United States business leaders spend $15 billion per year on sales training, but approximately 50% of salespeople still fail to reach their annual sales targets. Business leaders have limited understanding of the relationship between emotional intelligence and its central constructs (self-perception, self-expression, interpersonal, decision making, and stress management) and sales performance of sales professionals based in the United States. The purpose of this correlational research study was to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and sales performance via an online pre-existing emotional intelligence assessment. Results suggest that higher decision making skills lead to higher sales performance. Social implications for sales and business leaders include using these results to seek and hire emotionally intelligent sales professionals and training existing sales professionals about emotional intelligence competencies to improve company-wide sales performance.

Dr. Michael J.G. Reid is CEO of Winning With Emotion, a consulting firm that restores customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention by improving actions and behaviors of client-facing teams. He founded the firm based on three decades observing clients reacting more favorably to client-facing teams having above average emotional intelligence.