In today’s video I’m going to share why buyers can seem utterly irrational and don’t close the sale, even though it makes complete logical sense for them to do so.
Then I’ll tell you how you can overcome this emotional mess that buyers find themselves in so you can win more business and crush your sales target.
Have you ever been in a sales meeting where everything is going perfectly. The potential partner needs your product desperately, they have the budget, all the decision makers are in the room, yet the deal falls through?
This is because the potential partner is thinking emotionally rather than logically. In this video you’re going to learn why this is and how you can switch on the logical side of the potential partners brain so they close the deal and you get paid.
It’s not just potential partners who get emotional when they should be thinking logically. All of us do it. It comes down to how the human brain is physically wired.
You see, making decisions on emotion factors is actually the default, go to way of making decisions. This is because the limbic or emotional part of the brain comes before the frontal lobe or the logical part of the brain in it’s wiring.
Emotional decision making
Lets take a look at this image which shows this visually –
Here is how it works – everything you see, smell, hear, taste and touch is picked up by our sensory organs and converted into electrical signals. These signals are then fired towards our brain, passing from cell to cell through our spinal-cord.
Eventually these signals travel to your frontal lobe, which lives in your forehead, which is where rational thinking takes place. The issue is that before it reaches the rational part of your brain it passes through your limbic system and this is where instant, instinctual, emotional responses are produced.
This physical journey of firing neurons ensures that you experience things emotionally before you can reason with the emotion and think logically about the situation. There is constant communication between the rational and emotional parts of the brain but the emotional side of things gets information first, which always skews the output towards emotion.
Rewire their brains
So what we need to do is rewire the decision making system of our potential partners to do this –
We’ve added an extra step of THINKING about the initial emotional response the potential partner wants to throw at us and then getting them to consciously choose their next action rather than acting instantly.
You can’t stop them thinking emotionally or even illogically but you can nudge them into consciously adding a second layer of logic to these thoughts after they occur.
To do this you’re going to mirror their emotional state and slowly drag it towards logic.
Now lets think of the sales process from the potential partners side. It looks a little something like this –
They’re going about their day, everything is looking pretty logical. Then they find an issue, their collegues see there’s a problem too. The stress starts rising. Things get worse and so this problem becomes a priotiy for them to solve. The stress piles on.
Eventually the pressure is so unbarable that they reach out to a sales person or you call upon them at exactly the right time and they don’t ignore you.
Andddd…. All they want to do is dump all of this emotion, stress and pressure on you. They want you to come in and solve their now very emotional problem but what do most sales reps do?
They meet the potential partners emotion with… logic. They ask stupid logical qualification questions, they pitch logical features and benefits, they start talking about money and how much it’s costing the company to not solve the issue…
It looks like this with the seller and potential partner on completely opposite sides of the track right across the sales process.
Opposite side of the tracks
Even to the point that is somehow the potential partner manages to reduce their level of emotion themselves and progress towards the sale, the seller then starts getting emotional and moving away from logic as they get nervous about “the close”.
What you need to do, to pull a potential partner from emotion to logic quicker, is to meet them with emotion at the start of the sales process and then guide them through their turmoil like this –
To do this we need to work through the following four steps –
1) Use discovery questions to uncover the real emotional needs of the potential partner.
Understand that they don’t need a spade, they don’t need a hole, they have an emotional need or stress that there’s a body in their back bedroom that they need to bury. So forget features and benefits, focus on their real emotional needs and desires.
2) Share industry knowledge and insights.
At this point the potential partner has poured their emotional needs all over you. It’s time to mop it up with some industry knowledge. They’re begging you, even if they don’t directly say it, to guide them through solving the issue but you need to show that you’re the person who can take them to the other side of it first.
3) Transition into building buying consensus.
At this point the potential partner understands that you can help them. They know that you can heal their emotional wound and so they can put their emotions to one side and start adding a layer of conscious logical thinking on top of it.
Here you’re also moving into a more logical state and this is where the traditional sales process starts to happen.
4) Close the deal with the Closing 3.0 method.
We go deep into the Closing 3.0 m ethology in the Salesman.org training workshops but basically you’re wrapping up the sale with a logical question of “Does it make sense to buy?”.
The beauty of this question is that there is zero chance of rejection. They either say yes and the deal is done, or they say no and you ask “how come it doesn’t make sense to move forward?” There’s no weirdness, you close the sale with a simple logical question.
Summary
So there we have it. It’s a simple 4 step process to pull any highly emotional potential partner who won’t close the deal even though it makes logical sense for them to do so.
Just remember that all humans are wired to be emotional first because of the physical cabling from sensory input to the different parts of the brain –
## SWIPE ##
Understand that at the beginning of the sales process the potential partner is the most emotional –
Now we can build deep rapport with them whilst guiding them towards a logical closing process by following the four steps –
Unfortunately most sales people start the process in a logical state and so they never get to see the eventual logical side of the potential partner as the deal has fallen apart way before then.
Therefore we need to mirror the potential partners emotion like this –
- 1) Use discovery questions to uncover the real emotional needs of the potential partner.
- 2) Share industry knowledge and insights.
- 3) Transition into building buying consensus.
- 4) Close the deal with the Closing 3.0 method by asking “does it make sense to…”.
Now you know exactly what to do when a potential partner is acting emotionally during the sales process.
