Emotional intelligence is part of our daily lives. But few people know that it also plays a huge role in businesses. Almost every field including marketing, leadership, or finances, depends heavily on the correct use of EQ. Most importantly, EQ predicts the outcomes of various strategies and action plans with surprising accuracy. What this article aims at is to demonstrate the power of emotional intelligence in business, marketing, and leadership and explain how to use it, why to use it, and when to refer to it.
What Is Emotional Intelligence In Business?
EQ is an abbreviation for emotional intelligence. In simple terms, it is an ability to understand the mood, behaviors, and impulses behind actions and decisions. To understand emotional intelligence means knowing how to respond to various situations. It is not difficult to imagine the role of EQ in marketing and business management. Understanding the drives behind your customers’ motifs is a powerful tool to keep them satisfied.
Let’s highlight a few key areas where EQ comes into play for customer relationship management and buyer persona analysis.
- What triggers them to start looking for your products? Understand the customer buying journey.
- What are the emotional factors that cause them to start looking for you?
- How will they benefit from using your product?
- How will the products solve the customer’s products?
Stages of Emotional Intelligence in Business And Marketing
There are four stages of emotional intelligence:
Self-awareness
This is the ability to understand your strengths and weaknesses. It also lets you know how your emotions affect your team members. To impact others positively, you should first understand yourself. To determine your level of self-awareness, you can ask for customer feedback.
Social awareness
There is a very logical difference between self-awareness and social awareness. The first one means understanding yourself, whereas the latter one focuses on understanding those around you. In marketing, social awareness helps you understand your customers’ emotions and how they impact their buying decisions.
Self-management
Emotional intelligence in self-management in plain words is your reaction to stressful situations. In the business world, acting right in force-majeure conditions can decide a lot. Those with high emotional intelligence manage to keep their emotions in check.
Since reactions happen automatically, the more you stay aware of your emotions, the easier it is for you to stop reacting and start responding. You need to stop, think, and breathe before responding.
Relationship Management
Are you able to influence, mentor, coach, and resolve conflict in the right way? While the best way of doing that is by avoiding conflict, there are instances when they will arise. If you want your customers and sales staff to stay happy, you must have this emotional intelligence.
Importance Of Emotional Intelligence In Business
Here are the reasons why you need to have emotional intelligence.
- Leadership & management. When leaders are emotionally intelligent, they can understand other people’s emotions and empathize with the feelings of their team members. This can have a positive impact on the team’s performance.
- Sales and customer service. When a business has employees with emotional intelligence, they understand the customer’s needs. This, in turn, ensures better customer understanding and retention.
- Effective communication. Good communication skills are part of emotional intelligence. Business employees with emotional intelligence can communicate in a better way. They understand each other’s emotions and try to avoid conflict.
- Teamwork and collaboration. Emotional intelligence is a vital part of teamwork and collaboration. When team members understand one another, this leads to better communication, productivity, and cooperation.
- Problem-solving and decision-making. Problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills are vital parts of emotional intelligence. Individuals can understand and even manage their own emotions when conflict arises and empathize with the feelings of those around them.
Three Types of Emotional Intelligence In Business And Marketing
Emotional intelligence in business, leadership, and marketing can be categorized into:
Ability mode
According to the ability mode argument, you must have specific emotional intelligence skills. These skills include:
- Ability to know your emotions
- Understanding how to use them
- Knowing the meaning of those emotions
Trait mode
This differs from the notion that emotions are based on abilities. It suggests that people have inborn traits and talents that affect their level of emotional intelligence. These cannot be measured scientifically and are instead noted through self-identification. They include traits like self-assertiveness, happiness, and self-esteem.
Mixed model
As the name suggests, this combines different kinds of emotional intelligence:
- Skills
- Traits
- Other abilities like self-motivation and the ability to inspire others
There is a debate on whether emotional intelligence is inborn, a skill that can be learned, or a combination of both.
How to Improve Emotional Intelligence
Here are steps you can take to improve emotional intelligence for business:
- Become more self-aware. One way to improve your emotional awareness is by being aware of your emotions and those of the people around you. Understanding your feelings when you are happy or angry makes it easier to understand and process them in a way that promotes healthy results.
- Understand how other people feel. Emotional intelligence often begins with self-awareness, but it also helps to understand what others think about you.
- Practice listening actively. Communication can either be verbal or nonverbal. Therefore, you should watch out for non-verbal communication. When you take time to listen to others, it will also show your level of respect.
- Emphasize. Emotional intelligent persons understand the importance of showing empathy to others.
- Communicate clearly. For vital emotional intelligence, you need to have good communication skills. You should know what to say and how to build strong relations, especially in marketing communication strategies.
- Remain positive. You should understand the importance of using positive images, sending kind emails, and positive reinforcement.
- Stay open-minded. It’s often easy to approach emotionally intelligent people as they are often good listeners and understand other people’s perspectives. They are always ready to learn new things and to accept new ideas.
- Get feedback. Whether positive or negative, you should always be ready to listen to feedback. This shows that you are prepared to take responsibility for your actions and improve your communication with others.
Final Thoughts
Emotional intelligence is an essential skill that can help you navigate most business challenges. When you know your emotions and healthily communicate them, you can build relationships with influencers, customers, and other industry players. This will take your business to the next level.
You can get the most out of emotional intelligence with the above tips. We also recommend you read our guide on whether fear-based marketing works or not.
