How to Persuade Prospects into Emotional Decisions
Author John Gardner once said, “Most ailing organizations have developed a functional blindness to their own defects.” The reason these organizations are suffering is not because they can’t resolve their own problems, but because they can’t see their problems.
What organizations need is an expert who can see their defects and show the company’s leaders that they exist. Program on Persuasion’s corporate sales training shows how to find a company’s defects while building the business relationship.
The Lay of the Land: Psychological Advances
Recently, the psychology of decision-making has made many advances. With the introduction of technology such as PET scans and MRIs, we can see the “old” brain trigger immediate, emotion-based decisions.
The “old” brain, the part responsible for “flight or fight” responses and for controlling emotions (amygdala) serves as the gatekeeper for the reasoning part of the brain (cerebral cortex).
According to medical science, emotions trigger decision making. Here lies the foundational principle that decisions are made on emotion and justified with logic.
Our corporate sales training emphasizes that order for us to be persuasive, we must encounter a shift in paradigm about how persuasion actually works. Neuroscience has recently confirmed that which top sellers have always known: only emotion triggers influence.
Emotional Decision-Making
Sales Methodologies constantly change because markets evolve, and new inefficiencies are created. What does not change are principles. Neuroscience has discovered 6 principles that elicit compliance.
Program on Persuasion’s corporate sales training teaches the 6 Principles of Emotion™. These are the emotions that we can utilize in the business relationship in order to move buyers to take action. Our corporate sales training insists that if you want to make minor improvements, work on systems. But if you want to make leaps, work on paradigms.
These principles are also known as emotions because we feel them rather than reason them. As Dr. Richard Restak, neuropsychologist and author of The Secret Life of the Brain says, “We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.”
In Action
Top-tier sales reps constantly outperform the average rep because they are triggering the compliance principles more frequently in the business relationship—even if they don’t 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 in every business relationship because they don’t understand how they did it.
Conclusion
All this boils down to the fact that selling is about moving people’s emotions. Buyers make 100% of their decisions on emotion and then justify them with logic. Until sellers can utilize this shift in paradigm we will be forever pursuing the wrong target. Program on Persuasion’s corporate sales training teaches exactly how to utilize emotions to persuade in the business relationship.
As Daniel Goleman writes in Primal Leadership, “Although our business culture places great value in an intellect devoid of emotion, our emotions are more powerful than our intellect.”
Photo by Jesse Orrico.