Professional Salespeople Sell on Emotion, Not On Logic | Best Sales Training in Malaysia

What is it that causes people to make a decision to buy? Is it logic or emotion?

The Harvard Business School did some research on this some time ago and discovered that 84 per cent of all decisions are based upon emotion and not logic. I have said that people buy people. I have also said that we will not do business with some- body that we do not like. These are, of course, emotional reasons. Too much poor selling is based upon purely logical selling.

In the out-of-date sales strategy, salespeople were trained to find a need, to prove a need and to sell the need. All this does is create hard-selling techniques. And again, as I have already said, hard selling is out of date.

I could prove to you very quickly that you need some more life insurance. Or, if you haven’t got any, I could prove that you need some right now. But let me ask you a question, ‘Do you want some?’

The good and professional life insurance salespeople will find the need but they will not sell the need. They will turn that need into a want, by selling the results of either having or not having. The professional life insurance sellers are able to tell countless horrific stories of people who have had insufficient or no insurance, and the sadness and traumas created for their families.

Good selling turns that emotional appeal to the advantage of the seller and creates a want.

The true professionals believe in their product and do every- thing possible to persuade the client to insure according to status, income and the desire to provide for the client’s family. Whatever the product or service you sell, it is good business practice to be able to turn a need into a want, and perhaps the easiest and most effective way this can be done is by telling a story or an experience that one of your other customers may have told you. This has the effect of switching the logic to emotion.

My own bank sent two salespeople for a meeting with me to discuss critical illness insurance, and I have to confess I did not want this cover. They explained in detail what the policy would cover and the list contained a frightening variety of human ailments from cancer to heart disease, from kidney failure to loss of a limb, and they were attempting to prove that this was something I really did need, but I didn’t want it and I was providing them with some pretty good, logical reasons as to why I was not going to proceed. And then one of them said, ‘There are three of us sitting around this table, and statistically, before the age of 60, one of us is likely to experience one of the ailments off that list.’ Well, I signed up! You see, I looked at the other two guys and they both looked pretty healthy to me!

So what are the chief buying emotions? They are:

health, ego, security, ambition, prestige, status, fear of loss, greed, and pride of ownership.

This is another great principle of professional selling. People will always find the money for the things they want, not necessarily for what they need. Where you are ‘need selling’, your prospective customers will be much more concerned about price. If you are selling screws, say, to a professional buyer and his task is to buy screws in order to complete a manufacturing job that his company has been commissioned to undertake, it will be harder to stimulate an emotional want. He has been told to purchase screws and his job is to buy as well as possible. He will, of course, be buying value, but nevertheless he needs those screws so he is obviously going to be much more price conscious.

Some salespeople may have been brainwashed and conditioned by the importance of finding the need and selling it. Yes, absolutely find the need and provide the information that satisfies the need but you will win the sale when you really satisfy the wants. Selling a want is best achieved with true success stories, case histories and customer quotes. ‘In other words, don’t take my word, etc...’. This is when you can bring out and show the evidence.