today.
Old Models Don’t Work In the Digital Era
Carl Zaiss and Thomas Gordon point out in their excellent book, Sales Effectiveness Training, that old selling models do not work in a highly competitive, digital‐oriented, and data‐flooded business environment.
Rather than being seen as the manipulators and hard closers of the past, media salespeople need to be perceived as trusted and respected partners who provide insights and get results for their customers. Modern media salespeople must concentrate on long‐term, trusting personal relationships with buyers and clients. Remember, the biggest competition for media salespeople is algorithms, so developing emotional intelligence is vital to differentiate you from the AI used in algorithms.
The Zeiss and Gordon non‐manipulative advice might have been suitable for selling in the 1990s, but after the disrupting influence of the Internet and after 2003 when Google introduced its online auction AdWordsi that featured a cost‐per‐click (CPC) pricing model, just being non‐manipulative is not enough. Media salespeople have to be able to analyze data in order to come up with insights and solutions and to educate prospects about the benefits of their product.
The Current Model: Selling as Educating
The vast majority of buyers and customers of the media are hypersensitive to the tricks, manipulations, and the selling of “magic” in the past. With the highly complex digital advertising ecosystem, programmatic trading, and the explosion of available data, buyers need relationships with media salespeople based on a basic understanding of the underlying ad‐delivery technology, familiarity with available data, and mutual trust. Establishing mutual trust is the first step for a successful digital‐era, selling‐as‐educating model which, in turn, requires salespeople to have emotional intelligence in order to develop trusting relationships.
The Importance of Emotional Intelligence
The term emotional intelligence was popularized by Daniel Goleman, a Harvard‐educated PhD in psychology, in his best seller, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, which expanded on the work of the world‐renowned educational psychologists, Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg and others.
Gardner, Sternberg, and others questioned accepted definitions of intelligence and began to look beyond a number or intelligence quotient (IQ). After exploring the topic thoroughly, they realized that what IQ tests measured was only a person’s ability to take an IQ test and was not the enormously complex construct that had been referred to in the past as “intelligence.”
While Howard Gardner broadly defined intelligence as “the ability to solve problems or to create products that are valued within one or more cultural settings,” in his influential book, Frames of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he identified seven facets of intelligence. These are linguistic, logical‐mathematical, musical, bodily‐kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. In his book, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, he added three more facets of intelligence: naturalist, spiritual, and existential.
Daniel Goleman concentrated his research on the importance of the personal intelligences, which he labeled emotional intelligence. Beginning in Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, and in three subsequent books, Working With Emotional Intelligence, Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence Goleman has continued to refine and simplify his construct of emotional intelligence (referred to as EQ, emotional quotient) and social intelligence. In Working With Emotional Intelligence, Goleman defined emotional intelligence as the “capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.”1 His book, Primal Leadership, lays out an expanded definition that includes four dimensions of EQ, as defined in Exhibit 5.1 below:
Exhibit 5.1 Emotional intelligence domains and associated competencies
| Personal competence: These capabilities determine how we manage ourselves.Self‐awarenessEmotional self‐awareness: Reading one’s own emotions and recognizing their impact; using “gut sense” to guide decisions.Accurate self‐assessment: Knowing one’s strengths and limits.Self‐confidence: A sound sense of one’s self‐worth and capabilities.Self‐managementEmotional self‐control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses under control.Transparency: Displaying honesty and integrity; trustworthiness.Adaptability: Flexibility in adapting to changing situations or overcoming obstacles.Achievement: The drive to improve performance to meet inner standards of excellence.Initiative: Readiness to act and seize opportunity.Optimism: Seeing the upside in events.Social competence: These capabilities determine how we manage relationships.Social awarenessEmpathy: Sensing others’ emotions, understanding their perspective, and taking an active interest in their concerns.Organizational awareness: Reading the currents, decision networks, and politics at the organizational level.Service: Recognizing and meeting…client or customer needs.Relationship managementInspirational leadership: Guiding and motivating with a compelling vision (for media salespeople this would translate into creating value with an inspiring vision for your medium and your media outlet).Influence: Wielding a range of tactics of persuasion.Developing others: Bolstering others’ ability through feedback and guidance.Change catalyst: Initiating, managing, and leading a new direction.Conflict management: Resolving disagreements.Teamwork and collaboration: Cooperation and team building. |
Source: Goleman, Daniel, Boyatzis, Richard, and McKee, Annie. 2002. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Used with permission.
How important is emotional intelligence in selling?
Goleman makes the case that, contrary to previously held theories, IQ might not be an accurate predictor of life success. “At best IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces. As one observer notes, ‘The vast majority of one’s ultimate niche in society is determined by non‐IQ factors, ranging from social class to luck.’”2 A study of Harvard graduates in the fields of law, medicine, teaching, and business found that scores on entrance exams, a surrogate for IQ, had zero or negative correlation with eventual career success.
A study initiated in 1968 by the Stanford Graduate School of Business reinforced the importance of emotional intelligence for success in business. It conducted in‐depth interviews with the members of its graduating class, which examined the students’ academic records and grades, their extracurricular and social activities, and their reputation among their fellow students. The school kept track of the graduates’ careers and levels of success with re‐interviews in 1978 and in 1988. When the school published the findings of its 20‐year study in 1988, it concluded that the only two things that the most successful graduates (top five percent in title, position, money, for example) had in common was that all of the most successful graduates were in the bottom half of their class in grades and all of them were popular. In other words, relationship skills were more important for success than grades.
A major element of and success is optimism. A study
