Emotional intelligence (EI) is defined as the ability to understand our emotions and manage them effectively as well as to understand and effectively manage the emotions of other employees.
Strong EI in sales person means the ability to understand the client’s needs, to manage various kinds of selling problems and to deal with possible emotional troubles.
Having EI is necessary for sales jobs.As a seller with high EI should be better able to finalize sales and to create a positive emotional experience with regards to customer care and satisfaction, so EI is associated with customer relations.
According to Kindwell paper, High-EI sales professionals understand subtle facial expressions of confused customers, which prompt them to repeat or clarify messages or find better ways to explain product or solution details. So, with low EI Kindwell expect a weak relationship between cognitive ability and sales performance.
Several studies have reported that EI might be a good predictor of job performance, so for medical device company if the management could screen sales representatives and predict sales performance
success by emotional intelligence scores, the medical sales organizations could be more
successful.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.476.9648&rep=rep1&type=pdf