Short & Sweet reviews of our favorite books for entrepreneurs.
This weeks review:
NINJA BOOK REVIEW: SALES EQ:
How Ultra-High Performers Leverage Sales-Specific Emotional Intelligence To Close the Complex Deal
by Jeb Blount
5 out of 5 NINJA STARS
In a world of automated and robotic selling processes, customers now yearn for a truly emotional human connection – and this is exactly what freelancers and small entrepreneurs can offer them! This book is a must for anyone who wants to sell in the best way, the HUMAN way.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeb Blount is the CEO of Sales Gravy and advisor to the world´s leading organizations, consulting them on the impact of emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills in closing deals.
1 SENTENCE BOOK SUMMARY
SALES EQ says that you should forget about selling people on products, features, and solutions, and instead focus on creating emotionally satisfying experiences for buyers.
FAVORITE QUOTE
“Sales Drive is more important than talent, experience, education, skills, or technique.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- “Sales EQ is the ability to manage your own disruptive emotions while at the same time accurately interpreting and responding to the emotions of stakeholders.”
- “People buy for their reasons, not yours.”
- “Average salespeople delude themselves into believing that buyers make rational, logical decisions based on empirical data and information. But that´s not how the human mind works. Emotions come first, then logic.”
- “Buyers are starving for authentic human interaction.”
- “People act on emotion and justify with logic.”
- “As humans, it is important that our self-image correlates with our decisions. So, we fall on logic to justify subconscious buying behavior.”
- “Most salespeople begin the sales process from a position of logic and gradually shift toward emotion. In contrast, buyers tend to begin the buying process at the emotional level and over time shift toward logic.”
- “Salespeople who disrupt emotions pull stakeholders toward them…Different is sexy. Different sells. The amygdala loves bright, shiny things.”
- ¨Humans have an overriding desire to be consistent in their thoughts, beliefs, values, and actions…Dissonance is so emotionally painful that people will, in many cases, deny facts, deny evidence, and rationalize anything to protect a core belief.”
- “Because high-IQ people tend to think, talk, and connect disparate ideas faster and more rationally than other people, they have a tendency to damage relationships through impulsiveness, impatience, talking down to people, talking over people failure and hear people out, failure to empathize with others, and overwhelming people with elaborate solutions to basic problems.”
- “The end game is not the relationship, it’s the deal. Salespeople who forget this basic fact are doomed to mediocrity because they’re good at making friends and bad at moving deals forward through the pipeline.”
- “There is a difference between experiencing emotions and being caught up in them.”
- “Awareness is the mother of self-control.”
- “Problem solvers are the champions of the business world.”
- “Language is the ultimate sales technology…speaking your stakeholder’s language makes your message and recommendations sound familiar, safe, comfortable, and memorable.”
OUR NINJA OPINION
An important advantage that a freelancer or small entrepreneur can leverage over big companies, is their ability to have a closer, more direct human connection to their customers. This is such a big advantage that it makes sense for you to study it in detail and master the art of Sales EQ! Highly recommended!