The 1 Thing Every Salesperson Should Know

What is the single most important lesson I have learned in decades of sales? That all decisions are rooted in emotion. For years, I thought all sales were made by rational analyses, like ROI assessments and business cases. I was wrong. Yes, logic is part of the sale, however it’s not the most important part.

Because without emotion, there is no decision. And with no decision, there is no action.

Rationality and emotion are deeply intertwined and it turns out that emotions are a crucial component of decision making, even in business. Don’t believe me? Checkout renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in this brief interview with David Brooks.

Or if you have more time, try Damasio's book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

That’s the sales challenge. The bottom line of a sale isn’t just a set of figures. It’s an emotional belief. Simply put, sales people must provoke powerful emotions in their prospects. If everything we do is based on the logic and rationality of spreadsheets and bulleted PowerPoint slides, we will fail. We have to create a narrative of a future world that people passionately want to be in.

OK, how?

The most effective sales people are engaging story-tellers. Great sales people manifest the future in vivid living color - and it dances around in their prospects’ heads in every detail, inspiring them, haunting them, and urging them to be a part of it, to star in it.

It is our job is to sell the future. The future changes things in ways people may not like or understand. The future is all around us and it does not care if people embrace it or are left behind. We must inspire our prospects to harness that energy into an emotional commitment to change. In effect, people need to control their part in the future or it will control them.

That’s what makes sales such a challenging and rewarding profession.

So which emotion is the most effective at driving action? Fear. Call it the fear of missing out, or the fear of failure, or the fear of the unknown. Fear gets attention. That may sound negative but it doesn’t have to be. Fear of missing out makes a business into a first mover, an investor in disruptive change. Fear of failure makes a business want to move ahead of their competition by embracing new technologies. Fear of the unknown means getting in control, because the best future is the one people create for themselves.

Where do you start?

Stories have structure. You need a situation, relatable characters and, most importantly, a conflict - there has to be some form of adversity, something for the main character to achieve or to overcome. A story without conflict is not a story - it is just a descriptive narrative. Hint: the main character is your prospect or customer, not you. Experiment with which stories get the most visceral reactions – one story is probably not enough.

The best resource I have found on story construction is this book from Paul Smith, one of the foremost experts on selling with a story.

So whether you are trying to bootstrap a startup, increase revenues exponentially, or simply wanting to crush your sales quota - first find the emotional driver that will stir the hearts of your prospects. Then create your stories.

What emotions have driven your sales? What story positively changed your business?