Innate Intelligence

Your intelligence quotient (IQ) is an indicator of how smart you are. Innate intelligence is baked into your DNA. It is a talent no different than athleticism. You are either born with a certain IQ or you are not.

IQ is immovable. In other words, you are as smart as you will ever be.

The speed and complexity of the modern marketplace is the domain of intellectual agility. In a low-IQ versus high-IQ battle, I'll put my money on the high-IQ person any day. It's almost impossible to be an ultra-high performer in sales, or any other career, if you are not smart.

People with an above-average IQ tend to be curious, rapidly assimilate and learn new information, are strategic and can see the bigger picture, hold themselves to high standards, and have superior reasoning skills.

They also perceive relationships among seemingly unrelated objects, ideas, or facts and develop unique and original solutions to problems from these relationships—a critical competency in sales for discovery, challenging the status quo, and developing unique solutions and recommendations.

These competencies (and more) are why sales professionals with above-average IQs thrive in sales. But there is a dark side. Because high-IQ people tend to think, talk, and connect disparate ideas faster and more rationally than other people, they have the tendency to damage relationships through:

• Impulsiveness
• Impatience
• Talking down to people
• Talking over people
• Failure to listen and hear people out
• Failure to empathize with others
• Overwhelming people with elaborate solutions to basic problems

To effectively navigate relationships and influence the emotions of others, you must learn to temper and complement innate intellectual ability with emotional intelligence. In sales, where emotions rather than rational decision making carry the day, IQ is but part of the equation.

Many extremely intelligent people fail in the sales profession because they are unable to influence the behaviors of other people. Likewise, there are people with high EQs and average- or below-average IQs who thrive in sales and every aspect of life because they are virtuosos with people.

What I know to be true is that being smart gives you a competitive edge, but it is only one part of who you are. Innate intelligence becomes relevant, useful, and powerful when combined with acquired, technological, and emotional intelligence.

Acquired Intelligence

A sales manager asked me, as a personal favor, to spend some time with one of his salespeople while I was at his location on a consulting assignment. According to the manager, the rep had lots of potential but was failing.

I met with the rep in the break room. After listening to his long list of excuses, blaming everything and everyone beside himself for his shortcomings, I suggested a book and two podcasts that I believed would help him. He responded, “I don't like to read, and podcasts aren't for me.”

A week later I was delivering a two-day Sales EQ seminar for a client. On the first day, I noticed that a couple of the participants were disengaged. The rest of the group of roughly 20 people were participating and energetic. But these two were almost hostile.

At lunch, I asked the sales leader if there was something going on. He confided that everyone had been excited about the training except for these two, who had complained about having to go back to training. “They think they know it all. But trust me—these guys need this badly because they are struggling to hit their numbers.”

Average salespeople who think they know it all—I see it every day.

A Thirst for Knowledge

Innate intellect is useless on its own. It must be honed and developed through learning, exercise, and experience. Unlike innate intelligence, acquired intelligence (AQ) is not static.

Regardless of your IQ, you can grow your AQ with schooling, training, reading, and other learning experiences, along with practice, adversity, and experience. Acquired intelligence makes IQ relevant and useful.

What makes one person invest heavily in learning while another says, “Learning is a waste of time”?

Much of it rests on what neuroscientists refer to as locus of control. People who develop an internal locus of control believe that they have control over their life, actions, and situation. People who have an external locus of control believe they are at the mercy of outside forces, luck, and chance. They believe that nothing they do will change anything.

An internal locus of control is a key indicator of high emotional intelligence. Ultra-high performers have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. They:

• Seek out every opportunity to learn.
• Are coachable.
• Welcome feedback.
• View adversity as a learning opportunity.

Ultra-high performers believe that they can shape and influence win probability by investing in and making themselves better through learning and training. They believe that one of the keys to winning is to have more knowledge about the sales profession, their industry, and their products and services than any of their competitors.

UHPs study every move their competitors make. They take pride in knowing more about their competitors than their competitors know about themselves. UHPs invest the time to learn their competitors' products, sales tactics, pricing strategies, marketing, strengths, weaknesses, and even the names of their salespeople. UHPs are not intimidated by competitors; they intimidate competitors.

I have limited patience for salespeople who don't invest in self-development. When you decide not to invest in yourself, you are making the conscious choice to limit your growth and income.

Technological Intelligence

Technological intelligence (TQ) is the ability to interact with technology and weave it seamlessly into one's daily life. Those who fail to develop this ability or who resist developing it will be left behind.

According to Thomas Baumgartner, Homayoun Hatami, and Maria Valdivieso in their Harvard Business Review article, “Why Salespeople Need to Develop Machine Intelligence,” it is essential that salespeople adapt quickly to working with machines. “Beyond their relationship skills, reps will succeed based on their ability to understand and interpret data, work effectively with AI, and move quickly on opportunities.”¹

As technology—especially artificial intelligence—becomes a ubiquitous part of daily life, humans with high TQ will thrive in ways that humans with low TQ will not.

Salespeople can no longer afford to claim that they are “not computer savvy.” To do so puts you in the below-average group. If you don't get tech savvy and quickly, you will be left behind and out of a job.

Ultra-high performers use the Three As in their approach to technology:

• Adopt: UHPs tend to be early adopters of new, cutting-edge technology, and leverage it to achieve a game-changing competitive edge. They invest in it themselves out of their own pockets.
• Adapt: UHPs adapt new technology to their unique situations. They leverage technology to automate low-value tasks so as to gain more time for focusing on high-value human interactions and strategies.
• Adept: UHPs rapidly assimilate technology into their sales day and become adept at using it, not because they have special abilities but rather because they are open to it, have the courage to experiment and learn, and seek out on-demand learning resources.

In the future, there will be two types of salespeople. The first group will tell machines what to do. The second group will be told what to do by machines. Trust me, you want to be in the first group.

Emotional Intelligence

The ability to perceive, correctly interpret, respond to, and effectively manage your own emotions and influence the emotions of others is called emotional intelligence (EQ).

I've been obsessed with emotional intelligence and human behavior in the workplace for 20 years. For me it began with Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (Bantam, 1995). This seminal book took emotional intelligence from the obscurity of academics and introduced it into the mainstream.

Today, the impact of sales-specific emotional intelligence on sales performance can no longer be ignored. Buyers are starving for authentic human interaction. In our tech-dominated society, interpersonal skills (responding to and managing the emotions of others) and intrapersonal skills (managing your own disruptive emotions) are more essential to success in sales than at any point in history.

Emotional intelligence is the key that unlocks ultra-high performance. EQ offsets deficiencies in the other types of intelligence. The awareness and understanding of human influence frameworks, along with the ability to manage your own disruptive emotions, is the rocket fuel of sales performance.

Sales professionals who invest in developing and improving EQ gain a decisive competitive advantage in the hypercompetitive global marketplace.

IQ + AQ + TQ + EQ—A Powerful Combination

What is certain is that the four types of intelligence are tightly intertwined, each connecting, affecting, and amplifying the others. Let's review:

• IQ—how smart you are—is fixed. It is baked into your DNA.
• AQ—how much you know—makes IQ relevant.
• TQ—how fast you assimilate and leverage technology for low-value tasks—gives you more time for human relationships.
• EQ—your acuity for dealing with emotions—amplifies the impact of IQ, AQ, and TQ because it allows you to relate, respond to, influence, and persuade other human beings.

People who combine high IQ, AQ, and TQ with high EQ dominate any field or discipline they pursue. In business and in life, these “high Q” people are at the very top of the food chain while “low Q” people barely scrape by.