Do your most significant prospects decide with their emotions?

If you want to make minor improvements, work on systems.  But if you want to make leaps, work on paradigms. Sales methodologies constantly change because markets evolve, and new inefficiencies are created. What does not change are principles. Program on Persuasion’s corporate sales training shows how to identify and then utilize these principles.

Psychological Advances

New technology like PET scans and MRIs allow us to see which parts of the brain are responsible for emotion-based decisions.

The old brain, the part of the brain that is responsible for “fight or flight” reactions and for controlling emotions also serves as the gatekeeper for the reasoning part of the brain. That means that according to medical science, emotions actually trigger decision-making.

From this information, Program on Persuasion’s corporate sales training bases the idea that decisions are first made with emotions, and then people justify them with logic.

In other words, for sellers to be persuasive in the business relationship, we must shift our paradigm about how persuasion actually works. Top sellers have always known what neuroscience just recently confirmed: emotion is what triggers influence.

Emotional Decision-Making

Neuroscience has discovered 6 principles that elicit compliance. In direct response, Program on Persuasion’s corporate sales training coaches that six main emotions move buyers—even your most valuable buyers—to take action.

Top-tier sales reps constantly outperform the average rep because these sellers trigger the compliance principles more frequently. The trouble is that those top-tier reps don’t usually realize that’s what they are doing.

When we see anomalies, reps that only trip into top tier performance once in a while, it’s because they trigger the principles, but they can’t reproduce the success because they don’t understand how they did it.

All this boils down to the fact that selling is all about moving people’s emotions. Buyers make 100% of their decisions on emotion and then justify them with logic.  Until we get this shift in paradigm we will be forever pursuing the wrong target.

Paradigm Shift

Once upon a time, a sales rep defended himself in the middle of a performance evaluation saying, “Boss, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

The manager said, “Your job is not to make them drink. You job is to make them thirsty!”

So, how do you make them thirsty? How do you influence people?

What we’re talking about is a paradigm shift: author John Gardner once said, “Most ailing organizations have developed a functional blindness to their own defects. They are not suffering because they cannot resolve their own problems, but because they cannot SEE their problems.”

In other words, the organizations need an expert who can see their defects and show the leaders that they exist.

For instance, remember how the vast differences in medicine before versus after germ theory was discovered. After years of trial and error, we had explanations as to why patients became weaker after blood loss, why midwives were more successful delivering babies than doctors, and why injured soldiers were more likely to die in germ-infested hospitals—of infection—than they were in battle. The science of healthcare was focused on the wrong problem: they needed a paradigm shift.

Program on Persuasion’s corporate sales training provides that paradigm shift in two ways. Not only do we illustrate that all decisions are triggered by emotions, but we also show what those six emotions are, and then we teach your sales force how to utilize them.


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