Integrate Emotional Intelligence & Selling into Competitive Intelligence

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Last week I attended a webinar to improve my selling skills led by Colleen Stanley, Founder and Chief Sales Officer of SalesLeadership. Effective selling will help competitive intelligence professionals, product managers and researchers gain respect, cooperation and appreciation from internal peers. Combine emotional intelligence practices and selling with the collection skill of elicitation and watch your effectiveness soar!

Purposeful Cooperative Leadership in Competitive Intelligence

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In competitive intelligence and research, many of us don’t have any reporting people and report into another functional area of the company. Thus cooperative and purposeful leadership skills are all the more crucial when you rely on other people to give you great information or intelligence who don’t report to you, and your boss perhaps views you as an outlier since competitive intelligence doesn’t quite fit into anyone’s area. My most purposeful leadership was with Sales while I was at Verizon. I knew I needed to be cooperative in order to gain sales intelligence and customer’s input to be successful in competitive intelligence.

Cooperative Listening

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I have found that the ability to communicate cooperatively is invaluable in research, sales and competitive intelligence. Dedicated listening engages me to think of creative questions and comments to keep the conversation flowing, which often uncovers valuable information I would have never expected to learn. It’s also a lot of fun to listen and learn from others.

The Present of Presence & Listening

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I think the phenomenon of being quiet is valuable in business as part of cooperative communication, one of the arms of cooperative intelligence. In my fields of research and competitive intelligence, knowing when to be silent is a great gift, since there aren’t enough listening ears, especially these days with all the downsizing in America. Sometimes, people just need us to listen to them, and not offer any advice. This practice also builds incredible trust and connection between two people since you think enough of the other person to stay quiet and listen.

Christmas, A Season for Gratitude

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One of the purest ways to communicate is to express gratitude which is one of the practices of cooperative communication. There are so many way to express gratitude. A thank-you when someone does something nice is a good start, especially to those people in our lives who are often unseen as we go rushing through our lives. This Christmas is bittersweet for me as I mourn the loss of my Dad who was such a warm and giving man. I am grateful to have been influenced by such a good man.

Resurrecting Cold Calling for Research

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With all the buzz around connecting through social networks, cold calling is often forgotten. While cold calling is a nervy way to conduct research, if you’ve done your homework ahead of time, you can be successful in gathering information quite expeditiously.

Cooperative Leadership: Lessons Learned from my Dad

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I have noticed that cooperative leadership emanates from people who are comfortable with themselves and who don’t have those psychological issues of trying to be “one-up” on others. They are deeply rooted with “take me as I am.” People feel comfortable with this type of person: all personality types.

The Long Good-Bye

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I learned when you lose someone near and dear to you, like Dad was to me, it’s really hard to concentrate on work or anything intellectual. In our culture, we don’t talk about death enough: we’re so wedded to birth, babies and youth tha twe avoid talking about the side effects of death to dear friends and family which delays our ability to pick up the pieces and live our life anew.

Peace at Last: Reflections of my Dad’s Final Days

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This is a longer blog than usual as I reflect on my Dad’s life and what I learned about the end of life through being by his bedside much of the last couple of weeks. I share this close to our American holiday of Thanksgiving since I celebrate the many years I had with him, Tom Duffy, who died on Nov. 21, 2009 in his home surrounded by his family.

Are We Losing the Art of Conversation?

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What is ‘social’? I find that the connections I make and the blogs that I read through social networking are shallow in comparison to the connections and knowledge I gain and exchange in conversation. Social networks provide snippets and tidbits of information. As a society are we losing our ability and culture of conversation?

© 2024 Ellen Naylor