One of the biggest challenges I face when I’m training sales professionals is getting them to understand how important and how much effort it takes to build a long-term emotional relationship with other people.
In sales, it has been proven for many years that building an emotional relationship with a prospect is the most crucial element in winning long-term orders from that person or company. Most sales coaches and professional psychologists often comment that all purchases are made with: 80% Emotion and alone 20% in logic or facts That Deal Many of us know this all too well, but how many of us find ourselves talking about features and benefits and not the challenge our customers have that we can solve?
One of the key factors that drive most salespeople is the desire for near-instant results; they want to contact the prospect and walk away with the order in hand. They are often under pressure from their managers or sales directors to get very fast results, which makes them focus more and more on the logical aspect of any deal, the part that represents only 20% of the decision-making process.
What prevents people from doing what they have been taught to do is both the pressure from management for instant results and the person’s inability to recognize the full impact that emotions will have on their behavior and the ability to determine how change these behaviors. This becomes even more true when the work situation becomes more stressful than normal, as in these cases the salesperson will often go back to bending over backwards to get results, forgetting to build relationships and finding their conversion rate dips.
As markets have become more competitive and customer requirements have become more complex, sales professionals have become aware of the increasing number of decision makers within a business and the need to gain “buy-in” from them. everyone involved in signing that check.
This increased complexity of the sales process has caused the emotional aspects to expand at an ever-increasing rate, often resulting in longer lead times. What can make fast-paced sales professionals feel frustrated, lost, and out of control?
Learning how to build an effective emotional strategy to apply to a sales process will take time, patience and perseverance, none of this will happen overnight or without a great deal of understanding and application.
To build long-term emotional relationships with the kind of customers you love to work with, the sales professional must look at the bigger picture than they currently see when negotiating a deal. They must pick up the cues in the conversation about the customer’s pain points and make sure he has the cure they can’t refuse.
Many of the areas that fall under emotional decision making often do not appear to be directly related to the decision making process.
Some of the key areas to think about when considering larger decisions are as follows;
1. Past customer experience in this area. Past experiences can seriously affect the mindset, beliefs and fears a customer may have towards a product or service and it is vital that a sales professional asks about these in order to address any associated issues that may arise. Discovering these experiences is often not very easy and may require several different questioning techniques and time to truly find out.
2. what have you heard? Often the feedback they’ve heard from a trusted friend can have a big influence on how they approach the buying decision. Again, not an obvious line of questioning, but one that will need investigation.
3. Main concerns or fears within the decision-making process. Another area that can have a serious impact on the mindset of decision makers, but again a difficult area to uncover the facts.
4. What will this decision solve for the client? Often the decision to buy something could be to solve a problem in another area of the business. The way the product or service is delivered could be more crucial than the product or service itself, so you need to find out.
As you will see, many of the points above will require a high level of questioning techniques, time, patience, and most of all, great listening skills.
If you are a sales professional looking only for very quick results, building strong emotional relationships will take time and effort.