The Emotional Connection

People use your goods or service because of an emotional connection, and they justify it with the features and benefits.  Part of being human is seeking, experiencing, and communicating emotions. 

Take any product and you can boil down the reason someone made a purchase to moving toward (or preventing from losing) one of those three cornerstone motivational emotions. That’s why feature selling is ineffective. As a business owner or sales rep, if you don’t know how to evoke powerful emotions in the selling process, you’ll struggle to get even mediocre results.

What you are really selling is affluence or status, reassurance, time or convenience, pleasure or personal empowerment.

With affluence, remember, people, want other people to know that they have money and are of high status, thereby making them feel good about themselves through validation and that plays directly into the motivation. Using affluence as a motivator focus on personal benefits, specific ROI, case studies that demonstrate the exact benefit your prospect is looking for, plus remember to use words like a reward, valuable, exclusive, distinguishing, profitable, and gain, can help you paint the picture.

Peace of mind is priceless in playing to the power motivation. People want to have control over their lives. You can’t put a price on feeling safe and protected. Reassurance is the business that all insurance salespeople and financial planners are in. Here are some ideas on how you can use reassurance to sell products or services. Get your prospect or customer in the mindset of not worrying about this one thing and focus on running their business. In other words, describe what your product will allow them to do.

Have you received any awards or recognition in your industry? Do you have any additional training or certifications that will make your prospect more at ease? By sharing this you build trust to your advantage. 

If you’ve done your homework on both the industry and business, share that knowledge; this usually brings a feeling of trust, the prospect believes that this person really knows my business. 

Share your testimonials that show others have already put their trust in you. And remember to use emotional words like guarantee, results, improve, satisfaction, the leader in, secure, safe, trusted, and reliable can help you win trust.

If your customer is a working professional, busy parent, or anyone else with extremely limited time or energy, then selling convenience is a piece of cake, and this especially popular in the technology industry right now. You may suggest the value for them in the terms of time either lost or gained, remind them how much energy their current solution is costing them. What else they could/should be doing. What would they rather be doing? What are the more important things they could be doing with their time? How much more effective would they be at their job if they could get this one area under control? And use words like productivity, effectiveness, simple, quick, “plug and play”, and “done for you” will help them realize how much time they could be saving.

We all move toward pleasure and away from pain. We humans will pay almost any amount to enjoy a little more pleasure in our lives. Though B2B selling isn’t usually about selling pleasure, many companies buy products for the office that give them pleasure. You need to translate the value of pleasure for your prospect and make using your product enjoyable. Have them visualize a brighter future and remember to use words like fun, please, imagine, enjoy, satisfy, you, delight, and opportunity to play to the pleasant emotions.

Personal empowerment is a key to a successful meeting.  If you can help them become a better person and reach their dreams, you’ve hit the jackpot. This includes everything from fitness to finance to emotional health, and so much more. Have any of your customers made headlines after utilizing your product? Do you have pictures of your customer receiving their accolades? Offer to highlight your prospect if they go with you. Does your prospect need the publicity that you can offer? Would they make a good case study? And here use words like image, respect, power, reputation, prominence, influence, and prestige. This word will evoke emotions. 

You must always keep that emotional connection alive, even when they call you and are placed On-Hold.

Since 1987 HoldMasters has been helping both Fortune 500 companies, mom and pop businesses, and home-based businesses, around the nation increase their ROI with custom On-Hold-Messages. It can up-sell and cross-sell present clients and inform prospects of your business and philosophy and helps keep the emotional connection alive. It makes a small business sound big and a big business sound friendly. 

Let HoldMasters help you when your business is on the line.