Tuesday, March 22, 2011

EQ and the 'Crazy Customer'

New Article: 
EQ and the ‘Crazy’ Customer

By Charlie Lang


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heroesTo prepare for a sales training and coaching program for a major cosmetics firm, we arranged ‘shadow’ coaching sessions, meaning that we followed selected sales people during their daily work, visiting hair salons. The exercise was revealing.

To give you a taste of our experience, here are some true stories.

In one occasion, we walked in and the owner of the salon, a well-groomed barber of about 45 years of age, shouted at the sales person, apparently totally ignoring my presence: “You guys are so useless! I placed an order for 10 bottles of shampoo and you delivered only 9. And when I called, people pretended not to know anything. Tell me, why should I ever order anything from you again?”

The sales person responded in a very defensive manner, trying to ‘be right’ which made the customer even more upset.

In another occasion, the customer – another salon owner - was sitting at a table reading the newspaper. Upon our arrival, he kept reading the newspaper, only interrupting himself by uttering a disinterested ‘hello’. The sales person I was shadowing started to chatter her five minutes sales pitch about the latest promotion items, etc. The salon owner didn’t put his newspaper down, not even when at the end of her pitch she said ‘good-bye’.

You think I’m exaggerating? Can’t believe that such ‘crazy’ customers really exist? Well, I couldn’t believe it either – but seeing is believing.

How are these cases connected to Emotional Intelligence (EI)? And why might it matter to you even if you don’t have crazy customers like that?

What these two cases have in common with the sales situation you are facing is that we all deal with people with certain emotions and that we have certain emotions as well. If we can optimize the management of our own emotions and influence positively the emotions of our customers, we tend to be more successful overall.

According to Daniel Goleman’s model of EI, people who have high emotional intelligence

1. Have a high level of awareness of their emotions,

2. Have the ability to successfully manage their emotional states,

3. Are sensitive towards other people’s emotions and can ‘read’ them accurately, and

4. Are able to positively influence others’ emotional states.

For sales people to improve their success rate, working on these four dimensions has proven to be an effective approach. Consider this piece of research:


At L’Oreal, sales agents selected on the basis of certain emotional competencies significantly outsold salespeople selected using the company’s old selection procedure. On an annual basis, salespeople selected on the basis of emotional competence sold $91,370 more than other salespeople did, for a net revenue increase of $2,558,360. Salespeople selected on the basis of emotional competence also had 63% less turnover during the first year than those selected in the typical way (Spencer & Spencer, 1993; Spencer, McClelland, & Kelner, 1997).

So how would a sales person with high emotional intelligence deal with the above two cases?


Case I: The Screaming Customer

Before responding to the customer, it’s critical to become aware of one’s own emotions in this moment. For example, the sales person may realize that he feels unfairly treated because it was not he who made that mistake. Also, he may feel put down by the customer triggering the feeling of helplessness. Obviously, these emotions aren’t very helpful to successfully deal with this situation.

Noting that these emotions don’t help, it’s critical to now manage these emotions, for example, by telling himself that this customer is not really upset with him but with the company and that he simply needs to release his anger. He may even sympathize with the customer’s situation and develop an emotion of compassion instead.

As a result, it will be much easier for him to deal with this customer’s emotions. Instead of being defensive, he could show his understanding and focus on how to make up for what the customer experienced and how to regain his confidence in the company.


Case II: The Indifferent Customer

Considering again the four dimensions of EI, the sales person first pays attention to her own emotions in that situation. She might notice that she’s fed up with this customer’s behavior and as a result simply don’t care anymore. That realization could trigger her to reconsider her job mission. And she might regain motivation to make a positive attempt with this customer if she realized that this customer probably has a good reason for acting the way he acts – she just hasn’t figured out yet what exactly this is.

As a next step, she could think about what’s going on with this customer, why he behaves the way he behaves. By paying more attention, she might realize that this customer actually does buy from her company despite his even if he ignores her most of the time. She might also realize that this customer expects to be dealt with in a particular way and she just never bothered to find out exactly how.

Walking her through the concepts of EI, she became quite curious and a few weeks later excitedly reported about her experience. Instead of doing what she has always done previously, this time, she didn’t rattle down her sales pitch but instead first asked with assertively for the salon owner’s attention. This puzzled him and he indeed put down his newspaper. Then she went on to say something along these lines: “I noticed that my sales pitches seem not very interesting to you and that’s alright. At the same time, I want to ensure that I don’t waste your or my time and therefore, I’d really like to know how I could best serve you so that you see value in my visits.”

Eventually, the salon owner shared with her that he actually appreciated the products of her company but that he finds her sales pitches very boring and most of the time irrelevant. They agreed that instead of producing a sales pitch, she would first ask him about any needs he may have and then very shortly update him on any special promotions – and that only if she felt they could be useful for him.

These are just two simple examples, somewhat extreme in how the customers responded, but the principles of EI are universal and can be applied successfully in any interaction with customers or prospects.

Feel free to contact us if you’d like to know more how to build a highly emotionally intelligent sales force.
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Friday, March 04, 2011

Coaching or Mentoring?

Dear Reader,

Asia, and especially China, has long been known for being excellent in catching up with trends that were usually set somewhere in Europe or North America. Perhaps with the exception of Japan, Asia has not been perceived much as a trendsetter. This is particularly true for the areas of management and leadership.

This is about to change. We notice an increasing number of organizations based in Asia that develop thought leadership in these areas. Granted, it probably will take years if not decades until the wealth of thought leadership on management and leadership can be compared with Western countries such as the US, UK, France, Germany or even tiny Switzerland, for that matter.

The interesting thing is that this kind of thought leadership starts to emerge in this part of the world and that sooner or later executives in the West will seek advise and inspiration from Asian based thought leaders, something that rarely happens today.

If you are looking for progressive and perhaps innovative inspiration for your leadership, are you only looking in the West? How open are you to check out latest Asia based thought leadership? Progress-U is contributing to the trend to set trends from this part of the world. Let me know if you’d like to know more.

Let's keep progressing!
Charlie Lang
Executive Progress Expert and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.
Author of The Groupness Factor
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Coaching or Mentoring?
“What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?”

This is a question I am frequently asked which reminds me of the questions, “What is the difference between management and leadership?” or “What is the difference between vision and mission?”

Go online and use any search engine to answer these questions and I promise you, your confusion will be heightened, not reduced. Check dictionaries or ask several ‘experts’ and you won’t be enlightened either.

While I have my own definitions and differentiations of the terms coaching and mentoring, which make most sense to me, I would never claim that mine are the ‘correct’ ones. They just make sense to me, that’s all.

Ultimately, it’s really up to you how you define and distinguish these terms.

Why does it matter anyway?

Well, it does matter. Let me give you an example. About a year ago, one of our clients asked us to assist them in setting up a mentoring system in their organization. My first thoughts were: ‘OK, let’s first check the ability of their leaders to take on a mentoring role. Are they able to know when a coaching approach is more useful (and are they actually able to coach), when sharing is more appropriate, and when they simply need to teach the mentee?’

When I met the COO, I held back with my thoughts and wanted to clarify first the purpose of setting up a mentoring system. While it seemed obvious to me, I learned that even though such assumptions may 90% of the time be correct, sometimes they are plain wrong. And this was the case here, as I was about to find out. I assumed that they wanted to set up a mentoring system for taking care of their top talents and ensure their proper development and advancement in the organization.

It was a good thing that I first checked if this assumption was correct because I was in for a surprise. The COO’s understanding of mentoring was to appoint subject matter experts who could be consulted if anyone needed specific advice in the area of the mentor’s expertise. The purpose was to provide to any employee access to the needed expertise.
You see, had I not checked, I would have approached this case with my own assumptions and preconceived thoughts how to establish a mentoring system there. I would have been totally off track. It is important that an organization develops a common understanding of what certain terms mean for them, so that they minimize misunderstanding and ensure aligned communication and action.

I recently followed a thread on the definition of vision and mission statements on LinkedIn and got tired reading it after about 80 posts. In total there were a couple of hundred comments, many of them very passionately claiming that they have the ‘right’ answer and rejecting with equal amount of passion any other definitions. It was amusing and at the same time insightful to observe how excited people could get over two harmless words.

If people can get so engaged about two words when nothing is at stake, can you imagine how serious the implications could be for any leader or organization in terms of communication within the organization?

Over the years, working as an executive myself and having coached and trained hundreds of senior executives, I have learned to appreciate how important it is for an organization to develop a common ‘language’ and ensure that everyone in the organization adopts the same understanding of ‘soft’ words that are frequently used, such as vision, mission, strategy, management, leadership, coaching, mentoring, counseling, consulting, etc. To do so effectively, I found it’s helpful to openly admit that there are no strict official definitions for these terms and then agree on certain definitions for the said terms, within the organization. Everyone in the organization should be encouraged to adopt these definitions in order to facilitate effective communication. This is ever more important in multi-cultural teams or organizations.

Developing a common language, by the way, has some other advantages aside from reducing misunderstanding. It also leads to stronger groupness (sense of belonging to the group) which is a contributing factor to higher engagement and loyalty.

In case you want to know how I distinguish between coaching and mentoring, for me, mentoring is coaching plus sharing of relevant experience and assisting with the mentor’s own network. In my understanding of mentoring, an effective mentor is also an effective coach. Unlike a coach, a mentor needs to have specific and relevant experience in the field of the mentee and is able to make use of his network of contacts to help the mentees in their advancement. As a result, a mentor is typically more senior than the mentee. This is not necessarily the case for coaching.

If you want to know my definition of coaching, feel free to contact me and I’ll be glad to share it with you.
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