Emotional triggers that help increase sales

Although you’d be embarrassed if anyone saw you doing it, what food do you still eat like you did it when you were a kid?

My weakness when I’m in an emotional state is peanut butter. When I was a kid are would stick a knife into a jar of peanut butter, take out a huge dollop and spread it over buttered bread. I used to do this when I got home from school in the afternoons especially in winter when I needed to replenish my energy. But over the years I’ve always made sure that I have a peanut butter jar the cupboard in case of emergencies. I might be feeling low and need to break open the jar and get stuck in. Peanut butter has that soothing effect on me that helps me cocoon.

It might seem like an old model nowadays but the Maslow’s pyramid of five fundamental needs still holds true: physiological needs, need for security, need for love and belonging, need for recognition and need for self-realisation. Maslow recognised that these needs are progressive – we move from one category to another after satisfying our needs, starting at the base of the pyramid. Near the end of his life Maslow proposed that there was a level on the hierarchy above self-actualization: self-transcendence. Self-transcendence includes creativity, transforming and ethics.

Yet as complex human beings we also are often whether we like it or not driven by the seven deadly sins. Remember them? Here they are: avarice, anger, envy, gluttony, last, pride and laziness. Other emotional triggers include the seven emotions such as anger, fear, flattery, greed, guilt, salvation and exclusivity.

Do you pay enough attention to selling your products with emotional appeal?

How can you use emotion to sell your products and services?

While we believe that we make a decision based on rational logic, emotion plays a big role, often a decisive role, in our decisions to buy products that we want and desire. As Perry Marshall says, “We all fundamentally make all of our decisions based on emotion, not logic. Logic supports our emotions and is used to justify our decisions after we have made them. Logic plays a part, but emotion is the core ingredient.”

It doesn’t really matter, as he says, whether you are selling to engineers, accountants, executives, attorneys, home makers, academics, truck drivers, farmers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

Do you know the emotions that trigger your customers to buy? Are you deliberately using emotional selling to get your customers to buy?

What triggers a potential customer to buy is something that the product does for them or can do for them whether it be to save money, provide them with recognition and status, enhance their self-esteem, or even give them a sense of comfort and security.

But what we often see are bland and boring display ads that look like they have come out of the Yellow Pages. Salespeople tell the same old stories that put off their customers instead of inspiring them or driving them crazy with fear. Social media posts are often so self-serving, especially from short-term insurers, that you want to grab a vomit bag. Emotions in messages should harmonise with potential customers rather than turn them off.

You as a small business or start-up owner don’t have to communicate hyped messages to your potential customers. All you need to do is to remember that people buy on emotions and that emotions are vital to your selling. The basic emotional triggers for potential cusotmers in this economy is trust and confidence, especially as it being broken.

How can you engender a feeling of trust in your customers in that you will deliver on your promises? What can you do to strengthen their confidence so they feel you have the competence and expertise to serve their needs? How do you in your business demonstrate to potential customers that you are taking care of their needs?

Larry Pinci and Phil Glosserman in their book “Sell the Feeling” say that the most powerful emotional needs question is: “What’s important to you in…?” Find out what’s important for your customers in your products and services before you provide a lengthy and detailed description of your product or service.

Remember that people buy based on emotions and by finding out what they need want and desire will enable you to sell the feeling that acquiring your product or service will ultimately provide.