Emotional Intelligence in Sales: a 4-Step, Feeling-Based Approach We Discovered by Enrolling Thousands of Music Students

The emotional intelligence in sales is one of the most challenging aspects of team training to boil down into a manual, or guide.  And yet, the feelings you experience as a salesperson, or rep, have more bearing on your close-rate than any script, or verbiage could ever have.

The best salespeople have mastered the art of how a successful business transaction should feel, and that mental foundation gives them the fortitude to keep selling.  Ironically, though, most professionals do not realize this special mental power and talent they bring to sales is actually an emotional system that recurs in others.

Unfortunately, your thought-power and ability to manifest is not a unique angle you are bringing to the equation. These skills are critical to getting sales, though.

Specific feelings you experience lead to success with your sales, or lack of success in sales.  It’s very simple in concept, but has taken me 15 years to fully understand how sales training for teams should be run to make the most impact.

Sales training for teams was once a skill I couldn’t teach

Up until recently, I have had an admittedly hard time teaching the ‘art of selling’ to another person.  When I would formulate strategies and resources on how to go about closing a deal, they all boiled down to scripts and “if they say this, then you say that” charts.  These guides and prompts for a simple service would be impossible to memorize – or even organize in a useable way – for any administrator.

The truth is, when I really examined my own sales process, my advice would come back to “you just read the situation and do it, you know?”  Obviously, this is the least helpful advice of all – so perhaps the scripts were a step-up, considering my alternative was a Nike slogan.

In my case, I was the owner of a music school franchise location and was selling music lessons to families that I curated with a dedicated staff of music teachers.  The lessons were in-home, so there was a logistical factor involved with scheduling too.

By the time I was ready to bring on another administrator to help manage day-to-day operations, I had become quite proficient at growing my business – and you grow by selling.  To truly benefit from the addition of another manager for my school, I would need to train them on the art of sales too, even if they were not working on sales as a focus in their role.

Sales is a part of everything my school did in some way.  If a family is stopping lessons, we would need to re-market them, which is selling the opportunity to stay, or reengage with a service when a customer wants to terminate.  Or if we are rescheduling a student, we would need to sell the family again on working with a different teacher, which is a major revision to our service on the client end.

No matter where we turned, sales training and proficiency was needed to make our business run and keep students.  My own obstacle with sales training for teams – and developing a deeper system of improvement than verbiage alone – made it difficult to fully engage with my guidance outside of case by case scenarios.

And therein lies the answer to successful sales practices. Yes, it is impossible to boil sales training down into a few broad verbal exchanges and solutions, so there has to be a more central concept behind the art of selling.

The role of emotional intelligence in sales

Every sale, transaction, and deal is unique in some way – even if that way is being very straightforward, which does not happen often in the world of service sales.  One reason why sales training perplexed me was this novelty in each ‘path to closing’ that seemed to escape the scope of any system I tried to apply to the process.

Now, I realize there will always be some deviation you’ll encounter in service sales and steps between individuals, as well as highly varied questions about a product, or service.  However, despite these unique presentations, the sales process actually feels quite repetitive – especially if you have been in a sales role for a couple years, or more. 

In my last 2 years of 16 spent building my music school franchise location, I made a discovery around the role of emotional intelligence in sales of our service, and these insights completely changed how I approach training for this specific area when it comes to piano lessons, or a totally different service. 

Even when conversations about our lessons from potential students would keep me on my toes, I found a constant and repeated energetic push behind getting the sale was needed each time for sign-ups* to come in (*a sign-up is when we close the deal on enrolling a student and setting a start date).

Like many professionals, I was oblivious to the critical role emotional intelligence in sales before this epiphany. But once you see this sales funnel pattern and can feel it for your own product, you can’t un-see it. There is a through-line in the feelings you experience along the way with a sign-up. 

The difference between emotional intelligence and good manners

As we start defining specific feelings and motivations in the sales process that recur, it is important to distinguish the difference between being emotionally intelligent – and applying this insight to a business process – with simply having good manners. 

Good manners are universal, and developing appropriate business etiquette is also a training area for professionals.  Unlike sales, though, learning this workplace skill is straightforward, because manners are defined by rules. 

Emotional intelligence, by contrast, is a complex attribute that carries no definitive rules.  It is more a state of being, or a refined skill that requires adaptation, flexibility, problem-solving, and other sub-skills that work together in real time.

How do you apply emotional intelligence in sales?

Going back to my role selling music lessons:  I was routinely speaking with parents of children who were interested in scheduling lessons, as well as adults who wanted to learn an instrument.  The exact details would always vary, as would the questions, but there were a set of feelings I would have through the entire process that dictated how the communication would go, as well as the likelihood of success.  The latter is very important to keep in mind.

The feelings and level of emotional intelligence you bring to the equation through the sales funnel will dictate everything from the impression the client / customer gets from you, the perception of your brand, and where the conversation goes in direction. 

These key feelings will steer your sales-ship and outcomes.  Mastering them and performing the emotional work associated with sales will lead to results and a single approach that works in all scenarios.

4 emotions to master for sales success: a system of feelings

Service sales training for teams and individuals can be made far more impactful and effective for businesses by shifting focus to the emotions behind closing the sale, rather than individual strategies or scripts.

To share this method we have found so effective for signing up music lessons with fellow service providers, we have outlined the 4 emotions you should master to generate consistent sales success.

Sales emotion #1:  The initial ‘rush of possibility’

With every contact form, phone call, or outreach from a piano / music lessons lead, I would get an initial impression immediately upon receipt based on the inquiry itself.  With highly qualified leads, or those who had attractive details for our business and ability to provide service, this feeling was an initial ‘rush of possibility’ where I could visualize that person being a student with us – whether that would be a good, or bad thing for my school.

Contacts who had unfavorable details – like a location where we have no teaching ability, or students were under our minimum age to start – imagining them as enrolled students would either be way in the future, or based on some development.  Considering the “right now” when reading the inquiry, I would immediately know this contact could not be served. I couldn’t see it.

We would also have demanding parents reach out and make lots of special requests in their initial outreach that were “over the top”. Like saying “we only want an Asian female teacher for piano lessons who can do Tuesdays at 7pm, or Fridays at 5pm, and I only am considering those who have their master’s or higher to start my 5 year old; they are very advanced for 5”.

This is a real request I have received on more than one occasion, my friends. Every individual parameter and all combined have come up more than 3x in my career, and this is just an example.

You know when someone is not right for your service, and in this case, the parents requests may even seem reasonable on the surface, but they are so specific that there is no way to visualize how we would serve them. Or more importantly, what they would be like as clients with those requests.

The power of visualization in sales

This step of filtering out unqualified leads is part of every sales process in approximately the same way, but the magic is in how this feeling applies to those who are a ‘maybe’ or ‘yes’ on our end when considering if we are available to fill their request.

With favorable scheduling details for our school, I could typically visualize who the student’s teacher would be quickly and could see the student and teacher working together well.  I would see them having a great time in lessons and loving their instructor – feeling like they were the perfect match.  I would see the recitals they could participate in.

By feeling this initial rush of possibility and putting the students and leads we could work with into a mental picture of being enrolled, I would generate information I could share with the family that goes beyond a template-based contact form response.

In each of my initial outreaches where we shared pricing for our music lessons service, how to get started, and an intro to who we are, I would make little changes to the base message to enhance and personalize it. The result is that the recipient would feel a direct connection to the information.   If they are going to be students, we want them to have the absolute, most accurate and complete guidance for their scenario before they move forward.

Even in follow ups – if we did not receive a response back from the lead after sending our info – I would go back to that mental picture of this student, or family, working with a staff member on our team.  Not getting an answer back felt like a more pressing, organic reason for a follow up with the potential student, because their lessons were waiting, and I’ve factored them into our school network.

However, with those who had borderline, or “maybe they would work with [x] teacher?” details as we learned about them, we had the ability to back off our pressure a bit, due to our dynamic lead follow up protocols we developed in this same time-frame.

As a tool, visualization as an initial step in the sales process is powerful.  It’s a motivating practice, and after many years of scheduling lessons, that initial ‘rush of possibility’ became a natural reflex for me.  I grew a strong instinct for which leads to work in specific ways with either a more persistent, or more laid-back approach, as well as a sharper eye for the best matches.

Sales emotion #2:  The fierce ‘want’ for a sale

The best salespeople who have high conversion rates will already know what I am referring to with this emotion.  To be great at closing and see results, you must have a fierce ‘want’ for a sale that resonates within you so much that there is no other possibility than to succeed in your efforts.

For me, this feeling is like a sizzling undercurrent to my work that says, “you WILL see your student numbers get up to [x], and you WILL sign up that family of 4…”  It’s not just belief – it’s a belief with passion and energy behind it. 

If you do not feel this ‘want’ for successful sales within you, there will be a passion-gap in your communications that your leads (meaning, possible clients), will feel.  A customer wants to be wanted too, and being brave enough as a salesperson to convey your desire to work with them goes a long way towards creating success.

Of course, anyone can be too aggressive with pushing a buyer to engage, and this type of nagging can ruin a deal just as much as a lack of passion.  And yet, this fierce ‘want’ for a sale I described can actually correct this particular sales-process-miss too. 

If you are centered on closing clients as your end goal and have a drive to succeed, you will consistently course-correct to utilize the best communication strategies and timing that make your goal come true. Promise. You just have to keep investing sincere energy and effort – not worry.

As an example – in business and entrepreneurship, it is easy to pursue an initiative that proves to be the wrong choice.  I do this all the time to this day, but my ‘want’ to see positive results leads me to research, new strategies, openness to guidance, etc. All these correction-strategies give me better guidance to apply forward.

Like with blogging, I knew building out our ideas into articles would be a powerful outlet for AstroCat to share our thought leadership. The initial issue was that I did not have blogging strategy in mind from the SEO perspective early on, and it wasn’t on my mind.  But without SEO, no one would every find our thought leadership.

At first, I jumped in furiously to write a bunch of pieces that have little-to-no SEO value. Just getting content posted was my original goal and thought behind building traffic would work. Turns out, it’s a bit more specific than that in the blogging world.

Because I was tuned in to results, I was checking analytics to see if any article, or posts about the article, were leading to website visits.  As the start, they were not, and that is normal with a new site.  But still – just looking gave me enough insight to realize I needed to do more SEO-side research about writing effective pieces. My blogging skills and SEO practices naturally improved as a result.

Your fierce ‘want’ to make a sale happen will lead you to the solutions that get you to the result, even when you are off track. The feeling must be deep enough to make an impact, but if you have genuine intent and motivation, no one can stop you!

Sales emotion #3:  Total belief and understanding of the product

To sell effectively, you must have a strong belief in the overall usefulness of the product you are promoting, as well as a deep understanding of how it works.  These details connect to authenticity and the knowledge you can share with the client to determine if your product is the right fit for them…and determine this quickly!

If you do not fully understand your product, that is a recipe for disaster in sales – both in the short term and any retention, or customer engagement metrics that measure KPIs after the initial sale.  For services, specifically, this would mean a high attrition / low retention rate.

Likewise, a product you believe in offers value.  If you do not have faith in your product overall, or as the right solution for the person you are selling it to, most salespeople who lead with ethics will have a hard time promoting it.  The messaging will never really feel real to you when selling, and your customer picks up on this.

Instead, you must become a champion for the product you are selling and learn everything about it.  Learn how it benefits your sales audience, and telling them why they need your product, or service, will feel genuine and helpful.

How I learned to sell diabetic socks

Back in my post-college years, I worked at a marketing agency that owned web properties within the overall business.  These were the days before Amazon back in 2008 – 2009 when a stand-alone ecommerce site could be really successful. 

One of those properties – and my first assignment at the agency – was running a diabetic-socks store they developed as one of these ecommerce sites.  I was the manager and customer-service rep and would field calls and emails between my marketing work.

This diabetic socks store provided me my first self-led sales training, which was very organic and based primarily in knowledge of the products being sold.  I learned what was special about diabetic socks, wrote blogs about all types of socks, and started guiding the purchases of the customers calling in looking for different sock varieties.

I could tell you why going with white socks would be the best choice if you were diabetic and that we had a value pack in that color available.  I could steer customers away from the slouch socks that would not be the puffy kind from the 80s, but a more tube-sock with slouch look that is a bit more breathable. 

The nickname of ‘socks queen’ went around the office at one point.  I was much more effective at sales and customer service than I realized at that time, because I didn’t feel I had really done anything to learn sales.  I sold those socks, though, and you never would have been able to tell it wasn’t my sole life’s purpose to help those with diabetes find the right footwear.

Years later, I now realize that what I tapped into with my sales instinct to learn about the product I was selling and believe that what I was doing was valuable is actually an effective sales strategy. I still believe the information was critical to get right for a community that is vulnerable to severe complications if they do not take care of their feet.  This good intent always pays off too.

My simple belief that the socks I was selling were doing some form of good in the world was all the sales training I needed to be effective with that e-commerce business.

Sales emotion #4:  On-demand abandonment of mental investment (aka ‘controlled indifference’)

This is the tough one, and possibly, an unexpected emotional need you will be called to apply over, and over, and over again.  Instead of ‘on-demand abandonment of mental investment’, this skill could also be called ‘controlled indifference’, or the ability to turn off ‘care’ for a sales-lead that dies.

This is a tough feeling to master after the major positive intent we have already infused into the sales process with the 3 emotions prior.  We have cultivated the strongest mental connections we can create between selling a product, or service, as well as our emotions around the process.  In other words, we have invested ourselves fully into the closing of the sale up to this point.

This is the twist.  You cannot become so invested in a single sale that you can’t let go, though.  Even if you play the whole process right and do everything in your power to sell a product, any single opportunity can still break down and not work out.

You have to get over that shit fast – real fast, and keep going.

Get over the disappointment, the “wasted effort”, the emotional investment you put into the process.  None of it matters in the end.  Failure to get over the losses is where the concept of ‘fear of rejection’ or ‘sales anxiety’ enters the picture.

What does matter for emotional intelligence in sales is not letting one disappointment rattle you so much that you stop engaging with the sales process in a positive way.  If you are putting in sincere effort and applying emotional intelligence throughout the sales funnel, you will see positive results happen in time.

In self-help book called “The Art of Extraordinary Confidence” I love the point Dr. Aziz Gazipura, the author, makes about the positive and negative responses we receive. He says sales is a matter of acquiring enough ‘no’s’ to get a ‘yes’, and that ideas has always stuck with me as a beautiful explanation of resilience in business.  It’s a powerful concept. 

‘No’s’ and failures are part of the sales process, and in truth, we are very lucky when we get a ‘no’ too.  A ‘no’ means an avenue is closed, and we have the opportunity to focus our sales efforts in a more productive direction.

When fear of rejection ruins your sales-game

One sales-failure I see routinely that hurts my heart for the individual behind it is when one let-down, or sales-rejection turns into abandonment of emotional intelligence instead of abandonment of mental investment.

Sales is all about ‘trying’ at the core.  What we are suggesting here is a specific way and feeling behind ‘trying hard’ that we have seen succeed.  But what will 100% bring you failure is the inability to mentally shift and become indifferent – uninvested – in the sales that do not work out, despite your best efforts.

There are so many positive ways you can look at a sales failure to learn from the experience that I won’t bore you with examples.  I will share an example of a failure I’ve seen in the “fear of rejection” realm of sales, though, and how it impacted a burgeoning music studio owner’s sign-up efforts.

Case Study: How a lack of resilience hurt a private piano teacher’s studio growth

We work with musicians, artists, and creatives to help with building their own teaching practices as part of our business coaching services at AstroCat. We have a reputation for excellence with music school entrepreneurs, especially.  This is our home-industry, after-all.

One amazing paid advertising source I recommend to solo-practitioners is Thumbtack.com.  They have a music teacher section, as well as household services, tutoring, contractors, and more. 

In the last year, I was coaching a musician building his own studio who tried Thumbtack on his own as a source for advertising.  He stumbled upon it well before our first session and attempted this medium as a first choice for getting more students. This teacher’s instinct up to this point was commendable, but that quickly changed.

When I asked about his experience with the service, he said Thumbtack didn’t work for him. I found that to be odd.  I knew how conversion rates typically look on this site, and I have met teachers who built full, successful studios with this app.  I have also used Thumbtack before for advertising too with my school, and my experience was in line with the teachers who had built studios from it.  It’s a labor of love, but the site works.

I asked for more details, and he said, “I tried Thumbtack for a week. I would reach out with my information, but those people never got back to me.  It seemed like a waste of money, so I stopped.”

As soon as he said that, I knew immediately why Thumbtack was ‘failing’ this entrepreneur, as well as why the sales for his lessons were not coming through overall.

A paid advertising source typically needs a month of testing at a higher-than-normal budget to determine your initial baseline conversion metrics (i.e. the % success rate for customers completing a desired action, like a contact form submission, or setting the first lesson date). 

That one-week time frame was not nearly enough for this teacher to assess what the conversion rate was at all for this source, or if those initial conversations could even turn into a lesson.  Thumbtack could actually be the perfect solution for this teacher’s goals of populating his studio with new students and building a private teaching practice.

Instead, this teacher and burgeoning entrepreneur was easily discouraged by a couple of ‘no’s’.  Though we could also chalk this miss up to the individual not understanding paid advertising and the best practices, it’s the second part of his statement that pointed out greater problems.  “..those people never got back to me.  It seemed like a waste of money.”

Also based on my previous Thumbtack experience with advertising for music lessons, I knew that a week of advertising for lessons at a conservative rate was not enough spend to worry about yet.  It would have been under $50, which is low when advertising for a business service.

The expected earnings for piano lessons are between $80 – $100 per hour, so an advertising budget would need to take that into account to determine how much to spend.

Here is a better way to determine initial advertising budget for the same scenario:

If a typical student takes 4 lessons per month at $100 per hour, the profit made for a freelance studio owner performing the service is $400 per month.  Piano lessons are ongoing services, so if you consider your average retention rate, this profit would be multiplied across several months.

Therefore, as a return on investment, breaking even on the first month for the cost of acquiring 1 student at $400 would still result in a profit in most cases.  Gains would be made in the subsequent months. 

The good news is that – most likely – you would acquire 3-4 students on Thumbtack after spending $400 in a month, based on the average conversion rate we have observed. The company’s profile page on that site may need optimizations to enhance performance during the initial weeks of advertising. Ultimately, the cost per acquisition on Thumbtack should be between $75 – $150 for an average music student sign up.

To be fair, I doubt this individual got this far on thinking through the financials of lessons compared to Thumbtack before becoming discouraged from those first few ‘no’s’ he acquired.

If he only could embrace the same perspective as the author of “The Art of Extraordinary Confidence” of needing a certain number ‘no’s’ to get to a ‘yes’, the outcome of this teacher’s attempts at entrepreneurship and building a successful solo practice could have gone a lot differently – even as a novice. 

Much of the skill that goes into sales on the proactive end must be balanced with the ability to lose and handle rejection – aka ‘resiliency’. This is the sales skill our piano teacher was lacking when he tried to start his advertising efforts, because this world was new to him and the need to acquire students.

Without ‘on-demand abandonment of mental investment’ as an accessible in your emotional repertoire, your ability to sell and get into a problem-solving mindset will be hindered. 

Resiliency is the emotion that helps you stay in motion and working ‘the quantity game’ in sales. How we handle sales rejection and ‘no’s’ is where our efforts towards growth can succeed, or fail for the long-term.

Focus on the feelings that define emotional intelligence in sales

Approaching the art of sales training for teams from a perspective of ‘emotional intelligence in sales’ is a strategy that has worked beautifully for our businesses in the past couple years – ever since I defined the real secrets behind my sales success to teach to share within our office.

Discovering the feelings we carry into our work as professionals have the ability to shape everything in our operation was empowering. From our strategy to verbiage to net profit results – all could be made better by centering on the emotions driving our work and efforts.

Ultimately, sales is about filling a need for your customer, or client.  In a service business, you are also forming a connection with your buyer, whether it’s a momentary interaction, or you will be working together closely for one-on-one sessions. 

When we sell authentically by getting away from scripts and if / then best practices, meaningful growth and progress occurs for a sales person, or rep.  Focusing on the way sales should feel as a baseline practice does all the heavy lifting for you, as well as reveals what path we need to take forward. 

In most cases, the sales path needed for a customer to buy, or enroll is understanding how they will benefit from the product you are selling.  With a genuine passion to help and answer any concerns clearly, your sales growth will not only build revenue – you will amplify your brand image at the same time.