Sales success is all about connecting with your prospects on an emotional level.
We all know that feeling of excitement when we’re about to make a purchase or an investment, or the fear when we’re not sure if we’re making the right choice. Your prospects are no different and understanding their emotions will give you an edge when it comes to sales messaging.
To talk about emotions in selling, we sat down with Belal Batrawy to understand how buying and selling processes employ the different parts of our brain and how we can optimize for those experiences.
Deconstructing the Sales Brain: The Blueprint to Enhanced Sales Messaging
Let’s start with three parts of the brain that are involved in selling: the neocortex, the limbic brain, and the reptilian brain.
The neocortex is where we process conscious thought, the limbic brain is responsible for emotional responses, and the reptilian brain ensures our survival by triggering fight-or-flight responses. All three parts of the brain need to be targeted if you want to be successful in sales.
Strategy Time: Prospects vs. Buyer and How to Differentiate Them
The first step is to differentiate your buyer from the rest of your prospects. To qualify a prospect as a buyer, you need to make sure they have three criteria: a problem they need to address, an understanding of the impact if they don’t solve it, and a willingness to make a change. If they don’t have all three, they’re not a buyer.
The Universal Buyer’s Journey
Most outbounds are in the unaware stage of the buyer’s journey, so they haven’t even acknowledged their problem yet. That’s why it’s important to assess each prospect according to these three criteria before you move forward with any sales messaging.
When it comes to messaging, most reps use ROI, USPs, and customer evidence to try to convince prospects. However, these are neocortex triggers and do very little to evoke emotions in the buyer’s brain. That’s why you see low email response rates and conversation-to-meeting ratios.
How to Engage Emotions When Selling
That’s why, as a sales rep, you need to engage with prospects on an emotional level. You need to provoke an emotion in them — any emotion — because selling is about them, not you. Think about successful brands and the content they produce. They are successful because they are able to evoke the right emotions in their audiences.
Rationality will not get you anywhere with prospects in the unaware and aware stages. You need to engage with them on an emotional level to get them to listen. That’s why it’s important to focus on engaging your prospect’s emotions when crafting your sales messaging.
As a sales rep, you need to be a leader who understands their prospects on a deeper level. You need to understand their emotions and use them to your advantage. That’s the key to success when it comes to sales messaging.
If you found Belal’s session informative, we urge you to check out the full version of this episode where we bring back 3 of our favorite panelists from the year gone by. It’s packed with tons of actionable sales insights and experiential tales from some of sales’ biggest names, so you don’t want to miss it!
