Why Emotion Is at the Core of Sales

Do you really believe that you buy your phone from Apple because it has the newest technology? The best features? Or do you buy it because of what the Apple brand represents? Who owning an iphone makes you? How become part of the Apple community makes you feel?

We believe we are rational beings but biology can quickly correct this assumption. The newest part of the human brain, the neocortex, may be responsible for rational thought and language, but it is the older part of our brain, the limbic brain, which controls emotions and is responsible for all human behaviour, decision-making and critically has no capacity for language.

So we make decisions through emotion, then rationalise them through language.

This is crucial to understand when it comes to selling. From my experience over the years, sales is about three things: Storytelling, Emotion and Process. In this post I want to cover the first two — using the framework of a sales pitch to demonstrate how a salesperson can use emotion to invoke trust, pain, fear, relief, comfort, and excitement in order to encourage a customer into a sale.

Now before I start I want to clarify that I firmly believe the best kind of salesperson is one who embodies all the positive emotions they invoke in a customer — they should be honest, trustworthy, loyal, an authority on the subject, a partner and an innovator. The goal of this article is to ensure you know how to convey these attributes, not how to fake them.

The first emotion to understand in a customer is impatience. These days we are all short on time, so a salesperson needs to get to the point quickly at the start of a pitch. Concisely show your prospect you understand the common challenges and needs in their industry, and provide some examples of how you can help.

Next comes trust. Earning a customer’s trust is critical to making a sale, and comes as the result of many different actions on the part of the salesperson.

Firstly, building rapport with the customer (this often comes before the pitch). This involves finding common ground and encouraging the customer to believe you are similar people with similar values. A person is much more likely to trust someone like themselves.

Trust also comes from displaying that you clearly understand the customer’s critical business objectives and core beliefs. That you know their top priorities are and key risks. That your company fits in with their corporate culture and understands how they operate.

Finally, establishing yourself as an authority on the subject will invoke trust. Not only do you understand their current challenges and needs, but you can offer them unique and valuable perspectives on the market, challenge their assumptions, and teach them new ways to compete.

By offering value to the customer, you not only earn their trust, but you also encourage ‘reciprocity’, a term used in Cialdini’s Influence to describe how once a person has been given something, they feel the need to give back in return.

Once you have demonstrated that you understand their business needs and have established your authority, you then dig into their pain to force them to deeply feel the extent of the problem they are facing that your product can solve.

Describe the pain other customers you deal with are facing and ask if they feel those too. Ask for their more specific and unique problems. When does that problem happen? Why do they think it happens? What do they attribute it to?

Which leads to fear. Ask them the consequences if that problem does not get solved. Will their competitors overtake them? Will they be forced to spend hours doing administrative tasks that add little value? Would they be getting insufficient or inaccurate information? What would happen as a result of that? Just thinking about the potential consequences of inaction will make the prospect want to change it immediately.

Once your prospect can really feel the pain & fear of their problem, then you can move onto your solution and elicit relief and excitement. Here you don’t just explain how your product solves their problem (invoking relief), but also how once a customer buys the product they become part of a bigger picture (adding excitement).

What is your vision of the future? If your customer buys your product how do they become part of that future? Who does it make them?

By this point, not only have you cured their pains, you’ve made them part of a journey that can help their business improve exponentially in the future.

Make sure by this point you have explained:

Why do they need this product?

Why do they buy from your company specifically?

Why do they need to buy NOW?

This is the end of your pitch, and the time at which you answer questions, ask for feedback and establish the next steps in the process towards the sale.

Questions will often come up around price & competition, so you need to know how to use emotion when addressing these too.

On the question of price, you need your customer to feel comfort. You do this by clearly describing how the value that your product will bring is worth multiples of the cost. This way they know they are doing the right thing for the business, and can justify the purchase to anyone senior. You can describe value in terms of the costs you will be avoiding by using the product, or the extra revenue the business can make as a result of using the product. Use numbers to back this up as much as possible, so your customer knows you are serious rather than just exaggerating with rhetoric.

To address competition, we come back to trust, and the customer’s belief that the salesperson is honest. A good way to ensure your customer knows you’re honest is to directly compare yourself with competitors — what your relative strengths and weaknesses are, and for which reasons a customer should buy one or the other. This way the customer knows you’re not pretending you’re the only option in the industry, and sees you as an advisor rather than just someone trying to make them buy regardless of whether it’s the right solution for them.

There is much more than can be written about Sales: the structure of sales teams, sales process, working out the correct KPIs, segmentation, establishing a funnel, and using each sales pitch to iterate & improve. I’ll leave those for another day.

For now, I hope this post helps you understand the importance of emotion in sales, and through particular emphasis on the sales pitch, how emotion can be used in every step of the sales process.