People Buy Emotionally and Justify Logically

An axiom in sales states that people buy emotionally, whether it’s an object or an idea, and use logic to justify what they’ve bought or bought into. To sell or persuade someone of something you must begin with establishing emotional appeal.

Sales teams that focus on relationships quickly learn the value of providing personal and professional value to clients rather than focusing solely on the sale.

Relationship-focused teams grew their accounts at least twice as fast as regular transactionally-focused account teams. This happened despite the fact that the relationship-focused teams worked on the company’s largest, most mature accounts — the most difficult to expand rapidly because they were already so large.

Why?

People do business with people they know and like. And people like people who focus on their success. That means a sales call is a success if it advances your customers’ cause and builds the relationship, not just if it closes a transaction.

This won’t be news to most salespeople, who excel at building relationships. What can be hard for many sales people is turning the ongoing conversation of a relationship into a transaction.

The good news is that transactions often happen as a matter of course when sales teams focus on building great relationships with generosity.

Generosity Without Expectations of Tit for Tat

Do the homework required to go into each meeting with a list of ways to make the person you’re meeting successful. That’s what’s going to arrest people’s attention and make them willing to develop a closer relationship with you.

What kind of homework?

I’m not talking about the usual research on the company and its need for what you’re selling. Research the person! You’re looking for personal reasons to care. Find a way to introduce something that leverages your shared interests. Failing that, fall back to some deeply-held personal interests of your own. Talking about them will make you human, not just a sales person pushing a service or a widget.

The direct result of focusing so intently on generosity, or even of a single email ping to renew a relationship, is to advance the relationship. But think of it as good sales karma for which you may be rewarded.

Recently, I gave small talk on relationship-building missions beginning with a generous remembrance on email. The results were telling. Your mileage may vary, but in this case:

• One CIO called back immediately, and a week later initiated a dialog about the consulting firm’s services.
• A senior VP of a food manufacturer returned the personal message and followed within a week with a request for proposal on Value Chain Transformation.
• Another partner was rewarded by being invited to keynote at a conference for a major retailer’s top executives.
• One managing partner credited the outreach with producing a 750k deal.

Imagine the power of offering packets of generosity.

Be prepared with " packets of generosity" for each meeting. He defines each packet of generosity as a means to “make the person you’re meeting successful," but not just in the business sense. When you’re doing your homework for your meeting, you are looking for personal reasons to care about your client. You want to be seen as a human, after all, not a cyborg or just a sales guy.

So I challenge all of you to prepare your generosity before each meeting. Ask yourself the following questions: 

• What I offer my clients that I value the relationship and that I want their business to thrive just as much as they do? 
• Have I been “truly generous to this individual, and earned enough trust that they’re ready to listen” to my advice?
• Do I know the things my clients care most about (both professionally and personally)?

Believe me, these acts won’t go unnoticed.

 Mind you, they’re not all personal. At least one should be purely professional, even if not related in any way to what you’re trying to sell. For example, find out what the analysts say the company’s goals or “big bets” are and what they have to achieve, and find a way to help the individual serve that cause.

The bottom line is that you have to believe in “the ask.” It will be difficult to feel good if you’re selling snake oil. But if you believe the ask is generous, with low barrier to entry but huge opportunities for return, the ask becomes just another piece of generosity.

And Yet, the Path from Relationship to Transaction Can Be Hard.

After so much authentic concern for the success of your customer, sales people can hesitate, reluctant to appear to be capitalizing on the relationship and somehow tarnish it. But if you have truly built a great relationship, you can be exploratory about it. During a lull in the conversation, just ask:

“You know what I do. How can I be of service to you?” The open endedness of that question will let you see if the ripeness is there for the transaction. If they reply “Tell me a little bit more,” they’ve opened up the whole dialog about your products.

Leaving it open ended gives the client the opportunity to shape the discussion so that they’ll never feel pushed. And your relationship earns you the time to go deep, which can be required to differentiate today’s complex solutions.

Moving from relationship building to selling boils down to asking two questions:

1. Have I been truly generous to this individual, and earned enough trust that they’re ready to listen to my “ask”?

2. Do I 100% believe in the value of the solution I’m offering? If the answer to those two questions is yes, you’ll often find a transaction further deepens your relationship with your customer.

Your thoughts …………………?

The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice .All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensue discussion or debate.

Thank you … Beyond understanding and interacting conversationally, a dialogue has specific natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to understand the context of a conversation. It can also identify the intent of a question–what is being sought– to provide an accurate first response, and also propose options to confirm or clarify intent. 

Dialogue can infer customer personality traits and understand sentiment and tone during an interaction to deliver a personalized experience, or escalate to a live-agent when necessary in building relationships with customers.