Tips for Using Emotional Intelligence in Sales Settings

Emotional intelligence in sales is the skill of picking up on customer signals and adjusting your tactics to improve the sales experience. For a brick-and-mortar store owner, it’s how you greet the person who just wandered in, looking lost. For an ecommerce store, it’s how your ecommerce customer service team responds when someone sends an all-caps email about a late delivery. 

In the physical world and online, emotional intelligence in sales influences whether your shoppers have a positive buying experience. In a study published in the Journal of Resource Management and Decision Engineering, retail salespeople with higher emotional intelligence performed better at the things shoppers care about. High emotional intelligence increased customers’ trust and their loyalty following the interaction.

Like any other sales skill, emotional intelligence is something you can build. Read on for advice on building emotional intelligence across your sales team, with tactics from business owners who have made it part of how their teams sell.

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is the ability to respond effectively in social situations. It’s about communicating so that other people feel heard, solving problems without inflaming the issue, and understanding what will resonate with others. It draws on social skills and self-awareness, like reading other people, identifying emotions, and knowing how your own feelings shape your behavior. It is a soft skill that, in retail or ecommerce business settings built on human interaction, can be just as essential as hard skills like inventory management or bookkeeping. 

What is the role of emotional intelligence in sales?

Emotionally intelligent salespeople bring active listening and empathy to the sales process, online and off. Emotional intelligence is partly about picking up on what a customer actually needs. 

In a brick-and-mortar store, that might involve greeting a person who just wandered in looking lost, then helping them discover what product they need. Online, it might be sensing nervousness in a message like “I need a gift for my mom, and she’s impossible to shop for” and asking a few questions over chat before offering suggestions. Either way, it involves building rapport and helping customers solve their problems versus pushing a product.

Like other sales skills, developing emotional intelligence takes practice. You build emotional intelligence skills by interacting with others, not in a one-off sales training session.

Types of emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is a bundle of skills, not a single capability. Each of these emotional intelligence skills maps onto sales interactions:

• Self-awareness. You recognize your feelings as they arise, know how they shape your behavior, and understand how those around you perceive your behavior. For example, if you’re on the retail sales floor, you notice you’re feeling rattled from a difficult conversation with a colleague and might risk transferring that negativity to a customer. 

• Self-regulation. Self-awareness is noticing your own emotions; self-regulation is deciding what to do with them. Managing emotions can stop you from behaving in ways you might later regret—say, by firing back at a harsh one-star review. Self-regulated salespeople remain calm when a conversation gets tense.

• Social awareness. Social awareness is the ability to read a situation, including the feelings nobody has voiced aloud. A retail associate with this skill knows when to hang back from a browser who wants space and when to approach the shopper.

• Interpersonal effectiveness. You build and maintain relationships over months and years. If you interact with customers in person, it could mean remembering a regular’s name and asking about their last purchase. 

• Empathy. Empathy is understanding a person’s feelings, even when you don’t share them. Over ecommerce live chat, it might mean recognizing that a customer pushing hard on delivery dates might be anxious about a deadline.

Tips for building and applying emotional intelligence in sales

• Hire people who embody your ideal customer
• Meet customers where they are
• Skip the pressure tactics
• Center the person in front of you
• Read the room when emotions are running high
• Sell the way you’d want to be sold to

The following tips come from business owners who have built emotional intelligence into how they sell, including hiring practices and specific ways of interacting with customers:

Hire people who embody your ideal customer

Gaby Bayona began sewing dresses out of her apartment at 18, using skills learned from her mother, a professional seamstress. Today she runs the bridal brands Truvelle, Laudae, and Aesling, along with the boutique Lovenote.

She’s built a team of bridal associates by hiring people who reflect her customers. “When they’re talking to our clients through social, through captions, they’re talking as they would want to be talked to, which adds to the authenticity,” Gaby says. “I think that’s what more and more people are craving when they look at brands trying to market them something.”

This changes what you screen for in interviews. Does the candidate have a true affinity for your brand? Do they sound like your customers? The approach, Gaby says, “has been pretty successful for making sure people feel welcome and feel like they’re in the right kind of place, to not have things feel salesy, because the person you’re talking to could be a friend of yours.”

Meet customers where they are

Meeting customer needs starts with calibrating sales conversations to each individual. Erika Geraerts has built this skill as the founder of Fluff, an Australian beauty brand. “The biggest learning for me over the years has been the way we communicate with our customers,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “You have to meet them where they’re at—based on their knowledge and their experience around products or around the industry—because no one wants to be shouted at or made to feel like they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

One part of calibration is assessing what a buyer already knows. In store, train staff to open with questions instead of pitches. For example, asking whether someone already uses retinol on their skin tells you whether to explain what it does or get straight to which strength they need. Another piece of the puzzle is how you present information. Organize your product pages so plain-language basics sit up top and detailed specs sit further down. The same goes for your support inbox; match the vocabulary of the person writing in, and avoid using industry jargon.

Skip the pressure tactics

Pressure tactics like countdown timers and today-only discounts are designed to rush a decision. Skipping them lets customers buy when they’re ready, not when you need the sale. 

“I know that some bridal stores will give you a discount if you say yes on your first appointment,” Gaby says. “I would prefer for the bride to go home and think about it than feel pressured right then and there to make a sale. Because ultimately, it’s actually more work having them not be confident in their purchase than them just going home and thinking about it, and then coming back.”

As Gaby puts it, a confident purchase costs you less work than one that ends up in regret or a return. Consider what will help your customers make those confident purchases. For example, you might hold an item for a day or two without a deposit, or you might update your abandoned cart emails to answer a question that stalls your buyers, like how a fabric fits or how returns work. 

Center the person in front of you

Natalie Westlake spent nearly two decades at Lululemon, where she helped scale the company from 10 stores to more than 500, before joining Bluboho, a Canadian fine jewelry brand. She worked as a store manager at the Toronto flagship to get as close to customers as she could. As she says on Shopify Masters, jewelry customers were coming in to mark something special in their lives.

“Cultivating the relationship really starts with centering them. It has nothing to do with you, really and truly,” Natalie says. “Every person is coming for a totally different reason. I’ve had conversations about people’s IVF journeys virtually. I’ve had conversations about people receiving a new family member, a new arrival, or a passing of somebody or a divorce. When you center the other person, and you’re really, really genuinely curious, and that’s what you love to do—well, that’s authentic. It comes through.”

Demonstrating interest like this is how you form emotional connections that outlast a single sale and carry into future client interactions. Ask what brings someone in before you show them a single product, then use what they tell you. A notes field in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool can hold the fact that a customer was shopping for an anniversary. Referencing it in a follow-up acts as proof someone was listening. Natalie describes being “guest obsessed,” saying she likes to know as much as she can about customers. “[I like to] know what’s on your wishlist,” she says. “Know who your friends are, know what events of yours you attend so that every time I speak to you, I can draw back on any of those things.”

Read the room when emotions are running high

Some purchases come with an audience. A bride brings her mother and four friends, or a couple debates a big purchase right in front of your sales associate. When feelings and opinions pile up, your team’s job shifts from selling to steering. 

At Truvelle, Gaby trains her stylists for exactly these important moments. “Another thing that we really do well, I think, is making sure that the bride feels heard,” she says. “Sometimes there can be really, really loud and opinionated bridal parties. Making sure our stylists can read the room and see that everybody’s opinion is valid, but ultimately we’re here for the bride. Being able to really reinforce that in a way that’s gentle, in a way that’s nice, in a way that’s helpful.” That’s what’s important, she says. 

The same principle is true in a virtual chat. When a frustrated customer opens with a vent, resist the urge to lead with policy. Actively listen and reflect on what happened before moving to the fix. 

Sell the way you’d want to be sold to

When you’re unsure about a sales decision, an easy gut check is your own experience as a shopper. You know which follow-up emails feel well-considered and which feel like being chased through a parking lot. Gaby runs her businesses through that filter.

“How I approach things is being marketed the way I would want to be marketed to, being sold the way I would want to be sold to,” she says. “I personally would rather talk to a person. So it’s a no-brainer to not use AI when it comes to sales. But instead, a real human.”

You can use business automation for shipping updates, order lookups, and a range of other repetitive tasks. But Gaby draws the line at the emotional center of the purchase. “I’m selling wedding dresses. That’s one of the most emotional purchases you can make,” she says. “I would personally be annoyed if I was just talking to AI, and I’m trying to ask, ‘Do I look beautiful in this?’ It won’t be able to answer that properly.”

Audit your funnel the same way. Go through your store as a customer, from the welcome pop-up to the post-purchase email, and flag anything that would annoy or frustrate you. Then find your highest-emotion touchpoints and make sure a human is reachable.