Emotional Selling: Thinking vs Feeling States
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
What is Emotional Selling?
People don’t buy with logic. They buy with emotion and then justify it later with logic.
That’s the core of emotional selling. It’s the ability to tap into a prospect’s feeling state instead of triggering their thinking state. Because the more someone thinks, the more likely they are to pause, question, ruminate, or do nothing.
Thinking leads to indecision. Feeling leads to action.
Emotional selling is a sales approach that prioritizes connecting with prospects emotionally. Instead of overwhelming buyers with features, data, and rational justifications, emotional selling focuses on understanding the buyer’s underlying motivations, pain points, and what gets them excited.
This approach is especially critical if you’re selling a disruptive or emerging product where the prospect doesn’t have a planned budget and has little urgency. With this type of sale, the prospect often isn’t aware of your product or that their problem even existed. They can afford to be indecisive or not take action. They don’t need your product. When this is the case, your prospect will only take action if they have a significant amount of pain or a lot of excitement.
Keep prospects anchored in a feeling state and they’ll move fast.
The Psychology Behind Emotional Selling
Thinking and feeling states are two different ways of assessing situations and making decisions. Here are the behaviors they tend to lead to for buyers:
- Thinking State: logical, cautious, analytical, indecisive
- Feeling State: emotional, intuitive, motivated, action-oriented
People are not 100% thinkers or 100% feelers. We all shift between these states depending on context.
What triggers these shifts? Prospects move into thinking states when presented with complex information, multiple options to compare, or when asked to analyze risks and benefits. They stay in feeling states when focused on problems they want solved or outcomes they desire.
Most sellers push prospects into thinking states by trying to pitch, explain, and justify, which is where objections, delays, and risk-aversion live.
Emotional selling is about staying where action happens: the feeling state.
Your job is to guide the conversation without overloading it. Anchor prospects in emotion, keep the flow simple, and avoid anything that kicks them into analytical mode too early.
Techniques for Emotional Selling
How do you engage the prospect’s feeling state throughout your sales conversations? Here’s a list of things to avoid and lean into:
- Avoid: Features and Benefits
- Lean Into: Pain and Excitement
- Avoid: Pitching
- Lean Into: Storytelling
- Avoid: Complexity
- Lean Into: Simplicity
- Avoid: ‘Getting into the weeds’
- Lean Into: Succinct high level explanations
- Avoid: Lots of factual, objective questions
- Lean Into: Vision and dreaming
- Avoid: Overwhelming your prospect with irrelevant information
- Lean Into: Sharing only what is important to your prospect
- Avoid: Overtalking and statements
- Lean Into: Listening and questions
- Avoid: Challenging implementation processes
- Lean Into: Ease, support, help, and guidance
- Avoid: Asking the prospect what they want to do next
- Lean Into: Setting confident, prescriptive next steps
- Avoid: Being overly scripted and distracted
- Lean Into: Being in the moment and present
- Avoid: Rushing
- Lean Into: Taking the time needed
When to Engage the Thinking State?
Emotional selling gets prospects to say “yes” but that’s just the beginning if your product has a longer sales cycle and/or the prospect has a complex buying process. Once you’ve created emotional buy-in, you need to engage their thinking state to navigate the buying process.
Emotional selling gets the “yes” while engaging the thinking state ensures it gets executed.
When a product has a short sales cycle or simple buying process, leveraging only an emotional selling approach works. I’ve managed B2C sales teams where sales could be done purely with emotional selling. We were able to shorten our sales cycle to 1 day in many cases. No need for the thinking state. But if you’re selling to Enterprise customers (like my team does now) you must engage the thinking state too. You need to:
- Know your prospect’s decision-making process
- Ensure that you’re engaging other stakeholders
- Learn about their budgeting process and how to secure an approval
- Understand potential blockers/challenges
- Have a clear picture of the procurement process.
Otherwise the initial feeling will fade, your deal will stall, and you’ll lose the sale to inaction or your competition.
