affect sales results.

Millions of dollars are invested in sales training every year but it often doesn’t produce the desired revenue or changes. Many well-intentioned salespeople and sales organizations study the art and science of sales. You are one of those salespeople because you picked up this book. You listen to audio tapes, attend selling seminars, and read the latest and greatest literature on sales and influence. You’re part of a dedicated group of salespeople that have learned the basic hard skills of selling: ask questions to uncover the prospect’s pain, meet with all the buying influences, and get a range of budget before presenting solutions.

You know what to do. So why are so many of you running meetings where the prospect forces you to “show up and throw up”? Why are you talking with non–decision makers and writing proposals without uncovering the prospect’s budget? This behavior is often referred to as the “knowing-and-doing gap.” You know what to do; however, during tough selling situations you often just don’t do it. You walk out to your car or hang up the phone and ask yourself, “What just happened here? Did my long-lost twin sister take over my body during that meeting? Why didn’t I say this or that?”

Many salespeople review a less-than-stellar sales meeting and blame their poor performance on inadequate selling skills when it may not be about sales technique at all. It’s similar to the practice of medicine. If a doctor misdiagnoses the patient’s problem, the prescribed solution simply won’t work. For example, if a patient has seasonal allergies and the doctor keeps prescribing medication and treatment for a sinus infection, the patient isn’t going to get better. The doctor is working on the wrong problem.

Diagnosing Sales Performance Challenges

Many salespeople misdiagnose their sales challenges and work on the wrong problem. They attempt to improve their sales results by focusing on selling skills alone. The root cause for poor sales performance is not just about hard skills; it’s often linked to the inability to manage your emotions so that you think clearly and react effectively.

Let’s be clear. We don’t discount the importance of selling skills. We teach and coach them every day in our business. In fact, teaching selling skills is where we discovered the knowing-and-doing gap. We’ve worked with thousands of salespeople and watched them execute sales role plays flawlessly during a sales training workshop. But then these same participants land in front of a tough prospect and don’t execute the skills they’ve learned. They buckled, babbled, and sounded like a character out of a bad sales movie. They knew what to do, but didn’t do it. This puzzling behavior led us to explore emotional intelligence in order to discover the missing link between sales training and sales results, the gap between knowing and doing.

Sales can be a tough profession with lots of no’s and setbacks. If a salesperson scores low on self-control and handling stress, there’s a good possibility that when adversity hits, it’ll be followed by days of inaction, self-doubt, and roller-coaster emotions. Too many salespeople live exhausting and unfulfilling professional lives because of their inability to handle their emotions and the stress of professional sales.

Emotion Management and Sales Results

A common hot button for salespeople is when a prospect begins to question them about the value of their product or service. “Why are you so high? Your competitor is half your price.” If you don’t recognize this hot button, your emotional response can be to quickly concede and offer a discount. (This occurs even after you’ve been taught negotiation skills and concession strategies.)

The emotionally intelligent salesperson recognizes the potential hot button, manages his emotion, and changes his reaction. The response is calm and smart: “The reason our services are on the high end of the investment is because many clients, prior to working with us, had purchased on price. As a result, the purchase ended up costing more because they could never get a live body on the phone for problems. This led to missed deadlines, which affected their reputation and repeat business from clients.”

This redirect is a professional way to introduce the company’s value proposition and move the conversation from price to value. You executed an effective selling skill because you didn’t allow a tough prospect to trigger your emotions.

Let’s take Jolene, who’s a sales manager’s dream, as an example. She has a good attitude, works hard, and consistently hits quota. She’s been selling for about five years and really knows her stuff.

Jolene sells a complex service, and her sales position requires a certain level of intelligence to even understand how the service works. IQ isn’t a problem; Jolene earned straight A’s in her undergraduate and graduate studies.

But when she schedules a first meeting with the chief technology office (CTO) of a large firm, he turns out to be a difficult prospect. He’s not very warm, seems hesitant to engage in conversation, and throws rapid-fire questions at Jolene, like “I’m not sure if I see the value in your service. We might be able to develop this in-house. Why should I consider using your firm?”

Although Jolene knows the answers based on the extensive product knowledge training she received from the company, she caves under pressure from this not-so-friendly prospect. She freezes and can’t think of the right response. (Her only thoughts are how to end this meeting quickly and how much she’d like to put this difficult prospect in a choke hold.) She doesn’t recall one single selling technique and her meeting turns into a product-dump meeting that ends with the prospect saying, “I’ll need to think it over.”

Did lack of IQ, product knowledge, or selling skills cause Jolene’s poor sales performance, or was it her inability to manage her emotions during a stressful sales meeting? We contend it’s the latter. Jolene just experienced the knowing-and-doing gap, the gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it. She knows what she should say and do, but under stress the “shoulds and do’s” went right out the door (which is where Jolene wanted to go during the entire sales meeting) and she was unable to respond. Jolene’s emotions got the best of her. She got frustrated and a little intimidated, and neither emotion leads to a good sales outcome.

The good news is that emotional intelligence can be changed and improved with focus and commitment. We challenge you to become a better sales doctor and properly diagnose selling challenges by looking at both soft skills (emotional intelligence) and hard skills (sales ability).

The Business Case for “Return on Emotions”

Not convinced about the bottom-line impact of emotional intelligence? Then take a look at what the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations says about organizations using emotional intelligence as part of their sales training and recruitment programs:

  In a 1996 U.S. Air Force study, 1,500 recruiters were tested to discover common EI traits among recruiters who achieved 100 percent of their quota. By duplicating those EI traits, retention rate increased 92 percent, saving in excess of $2.7 million.

  In a pioneering EQ project, American Express put a group of Financial Advisors through a three-day emotional awareness training. In the following year, the trainees’ sales exceeded untrained colleagues by 2 percent, resulting in millions of extra earnings.

  At L’Oreal, twenty-eight sales agents selected on the basis of certain emotional competencies sold on average $91,370 more than salespeople not tested, for a net revenue increase of $2,558,360.

So what do they know that other organizations don’t know? They’ve figured out that a combination of IQ and EQ is essential for sales and business results. They understand that there’s a business case for “return on emotions.”

Discover Your Sales Strengths (Warner Business Books, 2003), written by Gallup consultants Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano, conducted research that shows that customer satisfaction and future recommendations are based on an emotional connection with the salesperson. Customers who like their salesperson are twelve times more likely to continue to repurchase.

Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind (Riverhead Hard-cover, 2005), writes in his book about the need for soft skills in order to conduct and win business in the Conceptual Age—the age of the knowledge worker. His work shows that the new worker will need to possess both high-concept and high-touch skills.

High-concept skills are the ability to synthesize data, recognize trends and patterns, and transfer them to a novel invention or solution. This aptitude is really important, because salespeople regularly meet with information-overloaded prospects who don’t have the time to figure out what information is important, what information is largely irrelevant, and how to quickly distill the most valuable information into the best outcome.

As Steven Stein and Howard Book state in their book, The EQ Edge (Stoddart, 2000), “A competitive economy demands that we be problem solvers, not problem reporters or collectors.” Good salespeople demonstrate their value by being good problem solvers and creative thinkers.

High-touch skills have to do with understanding the subtleties of human nature, finding joy in yourself, eliciting it in others, and pursuing purpose and meaning. These attributes certainly don’t sound like hard-core selling or business tactics, do they? This set of abilities is absolutely connected to emotional intelligence skills—the understanding of self and others. And the reality is that high-tech skills and other hard skills are increasingly outsourced to emerging world economies.

Soft skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and relationship building, are much harder to outsource or duplicate in a software program.

Hired for Hard Skills—Fired for Soft Skills

Many sales managers make a common mistake of hiring new salespeople based primarily on the number of years in sales or industry experience. This isn’t necessarily bad. However, there’s a lack of focus on integrating soft skills into their selection process.

When we teach sales hiring and selection workshops, we conduct a simple opening exercise with sales managers to raise awareness on the value of soft skills. We ask the participants to tell us about their worst sales hire. The stories run from downright funny to “you’ve got to be kidding!” One of the best ones we’ve heard was the potential sales candidate who reached across the table and grabbed an olive off the sales manager’s salad. Do you think he was hired?

More than 90 percent of the reasons for a bad hire consistently relate to soft skills. We hear responses like, “He couldn’t get along with other departments,” “She had a bad attitude,” and “He couldn’t read people very well.” Notice that none of the responses are linked to the hard skills of selling, such as “He just couldn’t close,” “She didn’t meet with the right decision makers,” and “He wasn’t good at selling value.”

Lack of soft skills is a big part of the problem in sales organizations not achieving sales results.

I have a personal bias when it comes to the value of soft skills because of my start in sales. I had the good fortune of landing my first sales job with a small firm in Memphis, Tennessee. When I joined the company, it was moving from a catalog-sales model to a direct-sales-force model. The company was small and didn’t have a lot of cash to invest in big base salaries so it was willing to take on salespeople with little or no sales experience. (Me.)

The early sales team was paid straight commission, worked long hours, and went head to head with a better-known competitor five times its size. Looking back on this experience, I now realize this company was extremely good at identifying salespeople with emotional intelligence skills.

The company didn’t have many marketing or sales support tools, so it was up to the salesperson to figure it out and often create their own materials. Today, I’d give our early sales team high marks in the emotional intelligence skills of problem solving and independent thinking.

Since there wasn’t a formal training program, salespeople called each other to ask for advice on products, sales, and customer service. This willingness to share and help members of a group is an emotional intelligence skill called “social responsibility”—the ability to contribute to a group even though you might not personally benefit.

This early group of sales reps also knew that when selling skills needed improvement, it was up to each person to buy the latest sales guru’s books and tapes. This self-improvement behavior is the emotional intelligence skill of “self-actualization”—the pursuit of personal and professional improvement. The company’s wisdom in hiring for soft skills certainly paid off, as it is now the largest in its industry.

Soft skills do produce hard sales and positive business results!

Action Steps for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence and understanding the what, why, and how of emotions is best discovered through self-awareness and self-discovery. A principle of learning and influence is that people believe their own data. It’s your responsibility to discover your own reasons for your actions or inactions.

There are three steps you can take that will increase self-awareness quickly if used every day and every week. They are:

1.  Schedule downtime.

2.  Create technology-free zones.

3.  Name the specific emotion.

Step #1: Schedule Downtime

In order to increase self-awareness, make a daily commitment to be free of distractions and to-do lists. Self-awareness is the foundational skill for building and improving other emotional intelligence skills. It helps you gain insight into how you’re showing up each day and how your attitude, behavior, and actions affect yourself and others. “Know thyself” is a simple definition for self-awareness.

We’ve seen many a bad selling scenario, like Jolene’s, repeated because the individual didn’t take the time to reflect and analyze how they got into a sales meeting with less than desirable outcomes. (Was the prospect simply shopping your company to get a necessary third bid? Did the prospect have no buying authority? Do you really need to write more practice proposals?) If you don’t invest any time in examining your behavior, you will end up in the same free consulting or price-shopping sales chair again and again. Don’t keep making the same mistakes. Reruns might be nice for your favorite movie, but bad sales reruns aren’t worth the price of admission. Here’s the basic principle: no awareness, no change, same outcome. You cannot change that of which you are not aware.

It’s only during downtime that you can be introspective and take time to reflect on your actions or inactions. In Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books, 2005; 1st edition, 1995), author Daniel Goleman writes about Richard Abdoo, former Chairman and CEO of Wisconsin Energy. “Richard has a firm resolution to reserve eight hours a week for solitary reflection. In Richard’s words, ‘You have to force yourself to spend some time away from the hustle and bustle of your job in order to get down to reality again.’”

Downtime allows you to ask yourself thoughtful questions to gain clarity on your sales behavior and outcomes:

  What was the reason for my reaction to the prospect or customer?

  What would have been a better response during the sales meeting?

  What can I do differently to prevent getting into a dead-end selling situation?

  Who do I need to ask for help and perspective?

  What did I do well and how do I repeat that behavior?

We worked with a wealth-management client named Joe who had an “ah-ha” moment after learning the self-awareness concept.

Joe is one of those guys who appears to have it all. He’s good-looking, funny, and likeable. He cares about his clients, works overtime to ensure that every client need is taken care of, and is ethical in all of his dealings.

So we were a little puzzled to learn that he wasn’t achieving his revenue goals. Joe told us he got a little defensive when potential clients questioned his strategies or philosophy. Like many salespeople, Joe misdiagnosed the real issue and tried to solve the problem by applying more selling skills, like validating the prospect’s concerns and redirecting the conversation to better understand their question.

The problem was that his nonverbal communication shouted irritation, giving the prospect a not-so-comfortable experience. Joe further analyzed and asked himself thoughtful questions about why he reacted defensively to certain questions from prospects. He realized that he was stuck in the past and still reacting to an overly critical father who, when Joe was growing up, dismissed many of his ideas and thoughts, often calling them “stupid” or just “not very smart.” Joe worked hard to prove his father wrong by getting good grades and a good job, but the emotional fallout from the criticism in his youth stayed with him into adulthood. When a prospect asked a question, Joe interpreted the question as an insult to his intelligence. He reacted with defensive posture, behavior, and language.

Once Joe recognized the root cause for his emotion and consequent reaction, he was able to reframe questions from prospects as just questions, not criticism or doubt about his abilities. Joe changed his response and improved his sales results.

Step #2: Create Technology-Free Zones

The very idea of turning off their electronics is enough to send most salespeople into severe withdrawal. However, a real deterrent in achieving downtime is our recent addiction to technology.

Salespeople, like those in other professions, feel a constant need to be connected. Many salespeople today remind me of dogs with shock collars. The minute something buzzes, rings, or vibrates, they feel a need to grab it regardless of time, place, or who they’re speaking with. (Have you ever found yourself competing for attention with a smartphone?)

Many salespeople don’t allow themselves time to think because they’re so busy checking their text messages, email, and voicemail. Contrary to popular opinion, the brain isn’t good at multitasking. The frontal lobes of the brain require focus in order for a new habit to begin forming. The only habit many salespeople have is that of one constantly checking their electronics.

A high-level, consultative sales meeting takes a full hour of being totally present and engaged. Due to their constant checking in and frequent interruptions, many salespeople have lost their ability to focus for more than ten minutes. (We even see salespeople checking their smartphones during appointments!) The prospect senses the lack of attention and the sale goes to the focused, attentive salesperson. We call this behavior SAD: sales attention disorder.

You can cure SAD by developing a new sales habit: introspection and reflection. It’s right in line with creating downtime. Create technology-free zones just like no-smoking zones. Wake up fifteen minutes early each morning and simply devote time to thinking about the following:

  How do I want to show up today with my boss, colleagues, and customers?

  Do I want to be the go-to person in the office or the go-away-from one in the office?

  Where did I not show up well yesterday?

  What caused me to respond ineffectively? Effectively?

  Where will I be tempted not to manage my emotions today?

I have a lovely piece of art in my family room, which is where I spend between fifteen to thirty minutes of reflection time each morning. The words on it are always a good reminder of how I want to interface with employees, colleagues, clients, and prospects: love, joy, peace, goodness, patience, and self-control. If I accomplish even half those words, I’m bound to have a good day!

Step #3: Name the Specific Emotion

When analyzing your own knowing-and-doing gap it’s important to be specific about the emotion you’re feeling. For example, if you tell your sales manager that you’re nervous about calling on the C-suite when in reality you’re downright intimidated, you’ll both be working on correcting the wrong problem.

There’s a big difference in prescribing a solution for being nervous and for being intimidated. Nervous can simply mean you’re excited about the opportunity. It can mean that you’re prepared rather than complacent.

Intimidation is a different emotion with different outcomes. If you’re intimidated, you show up to the C-suite lacking confidence and personal presence. Maybe you feel the person you’re meeting with is better than you in some way because of his titles and degrees. After all, your business card reads Business Development Executive, not Vice-President. And you have no academic credentials or certifications listed. (How in the world will this prospect take you seriously?) You’re worried that the prospect is going to know more than you do. So you invest all your pre-call time worrying about looking and sounding smart instead of focusing on your prospect’s business and challenges.

A key concept we teach to solve the intimidation factor is helping you realize you are being self-centered. Yes, the thought of being seen as self-centered hurts. However, look at your actions and thoughts and you’ll find that you may be dialed into the What About Me Channel: “How do I look and sound?” “Is the prospect impressed with me?”

Apply the emotional intelligence skill of empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand what others are thinking or feeling. Step into your prospect’s shoes and really think about the life of this C-level executive. She has multiple roles and responsibilities, sixty hours of work sitting on her desk, and is constantly being asked to do more with less. Do you really think she has time to focus and study various products, services, and solutions as you do? No, she needs a great salesperson to be a valuable shortcut and make her life easier. She needs you!

Shift your focus and turn on a new channel: It’s All About Them. As the late Dale Carnegie said, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” We think Carnegie had some insights into emotional intelligence.

We’ll continue to diagnose and prescribe throughout the book because there’s no one magic answer for increasing emotional intelligence and sales results. Get some downtime, put your electronics in their place, and clarify what emotion you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. Are you making up stories or working from empirical data? Are you still responding to events from childhood?

Analyze whether your response is serving you well and what you need to do to change. If you don’t have the answer, ask your boss, colleague, or coach. Trusted colleagues will help you see your way out of the emotional-response forest.

The emotionally intelligent salesperson knows that outside stimuli cannot always be changed (tough prospects and customers, stress, putting out fires, busy calendars, etc.). But she also knows that her reaction to stimuli can be recognized, controlled, and improved by increasing her self-awareness. Congratulations on taking the first step to increasing your revenues and happiness by integrating emotional intelligence skills into your sales process!