We buy on emotion and justify on logic

You’ve probably heard it a number of times before but it’s so true – people buy on emotion and use logic to justify their buying decision.

We emotion sell don’t we. Let’s spend a few minutes now seeing how we can capitalise on this…

This year I failed to get to the Glastonbury Festival which I’ve been able to attend every year for quite some time. Awfully disappointed I was, especially as the festival approached, and the TV and the newspapers were saying what a brilliant Glasto it was going to be and one of my favourite bands – Blur – were going to headline.

So I decided to record every piece of Glastonbury that the BBC could show and watch the recordings over and over again as a consolation. The BBC probably show about 50 hours in total of the festival so using Sky Plus was out of the question since it doesn’t have the capacity.

I picked up a new Archos Personal Video Recorder to attach to the TV to ensure I didn’t miss one showing of the festival.

I’d cracked it – I could now relax and look forward to watching hour after hour of Glasto, whenever and wherever I liked.

Until my wife picked up the gadget and asked what on earth do we need this for as we’ve got Sky Plus.

Patiently awaiting an answer I told her. “Darling we can use it to do other TV recordings that stay recorded forever and not wiped off by our adorable children, we can record movies to watch later, we can use it to store photos when we’re on holiday this year when the camera card gets filled up, we can take it to your Mums this Christmas and show lots of photos of the children by rigging it up to their TV. I can even use it for work to show delegates videos of their presentation.”

Phew that was close.

But the point is this. It was a pure logical justification. I bought on emotion and justified the expenditure on logic to my wife and myself.

So how much emotion do you bring into your sales and coaching meetings?

Early on in your meeting, seek out your their hot buttons – and how they apply these to the product or service or idea that they’re buying? Hot buttons are:

  • Security
  • Convenience
  • Power
  • Comfort
  • Peace

So ask them what’s important to them in buying your product or service, what it means to them, what was important last time they bought something similar. What does coaching mean to them. And then feed on this emotion.

In total I must have recorded about 75 hours of Glastonbury. Have I seen it all? No way…can you remind me why I bought the Archos 400? Oh yes, it was hard-drive storage, the ability to record TV programmes permanently, photos at Christmas…