Emotional selling is a strategy that leverages customers’ feelings—rather than logic or the features of what’s being sold—to influence a purchasing decision. It’s used both in sales interactions and marketing materials to appeal to prospects and customers. This article explores six key emotions salespeople can trigger to entice customers to buy products and services. We also explain how effective the technique is and how to integrate emotional branding tactics into your sales strategy.
What Is Emotional Selling?
Emotional selling is a sales management strategy that motivates customers to purchase a product or service based on how that product or service makes them feel. This requires the seller to make a genuine connection with the customer in order to uncover their feelings, needs, and wants.
1. Explain the Risk of Not Buying (Fear)
“Fear” can have a negative connotation when it pertains to danger, but when used in selling, it’s a powerful motivator that has real emotional value. Fear often indicates what may or may not happen (the negative ramifications) if someone does not purchase a product or service. There’s also fear of missing out, aka “FOMO,” that customers feel if they don’t make a purchase decision and miss out on a limited-time offer (LTO) or fail to purchase before a price increase.
2. Describe What They Will Get (Greed)
Although the word “greed” is often perceived negatively, it’s important to understand it in the context of emotional buying. To some extent, nearly everyone desires to gain more than they already have, whether it be wealth, praise, or success. This is what is meant by greed here. This emotion motivates prospects to make a purchase by pointing out the personal value they can attain by taking advantage of your offer.
Example: One way to leverage greed is to highlight the praise a decision-maker would receive. An example is: “Think about the gratitude your CEO will show you if you invest in our marketing automation tools and can generate 40% more leads. This puts you in a position to get that big promotion when you explain that it was you who revolutionized the firm’s lead generation process.”
3. Point Out How You Make Them Better (Jealousy)
Jealousy, which can also be thought of as envy or competitiveness, can motivate the decision-making process. To appeal to customers’ jealousy, it’s essential to not just focus on how your product or service can help that person. You also need to highlight how it can give that person a competitive advantage over another person or business, or support them in achieving or obtaining what another person or business has.
4. Explain How Their Decision Can Help Others (Altruism)
Altruism can refer to the general feeling of helping those in need but may also speak to how the purchase benefits the decision-maker’s colleagues, employees, friends, or loved ones. Making customers feel like they are doing something for the greater good by purchasing your product or service is another way to encourage an emotional purchase.
Example: One of the ways you’ve probably seen altruism in emotional branding is a retail company promising a donation for every item a customer purchases. This is effective in making the customer feel that others are benefiting from their purchase. Another example is if a salesperson points out the benefit of the increased productivity employees will gain if a company purchases automation software.
5. Highlight the Consequence of Missing Out (Shame)
Shame is an emotion that can be used in sales to reference a past mistake a prospect may have made by not purchasing your products or services. There’s also the ability to present an outcome where the prospect can be blamed and then potentially shamed for not fixing an issue.
Example: An excellent example of this emotional branding technique is a business selling cybersecurity training services to another business. The salesperson can talk about how bad (the “shame”) the decision-maker would feel if they didn’t provide employees with the proper knowledge to protect themselves from cyberthreats.
Multiple customer emotions may be leveraged at the same time. In the scenario above, the rep could also evoke envy by pointing out that competitors have taken advantage of the offer. They could speak to altruism by highlighting the benefits employees gain from being protected or fear by mentioning the negative consequences a company could experience if data was breached.
6. Emphasize Ways You Help Reach Goals (Pride)
Pride refers to the gratification one receives by doing something, or in this case, purchasing a product or service. Pride can be a powerful motivator to make a purchase, so emphasizing that the lead can receive special recognition for their decision is one way to accelerate a purchase decision.
Example: An emotional selling example using the feeling of pride can be illustrated by a company selling employee benefits—health insurance, retirement plans, life insurance, or supplemental benefits like tuition reimbursement, legal services, and gym memberships. The sales rep could point out the positive reputation the business will achieve by giving employees a wide range of benefits. They could also highlight how it puts the customer in a better position to attract talent or win a “best places to work at” award.
How Effective Is Emotional Selling?
Emotional branding is highly effective in terms of revenue generation because it helps customers remember your product or service and become more loyal to your brand. Therefore, as part of the key aspects of sales management, you must train new sales reps on the emotion-based sales tactics most effective and appropriate for your products or services. Below are a few statistics that support the effectiveness of these tactics.
- Half of consumers who have developed positive sentiments for a product make repeat purchases and recommend it to their family and friends.
- 48% of consumers join loyalty programs as a way to express their loyalty to that brand.
- 55% of customers say they feel emotionally connected to a business that is based in their local area
- 70% of shoppers say loyalty programs are an important factor in keeping them connected to a business.
Did you know?
Apart from selling, emotions can also impact your internal sales team. This is especially true if your team is working in a negative work environment. To ensure your sales department is put in the best position to succeed, check out our guide on how to build a positive sales culture for insights on increasing job satisfaction, improving performance, and celebrating wins.
Additional Strategies to Leverage Customer Emotions
Emotions are often a greater driving force when building genuine customer connections and influencing purchasing decisions than the actual features or functionality of a product or service. Success with emotional branding depends on your business’ ability to target the key emotions of your customers.
When creating a sales plan, weave tactics for emotional buying strategically throughout it. Find ways to incorporate emotional branding when formulating your sales strategy and developing customer personas. This will allow you to trigger the right emotions while having sales conversations with your prospects. You’ll also be able to use those strategies to construct an emotional appeal within your marketing materials and other content.
Pro tip: Download and customize our free sales plan template and follow our step-by-step guide on creating a sales plan to help you hit your target revenue. Then, assign roles and responsibilities to your team members accordingly and use metrics to measure results.
When done correctly, emotional buying is all about the feelings generated while using a product or service, as well as the feelings created by not purchasing the product or service. This underlying, emotionally motivated strategy can be used during many different types of activities, from sales conversations to advertisements or marketing collateral.
Here are some things to remember when implementing an emotionally motivated strategy in different types of activities, from sales conversations to advertisements or marketing collateral:
- Feelings: Focus on how someone feels when they purchase (or fail to purchase) your product or service instead of just communicating logical reasons to buy.
- Impact: Instead of merely communicating logical reasons to buy or the functional benefits of the products, talk about how it will make your customer feel—and how it will impact their lives.
- Customer persona: Emotional branding relates directly to your customer personas, each representing one of your ideal buyer types, which in turn will have different feelings to which you can appeal.
Pro tip: Download and customize our free customer persona template to get started defining your ideal customers and follow our step-by-step guide on how to do this. Knowing various aspects of your ideal customer persona, their pain points, and their behavior can help you leverage emotions like fear or jealousy to make your sales strategy more effective.
Emotional selling while engaging with a prospect either over the phone, in person, over video conferencing, or even via email involves first attempting to discover its potential. Discovery can easily be done by asking questions about their current situation, professional or personal, in which your product or service can make an impact.
Here are some important things to remember during sales interactions with prospects:
- Pain points: Ask prospects about the pain points they want to solve, who their current competitors are, if they have bosses they want to impress, if they have employees they want to help, and so on.
Example: If a customer tells you they want to do something good to help their employees, altruism would be the emotion to focus on. You can dive into details on how your product or service offers tremendous benefits to their employees. Just as if they were to say that they report to a boss and want to make a huge impact, pride would be your target emotion. You’d then want to focus on the respect they’d receive from their boss due to the impact of your product.
Pro tip: Video conferencing software is a safe and efficient way to communicate with leads and customers in a face-to-face setting. Face-to-face conversations simplify the process of emotionally connecting with another person. Platforms like Zoom offer a cost-effective solution your business can take advantage of to schedule and conduct video meetings easily.
Zoom provides an interactive platform to sell more effectively and better appeal to your customers’ emotions. (Source: Zoom)
- Potential emotions: Once you start getting answers, you begin to see which emotions are most likely to motivate them and gear your sales approach and lead nurturing strategy accordingly. Document potential emotions to leverage while conversing with leads.
Pro tip: Use customer relationship management (CRM) software like Pipedrive to organize your contacts and improve your interactions with them. This platform allows you to take notes while on the contact record page so all users can view what you gathered.
Pipedrive allows users to add notes in contacts’ records, so agents can take note of what kind of emotional selling they can leverage on them. (Source: Pipedrive)
- Personalized solutions: Label your leads according to the emotions that are most likely to foster buying motivations. You could divide them into emotional groups and send prospect-specific solutions or materials based on their labels.
Example: During conversations, you identified the leads who want to help their colleagues and grouped them together under “altruism.” You then send them materials that highlight the benefits that their employees could receive if they purchase your product.
Pro tip: Use a CRM system’s tagging features to label emotional groups and send different emotional selling marketing campaigns to leads under each group. Zoho CRM allows you to “tag” contacts on their profile, view all contacts in a list-style view where tags are shown, and filter these lists to only show the contacts based on specific tags.
Zoho CRM lets you add tags to customer details, so agents will know what product offers will appeal most to them based on their emotions. (Source: Zoho CRM)
You can leverage emotional selling tactics in all types of marketing materials, including advertising, website content, social media, and email marketing. Whether used in sales interactions or marketing collateral, each of the six key buying emotions can be triggered by specific words and messaging.
Here are some keyword examples you can use to encourage emotional buying from your customers:
- Fear: Words like “cost,” “limited time,” “missing out,” and “consequences” are fear-triggering words.
- Greed: “Exclusive,” “reward,” “earn,” “free,” and “valuable” are words that speak to greed.
- Jealousy: Using “competition,” “leader,” “premium,” or “leading solution” evokes the feeling that the purchaser can be better than their peers or other businesses in their space.
- Altruism: “Benefits,” “give,” “contribute,” and “help” show the value another group receives if the buyer purchases your products or services.
- Shame: Words like “mistake,” “fail,” and “avoid” hold strong associations with feelings of shame.
- Pride: The words “best,” “image,” and “reputation” can trigger an emotion of pride.
HubSpot CRM provides an array of tools your business can use for emotional marketing. It has extensive email marketing features that will allow you to be creative with your text copy to effectively appeal to your customers’ emotions. Plus, you can use HubSpot CRM’s content monitoring and managing features to gauge the effectiveness of using emotional keywords in your content.
HubSpot CRM email marketing tools provide a great platform to highlight copies and headlines that will appeal to customers’ emotions. (Source: HubSpot)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
An emotional selling point (ESP) is an idea that encompasses all the emotional drivers and triggers that prompt an individual to make a purchase. Through a process called emotional tagging, the brain stores memories associated with an event. ESP sparks emotions in customers and appeals to their desires, leading them to believe that they need your product or service to improve their lives. For example, a digital camera company appeals to its customer base by advertising the product’s importance in capturing their family’s important moments.
One of the most notable emotional selling examples is Cadbury’s virtual egg hunt, which aimed to help people connect with their loved ones during the pandemic. Another is Coca-Cola’s limited edition packs, which replaced its logo with encouraging quotes. Here, both businesses capitalized on how their product or service makes their customers feel. An emotional purchase means a person pays for a product or a service that they don’t actually need or want but satisfies their emotional need.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) matters in sales in a number of ways. Empathy can help you overcome objections and see pain points as opportunities to provide a solution. Persistence and objectivity can help you handle rejection without taking it personally. A salesperson with a high EQ is also able to remain calm and confident when dealing with irate customers.
Bottom Line
Emotional selling can result in new business, higher customer loyalty, lifetime value, and more referrals generated from your emotionally connected customers. Leverage emotional branding in your overall business strategy, during sales conversations, and while constructing marketing materials in order to reap the benefits of an engaged customer base.
