Appealing Emotionally In Business
Here’s a wild suggestion: I think rationality is overrated. Yup. It’s true. I realize it’s important to have a good foundation with your feet planted solidly on the ground, but rationality has taken over the realm of business (though it has not yet taken over the world of romantic relationships. . .) and we’ve lost an integral part of ourselves that makes us appealing: emotionality. We have moved from mom and pop businesses into the age of faceless corporations and in doing so, things have become so sterile.
I’ve discussed in previous articles how to access our clients’ and prospect’s emotions. Here I’d like to discuss why we should do this. Their emotions and other-than-conscious minds are conduits and our viability as sales people are linked to these conduits.
Our core emotions drive us to take action. The same things that ruled our ancestors, rule us–our need for food, shelter, sex, fight or flight. There wasn’t an overabundance of products and services to choose from at that point, there were just the basics. With no thought to the concepts of choice, luxury or affluence, decisions were simple. And yet, we are still hardwired to think about these core needs first and foremost.
In our interactions, we need to have foremost in our minds the goal of appealing to their core. Gut instincts can be honed to be even more powerful than our rational thought processes. And when we combine the two, that is where the real power is.
In an instant, our gut instincts kick into action. In the book ‘Blink’, Malcolm Gladwell writes about thinking without thinking, that rapid cognition that happens in the blink of an eye. Our rational brains take five times longer to assimilate than do our emotional processes.
Think of this in terms of how sales used to be and how they are now. Despite the fact that at our cores we’re like cavemen, we are incredibly sophisticated. If you consider even back to the fifties, sixties and seventies, the ‘features and benefits’ style of sales, the Dale Carnegie method, these were passable at the time, but as our choices have grown in the marketplace, so have our BS detectors. We know when someone’s being slick with us and it doesn’t feel good.
It feels good to be understood and at ease, and we want these responses from our clients. With the right training, we can duplicate these responses over and over. When we access our prospect’s and client’s values and criteria, combine them with sincerity, honesty and integrity, add in our products and/or services, it creates an emotional alchemy that is easy to feel good about.
In our advanced state of civilization (depending on your perspective) we have an amazing array of choices. There are opportunities available to us that even a generation ago, wouldn’t have been dreamed up. In this ever expanding atmosphere it seems likely that those of us who know how to access the core and our prospect’s emotions are going to be the ones capable of rising to the top in our given fields. By elevating emotions and partially bypassing rationality, we find ourselves with incredible persuasion power.
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