6 Emotional Selling Techniques to Drive Buying Decisions
Jess served on the founding team of a successful B2B startup and has used a wide range of sales and marketing tools over the course of her 15-year career. She uses her industry knowledge to deliver the best answers to your questions about sales tools and sales management.
Jill is a writer at Fit Small Business specializing on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
This article is part of a larger series on Sales Management.
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, how effective the technique is, and how to integrate emotional selling tactics into your sales strategy.
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.
Insurance is a responsive, financial risk-management tool, so it’s an excellent example of a product where you can leverage fear-based selling. You can convince someone to purchase a line of coverage by explaining the worst-case scenarios of not having insurance. Situations can be explained where a business was sued due to an uncontrollable injury on its premises in which the financial costs of not having insurance can put them under.
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 selling. 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. This emotion motivates prospects to make a purchase by pointing out the personal value they can attain by taking advantage of your offer.
One way greed can be leveraged is by pointing out 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 need to highlight how it can give that person a competitive advantage over another person or business, or help them achieve or obtain what another person or business has.
For instance, if you are selling a business phone system with power dialing features, point out that the power dialing feature would allow your business to outperform competitors in cold calling. Rather than just focusing on what the product does, appeal to jealousy or competitiveness to show how they can meet or exceed what another has done.
4. Explain How Their Decision Can Help Others (Altruism)
Making a customer feel like they are doing something for the greater good by purchasing your product or service is another way to encourage emotional purchase. 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.
One of the ways you’ve probably seen altruism in emotional selling 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 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.
An excellent example of this emotional selling 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 making a purchase, so emphasizing that the lead can receive special recognition for their decision is one way to accelerate a purchase decision.
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 & What Are Its Benefits?
Emotional selling is very effective in terms of revenue generation. Therefore, as part of your sales management process, you must train new sales reps on the emotion-based sales tactics most effective and appropriate for your products or services.
Some 70% of customers are likely to buy a product when an advertisement appeals to their emotions. They are also more likely to recommend brands they feel connected to, with 71% of customers recommending a brand based on emotional connection. Furthermore, brand loyalty also increases as 81% of emotionally engaged consumers say they enjoy giving back to a brand they are loyal to.
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 Sales 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 selling depends on your business’ ability to target the key emotions of your customers.
Weave tactics for emotional selling strategically throughout your sales plan. Find ways to incorporate emotional selling 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.
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💡 Quick Tip:
Once you’ve created a sales plan, give your sales team the tools to execute it effectively with robust customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Use a CRM like Pipedrive to help your sales team collaborate on deals, develop sales reports, track deals, and create custom sales dashboards
To encourage emotional buying from your customers, focus on the feelings experienced when someone purchases (or fails to purchase) your product or service. This means that instead of 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.
For instance, when selling insurance products, you’re actually selling the feelings of security, safety, and protection. A restaurant doesn’t sell food—it sells a fun experience with friends or an intimate, romantic setting with someone special. Marketing agencies aren’t selling marketing services—they are selling the pride a business owner feels because they grew their business or the envy they feel for outpacing a competitor.
When done correctly, emotional selling 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 focused strategy can be used during many different types of activities, from sales conversations to advertisements or marketing collateral.
Plus, emotional selling relates directly to your customer personas, each of which is a representation of one of your ideal buyer types. Each buyer type will have different feelings to which you can appeal. For example, if your ideal customer persona is a parent, feelings of fear, shame, and altruism can all lead to purchases that involve protecting or doing what’s best for their children. This can include buying health insurance or setting up a college savings account.
If you look at the customer persona above, knowing various aspects of your ideal customer persona will help you create your sales strategy and marketing messages effectively. Knowing their pain points will help you leverage the emotions of fear or shame, while knowing their behavior can help you leverage the feelings of jealousy or greed.
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.
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. 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.
For example, if they tell 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 easily schedule and conduct video meetings.
Zoom provides an interactive platform to sell more effectively and better appeal to your customers’ emotions. (Source: Zoom)
Customer relationship management software (CRM) can be used to organize your contacts and improve your interactions with them. One way this can be done is through the note-taking features most CRMs offer, where you can document potential emotions to leverage while conversing with leads.
For example, during conversations, you can document that “prospect is looking to get a promotion in their department” or “prospect is prioritizing helping out their employees.” Pipedrive is a CRM product that 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)
Similar documentation of emotions to sell a lead can be done with CRM tagging features. Tags can help you improve sales rep conversations, provide more appropriate solutions, or send prospects specific materials.
Tagging is the action of placing unique identifiers, or “tags,” on a lead’s record. For instance, you could divide your leads into emotional groups by adding a tag to prospect records indicating which emotions are most likely to foster buying motivations. You can then send different emotional selling email marketing campaigns to each group.
Zoho CRM allows you to “tag” contacts on their profile and view all contacts in a list-style view where tags are shown. You can also 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.
Email marketing tools provide a great platform to highlight copies and headlines that will appeal to customers’ emotions. (Source: HubSpot)
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 selling in your overall business strategy, during sales conversations, and while constructing marketing materials in order to reap the benefits of an engaged customer base.
