How to Use Emotion in Sales to Ignite Your Conversion Rate

Everything is driven by emotion in sales. I don’t care what your friend, your mama, or that Reddit commenter with no avatar has to say. On the surface, you may think that I’m implying you must pump fake adrenaline into every sales call. That’s not the case. Guiding emotion in sales is an art. The key is to align your prospect’s heart and mind with the heart as leader and the mind as follower. This requires you to create an experience and guide your prospect into associating with that experience. In this article, I will show you exactly how to do just that…

I have talked in previous articles about how all sales are driven by emotions. Emotions are the most critical factor in the decision making process. In general, emotions spring from deeply held values (what motivates your client’s every decision in life.)

Values are what focus your client or prospective client and enliven their imagination… and connect their imagination with the churning fire of emotion.

Associate Your Client Into The Experience

And if a person appears to be sharing their values in a dissociated way, all you have to say is…

• But what does that mean to you?
• How do you feel when you say that?
• What’s your experience of that?
• Can you relate to a time in your life when that happened?

Any of those will get them associated into the experience. Watch for the non verbal cues and you’ll be able to see it happening.

Identify Associated vs. Dissociated States

Let’s talk about these two important distinctions that I just started to allude to, because these are distinctions that will help you control emotions within yourself and others more effectively.

1. Associated Emotional States: When you or the person you’re selling actually feels the emotions. They’re connected to it and really feel it.
2. Dissociated Emotional States: When you or the person you’re selling is thinking about it, but not experiencing it. They’re not connected to it and don’t really feel it.

Dissociation: Talking About Emotions

Dissociation is like talking about an emotion.

So if I said…

“The other day a friend of mine was really upset and they were raging actually and they were going on and on and it was really difficult for them. They were talking about how they put a hole in their wall and they had driven over here and their car was still hot and blah, blah, blah.”

It would be like saying…

“The other day in the store I saw this kid and he wanted . . . it was very funny, he wanted this box of cereal and so his mom said, no, we’re not going to get Cap’n Crunch and he started screaming and he was yelling and screaming and throwing the biggest fit I’d ever seen and man I was just laughing about it. He was kicking his feet in the cart and then he reached over to the isle where the boxes of cereal were and he started pulling them all down onto the floor until his mother raced over and stopped him…”

Am I talking to you about that experience in an angry state?

Am I throwing a fit and knocking cereal off the shelves myself as I tell you about it?

No. So I’m dissociated from it.

You Must Associate First

Now let’s analyze that very carefully.

It won’t do anything for you at all. It’s only when you associate them to the emotional state and they feel it that you have one giant persuasion lever.

In order for emotions to work in your favor, to leverage them to your advantage, the person you’re persuading must be associated, meaning, they have to feel the emotion. And in order to get them to feel the emotion, you must feel it first, make eye contact with them and express that feeling in your emotional appeal. Don’t expect them to go there if you haven’t or if you won’t.

And again I see so often in people that I train, I see so often that they start off thinking about the emotion and taking a long time to get there and by then they start to go out of rapport with the prospect. That’s a mistake.

Keep The Spotlight Focused In

Again, a huge mistake. Doesn’t work. Okay? Your key messages must carry the emotions.

You can think of values as a spotlight emanating from deep within your client. It shines out from them, looking for things and people that resonate with it. As the context changes for your client, so too will the spotlight that’s being broadcast by them.

The Source of the Fire: Find the Deep Value

For example, in business perhaps the spotlight is being aimed at making money. However, that in and of itself is not a deep value. What will the money be used for?

Maybe it will be to pay a family member’s schooling, or for stability. Those are deeper values.

So an example would be, in a person’s primary relationship, perhaps the spotlight is being shone on more intimacy or maybe deeper connection; or maybe even on finding a primary relationship to share one’s life. You have to find out what is the customer focused upon at the deepest level.

Values: The Spotlight in Their Mind

Do you see what I mean?

I want you to really get this concept that values are like a spotlight inside the mind of your client, shining out, looking for connection, looking for those things that resonate with it. And your job in sales is to see that spotlight and connect for all it’s worth. That’s your major job with your persuasion techniques.

Right there, if you do that, your results are going to skyrocket. And if you think like that, it just flat out makes it easier.

Unlock Your Client’s Inner Flame

And a spotlight is the perfect tie-in for a visual image. It’s so similar to the inner flame, to the power of charisma. This is how you unlock charisma in others.

Once you really hone in on what their values are, you basically uncover their inner flame for them and they connect with that deep value within them. You’ve unlocked their inner flame with them just by doing that.

So you’ve helped them unlock their charisma, and the feeling of having that unlocked … they’re going to associate you with that experience. And you’ll be able to see it in their body language.

So by you helping them uncover that within themselves, they see that in you as well.

Zero In On The Flame

And the reason I want to really acknowledge that so powerfully is that when you begin a conversation with someone, they are often hiding their values.

“Well let’s see what you have to show me, and I’ll be happy to decide if I’m going to go forward or not…” That kind of BS. This is their self perception of how a business person should be.

And that’s precisely what we don’t want and what I won’t tolerate. I won’t tolerate it, and you shouldn’t in sales either.

And the process I’m going to go through with you in this series of articles is all about how to zero in on even the slightest whiff of a flame … the tiniest, ittiest, bittiest spark … and fan it into a giant fire, a spotlight, that can’t be put out, leading the customer journey directly to it.

The Source: Values

What’s the source of the spotlight?

Think of a lighthouse. We’re talking about the ocean … ocean with emotion.

And let’s be clear right here and right now: the source is their deep values. That is true for every single person, but we’ve been trained to overlook it. What a shame that is. What a shame! I mean, really, when they’re right out there for us to see and connect with! This is probably the single most profound persuasion tool in the toolbox.

The Most Powerful Thing You Can Ever Do

This will help us in our personal relationships and our business relationships. It will help us with our friends and with our family and with everyone. A few seconds of high quality attention paid, where someone’s values are exposed and uppermost, is like a year’s worth of blah-blah-blah. Really, really good. All human beings respond powerfully to their own high values.

The most powerful thing you can ever do to convince people is connect with the person’s deepest desires and connect those with what you do and your solution and even personally. Make that your primary mission. Keep this uppermost in your mind and you’ll continue to get better results with less effort.

Shift Your Way Of Seeing Things And It’s Easy

For someone new and learning persuasion skills, this may sound like a Herculean effort. Bluntly, it’s not, It’s actually quite easy.

It requires you to shift your way of seeing things by about fifteen degrees and then it all makes sense. You just make a slight shift, and I’ll show you how in these articles. It requires simply that you adjust your thinking and then that you intend to make this connection for your client.

Summary

As you can see, emotion in sales is far more complex than “pump fake adrenaline into every sales call.” The methods you’ve learned here are incredibly powerful and distilled down to its most simple form.

• You can tell if the other person is associated or not by the way they respond. Can you tell that they are really connected to what THEY are saying?
• The source of emotional fire is someone’s Values. These are the most leverageable thing in all of sales.
• Don’t be discouraged if the other person seems closed off at first or doesn’t want to share their values. Most people prefer not to be open and vulnerable at all. At the very least, they prefer to be open and vulnerable with select people in their life.
• In order to ensure the other person associates with the experience, you must first associate with the experience. Otherwise, all else is null and void.
• The true power of emotion in sales is to connect the other person with the inner flame of their own emotion. Do this, and you are sure to ignite more conversions.

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