Getting Emotional

June 5, 2008 – 10:00 pm
by Kenrick Cleveland

Here’s a bold statement, but one I’m willing to stand behind: forget about appealing to your prospect or client logically. In sales, appealing to logic comes a (way) distant second to appealing to their emotions. To illustrate this, I’m going to tell you a story about some college kids who learned this and put it to the test.

The students in this class got together and decided that if the professor moved to the right of the classroom, to the student’s right, the students would sit up and pay extremely close attention. They would be very quiet, smile, and nod approvingly at the professor. But if the professor moved to the left of the classroom, the students would cut up, act out, throw things, ignore and look away from the professor and act disinterested.

Class began. They followed through with their plan and it didn’t take but about a half an hour and the professor was pegged into the right side of the room, standing there for the entire rest of the class with the students absolutely gobbling up everything he said, excitedly listening, nodding, smiling and showing their approval of all that he was doing.

The next day, they decided that they would do the exact same thing but just reverse it. So class began and what they did is as the professor would move to the right, which he started right off towards the right of the room, they immediately would cut up and act up and act disinterested and as the professor would go to the left of the room, they would act interested and they would do what they should. It took not too long and the professor was pegged over into the left of the room.

The professor was totally in the dark throughout the experiment. And he was massively affected by what they did.

How did this shake out? We are very approval oriented. We love to be smiled at and encouraged and loved. We really like knowing that we are having a good impact on people. We like it when people are interested in what we’re saying. These are all emotional responses.

How would you like to be able to affect people in that same way and get them doing things and responding to you in ways that up to now has been happenstance?

Something very important to remember when you’re selling is that people are led to make decisions based on their emotions. These emotions bring people to their decisions and logic cements or breaks that decision. Logic is a very minor part. Each person is slightly different, but generally, decision making is based 80-85 percent on emotion and 15-20 percent on logic.

A person who makes their living persuading but can’t use emotions well will most likely never make much money, at least the cards are stacked strongly against them. And similarly, a person who can make strong logical arguments but is not adept at utilizing emotion also has the cards strongly stacked against them.

So how do we do this? Well, stay tuned for an upcoming article for more information about getting to your prospect’s and client’s emotions.

About the Author:
Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques to earn the business of wealthy prospects using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion techniques.

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