Getting Emotional

You’ll often be told that ‘getting emotional’ is a disadvantage, especially in a business setting. However, emotional selling is the ability to utilise emotions and appeal to your customers’ emotions, which will bring you huge improvements in your sales numbers.

Think of the last time you felt emotional over anything; this could have been something that made you happy, sad, angry, envious or invoked any strong feeling within you. Whatever it was, it must have been something that you cared about. That’s because we only feel emotion for things that we care about and have some kind of investment in. Think about your emotional reaction when seeing a crash on the side of the road. This is entirely different to your feelings after being in a crash yourself. Seeing a crash on the side of the road you might feel momentarily sorry for the person in the car and stop to help. However, if you were in a crash yourself (apart from any physical pain) you’d be feeling angry, upset, scared, and a host of other emotions vastly stronger than what you’d feel simply driving past a crash.

Selling with Emotion

Now we can apply the knowledge we have on emotions to create our emotional selling technique. The key is to stimulate or appeal to your customers emotions, which could range from happiness all the way to fear. Whichever emotion we want to appeal to it has to be one that we feel will give us the best reaction for the least effort. Again, using the car crash example, if someone was feeling scared following a crash because they didn’t how they would afford to get their car fixed, in this case it would be far less effective to try and ‘cheer them up’ by making them laugh than it would be to address their fears and to help them to come up with a solution.

Emotional Selling is a sales method that attempts to appeal to a buyers emotions, either by generating desire and excitement around the products benefits, or evoking negative emotions like fear and frustration – pain points that your product or service can alleviate.

Logic vs Emotion

People buy on emotion and justify with logic. Think about the person who buys a brand new Rolls Royce. What is driving that decision? Pride, almost certainly, to have a feeling of importance, quite probably, for the love of world class engineering and the perceived quality and durability this represents, possibly?

Most lovers of brands are a combination of all of the above. If we can discover peoples emotional triggers we can sell and present with those in mind. Other emotional triggers; 

• Instant gratification, “This will solve your problem now!” 
• Happiness, “You’ll be happier once you’ve made this decision” 
• Fear, of missing out on this offer/saving 
• Trust, they believe in you and your product, perhaps endorsed by testimonials 
• Sadness, to be demonstrated if your solution isn’t taken up 
• Belonging, other people are using this and enjoying the benefits (e.g. iPhone) 
• Values, buying sustainably, environmentally, socially, politically or technologically