You may have heard it said that purchasing decisions are made based on emotion rather than logic. Perhaps you’ve even experienced it. You knew you needed to hire a service for your business and logistically, everything checked out — but you still felt like it wasn’t right for you. Or, something had absolutely no logical perks — such as booking that hotel on your last vacation for twice the price of a similar quality one down the street — but you felt emotionally compelled to do it anyway.
You may have heard it said that purchasing decisions are made based on emotion rather than logic. Perhaps you’ve even experienced it. You knew you needed to hire a service for your business and logistically, everything checked out — but you still felt like it wasn’t right for you. Or, something had absolutely no logical perks — such as booking that hotel on your last vacation for twice the price of a similar quality one down the street — but you felt emotionally compelled to do it anyway.
‘Emotionally compelled’ is exactly how a prospect should feel when they consider purchasing your product or service. But, to strike this emotional response requires a robust understanding of behavioral science and how humans make decisions. It’s not enough to know that we’re emotional decision makers and try to appeal to that. This form of sales must appeal to the overarching psychological habits of humans.
To understand this further, I chatted with Jeremy Miner, sales trainer and the founder of 7th Level Communications. Miner made multiple seven figures a year as a W-2 earner in his sales career by going above and beyond what most salespeople do: he created a sales technique that helped salespeople persuade prospects emotionally — by helping the prospects to persuade themselves. He shared key tenets of his proprietary Neuro-Emotional Persuasion Questioning technique with me, which he crafted over years of delicate attention to wording and prospect responses.
The Prospect Should Do 80 Percent Of The Talking
While the wording has been perfected, Miner teaches that it actually isn’t a salespersons job to do most of the talking. “My journey with understanding effective methods of sales began when I had my first sales job in college,” shared Miner. “I was studying Behavioral Science at the time, and found it odd that everything I was learning from the ‘old sales gurus’ was antithetical to what I was learning about human psychology. The sales gurus teach you to ask a few logical based questions and then present and pitch all the logical facets of why the customer should buy from you, and my professors were teaching me that people strongly dislike being told what to do,” Miner explained.
How do you usually converse with a prospect? If you are like most salespeople you jump into your solution far too early in the conversation about why they should buy what you’re selling — which would only really work if humans did make purchasing decisions based on logical reasoning. You could have all the logical reasons in the world why they should buy, but if they’re not emotionally persuaded that they do, in fact, need or want what you’re selling, they’re not going to budge.
Miner shared that it's only been recently adopted into sales that the salesperson should be asking the questions rather than doing the talking. The key here is, are your questions only logical based questions, or have you learned questions that pull out their emotion, their feeling side? “I now tell my students that the prospect should be supplying 80 to 90 percent of the conversation because of the thoughtful skilled questions that are asked,” says Miner. These questions are NEPQ questions, or Neuro-Emotional Persuasion Questions.
Be A Problem Finder
“I teach that rather than being ‘product pushers,’ salespeople need to be problem finders,” notes Miner. He teaches what specific questions to ask in which order through Neuro-Emotional Persuasion Questioning, but the gist is this: your role is to first help the prospect identify what problems they have in their lives. As a problem finder, the prospect comes to trust you. They don’t want to be told what they need. They want to be asked, heard, and understood.
This is done through a part of NEPQ called “problem awareness questions,” which includes probing the prospects to see if there are any blind spots or points of contention in their lives or business that pertain to what you’re selling. These are taken a step further by asking the prospect what would happen if they don’t fix the problem at hand (conjuring the emotions). Then, there are “solution awareness questions,” to help them think through what potential solutions are available that could help them.
Become A ‘Trusted Advisor’ Rather Than A Pushy Salesperson
Contrast this with sales conversations you’ve been involved with in the past, when you were the prospect. There’s a reason we dread going to the dealership and talking with car salesperson. They’re convinced they know exactly what we want and need in our car search, so we end up fending them off for most of the visit. Imagine if instead, a salesperson asked questions that helped you think critically and emotionally about what problems you have with your current car, what problems you would have with some of the cars you’re considering, and what options solve your problem. You may enjoy the day at the dealership more than you ever have before.
“When you help to guide a prospect through their thought process by asking skilled questions rather than ‘telling’ them what they need, they’ll view you as the trusted authority or even an industry expert instead of a salesperson who just wants commission,” noted Miner. “It simply becomes apparent that you are there to solve their problem.”
‘Helping’ is at the heart of what Miner teaches. The truth is, if your product or service can really help someone, guiding them to recognize how it can solve their problems (after their problems are identified, of course!) should be fairly easy. Sales should be about advising and helping them discover problems they might not have even thought they had, rather than putting sales pressure on them to buy. It’s all about appealing to a prospect’s emotions as the helping hand.