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Author: David Yule
Excerpt from the book “Emotional Selling – Using Emotional Intelligence to Get Sales”

As Human Beings we have certain Psychological Needs and these needs must be respected when selling to someone. If you violate these needs then you will not sell. Even when you have the most logical product, the best price, the fastest delivery, etc. Imagine you had the best product and the best price in your favour but the existing supplier is the customer’s brother-in-law, would you still expect to sell? What is it that causes people not to buy the best product?

The three major buying motivators, in fact, are:

1. Habit – the biggest motivator of all!
2. The second biggest is Emotion — and the biggest emotional motivators are:
   • Fear then
   • Greed
3. The lowest-rated buying motivator, however, is Logic…

Habit

People buy from the same place time after time simply because they are in the habit of buying from that place. They are probably so relieved, the first time they find what they are looking for and not a lot of pathetic excuses! After that first successful purchase, they will put up with anything. When a buying pattern has been established people rarely alter and so repeat customers usually get the worst `deal’. This is evidenced in many industries where we reward the behaviour we don’t want. For example, think of the offers made to you if you change your mortgage to another building society. What offers are made for you to stay loyal? None. Instead, they cane you with early redemption penalties… Cancel your TV rental, do they offer you a replacement deal, maybe a reduced rate in recognition of the fact that you have paid for the set three times over already? No, a highly-trained engineer arrives in person to take back the set without a murmur! What about taking a new catalogue? You are offered £15 off your first order… nothing off the next ten! How about booking a holidays at the last minute? You get some great bargains, but it is noticeable how few offers there are for booking early, or booking ahead for next year, or bringing all your friends… And when did the maitre d’ at Burger Star show you to the best seat in the house?

In some industries, the buyer’s habit is to shop around for the best deal. This usually happens when people don’t buy frequently enough in one place to get addicted, or when they can’t perceive any great differences — or when your store happens to be nearer. These industries are totally geared up to the prospect of losing and replacing customers. For example, a supermarket will rely heavily on your repeat buying habits. When buying a new kitchen the habit would be to shop around since we don’t buy kitchens very frequently. But we all visit supermarkets at least once a week.

The supermarket companies have researched consumer behaviour. They have found that in order to change your supermarket shopping habits you only need to make 4 consecutive visits to an alternative supermarket. In order to combat this they developed a loyalty card that would record your purchases (each individual product). They can use this to identify your buying habits. A computer can be programmed to flag up when it is likely that you have paid three visits to an alternative supermarket. They could then mail you special offer coupons for products they know you buy to avoid you developing another buying habit. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Imperial Tobacco calculated that it took 7 weeks to change a person’s cigarette brand for life. Following trial promotions in 1989 where smokers in supermarkets were handed free packs of cigarettes, a mailing campaign was instituted to follow up a test `cell’ of triallers with free product vouchers for six more weeks. The campaign achieved 16% increase in brand switchers over the control group.

This chapter helps to develop a strategy for dealing with people who are in the habit of not buying from you.

Emotion

The biggest emotional motivators are Fear and Greed. The smallest is Logic.

Fear

Often customers buy for fear of losing out. They also remain with existing suppliers because of fear. If something went wrong, and they instigated the change, they would get the blame. This is the reason that Limited Period offers do work. `Sale Must End Soon!’ This is also the reason large companies use large suppliers. No one ever got fired for using the biggest and best-known supplier in the market, even if they offered the worst deal and delivered a boring, utterly predictable result. People have a fear of losing out. In buying, people buy a product emotionally and then justify it to themselves logically. Typical post-rational buyers’ logic: It might have cost me more to go elsewhere. Better the Devil you know. `Which?’ magazine rated it highly. I believe in staying loyal to my suppliers. (Ha ha!) We have a policy of buying local. We have used them before and never had any trouble…

Greed

Is the corollary of fear. Fear of not having drives people to want too much. The drive to have something other people don’t have. The urge to keep up with and beat the Joneses, for fear of seeming less than they are and losing face. The belief that we are what we consume… That our status in life is determined by what we have. That ultimate satisfaction can be achieved through possession of material goods. That we can `measure’ our success by piling up `treasure’… These crazy motives are driven by fear of the alternative: failure. They are very deep down in the DNA — not at all logical. (Get rid of that old stuff at a car boot sale — see how much better you feel!)

Logic

We often think that we are being logical in making a purchase. 24 valves must be better than 16… A clockwork wind-up radio is sure to come in useful on that camping trip… I’ll go by boat, the Channel Tunnel might catch fire…

In selling, however, the arguments we use to convince someone to buy our products are almost all based on logic. We think purely in terms of `reasons’ either to buy or not to buy. After all, why wouldn’t any reasonable person buy our product? We did, we even bought the job that went with it! The secret to selling is to appeal to the emotions, but in a logical way (no one likes to feel they have bought purely because of emotion). So we need to get at the emotions behind the reasons, and to dress up our appeals to fear and greed with a logical appeal. (‘Of course you’d like to be more successful at attracting gorgeous supermodels, Sir, who wouldn’t?)