Emotions and empathy: assets to achieve sales targets

Introduction

We are not sufficiently aware that emotions are a fundamental driver in managing the relationship with the customer and the business in general.
Managing emotions is crucial for salespeople because emotions can support:

• building new business relationships;
• strengthening existing ones;
• enhancing sales performance.

Aims

The course is designed to help salespeople increase their ability to:

• manage emotions and build an empathic relationship with the customer;
• experience failures as a moment of self-reflection from which to restart and achieve challenging sales targets.

Who should take this course?

This course is designed for salespeople who want to improve a few crucial aspects in the management of their role:

• using emotions and empathy as a mean to build new relationships and strengthen existing ones;
• developing resilience, i.e. the ability to experience failures as a temporary situation to start again towards new and challenging targets.

Contents

The sales process

• The structure and the different steps

Emotions

• What are they?
• Where do they come from?
• Why are they so important?
• When do they have a negative impact, and when do they help us achieve results?

Learn to listen and make the customer listen to you

• Listening: a weapon of competition, too often neglected
• Take a test to assess your listening skills
• Bad listening behaviour: a review
• Conscious listening and its forms: empathic, informative, critical, appreciative
• Listening that strengthens personal relationships and the one that helps to manage your role better
• When the wrong type of listening can cost a lot: the empathic listening in detail
• Tips to keep listening when we meet the customer
• Tips to make the customer listen to you
• The role of non-verbal communication: the postures that work and those that do not!

Asking the right questions

• Why are we less effective than we think at asking questions
• Open and closed question; characteristics and use
• Techniques for constructing an open and semi-open question
• The questions that help you ascertain the customer’s motivation to sign the contract
• Questions that take you straight to the point: clarification, comprehension check and paraphrasing

Examples of situations with high emotional content

• Managing customer objections
• The importance of the first meeting
• Tips for adopting conscious listening when we are under attack
• What can you do when you’re angry? Can you manage emotions?
• What can you do when the customer is furious?
• The liking bias: when sympathy helps you to sell
• The chatty customer and the taciturn one: techniques to manage and keep control of communication

Strategies to turn emotions into a winning weapon

• Questions as a tool to command concern and fear to fail
• Using questions to improve the management of emotions
• Knowing “now” what will happen “later”: why preparing yourself helps you reach your targets
• Strategies for managing anger, ours and others’
• Why listen is vital in any case
• Why seeing failure as an episode will make you successful

What about the learning material?

• Course slides
• Exercises
• Articles about sales management, effective communication, sales management
• Examples of different types of questions
• The most frequent listening behaviours
• Cartoon strips
• Recommended movies and books

Teaching method

The design of the course is focused on two key points:

1. emotions play a crucial role in achieving sales targets;
2. interpersonal communication, improved by listening and question formulation techniques.

This course promotes complete immersion in the topic and the individual experience.
The participants will face situations through exercises and video clips that reproduce moments similar to the ones they face daily.
Would you like to know more about the teaching method? Click here.

Final test and certificate

At the end of the course, participants take a test; after passing it, they can download their certificate of attendance.

Duration

16-24 hours in the classroom, according to the participant’s needs.
It is recommended to attend the e-learning courses The power of questions and Improve your listening skills before o between classroom sessions.