Sales are Emotional (Even if You Don’t Believe it)
All Decisions are Emotional
Daniel Kahnamen and Amos Tversky developed a groundbreaking theory about human decision-making (popularized by Kahnamen’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow”).
Humans have two types of decision-making, Type 1 (Emotional) and Type 2 (Rational).
Type 1 thinking is quick, unconscious and instinctual. Type 1 thinking prioritizes ideas and beliefs that align with the decision-maker’s perspectives, biases and goals, and shuts down areas of potential risk, pain and discomfort. Type 2 thinking, in contrast, is slow; rational and thoughtful in analyzing issues.
Emotional Type 1 thinking is a gatekeeper for analytical Type 2 decisions. An issue must pass Type 1 thinking before it is further analyzed with rational, Type 2 thinking. If it doesn’t, Type 2 thinking is not engaged and the issue is treated as settled.
For example, when shopping, a nice dress or jacket will catch your eye based on your immediate feelings and perception. This is how Type 1 thinking works, spurring Type 2 analysis with questions like (i) do I really need this, (ii) can I afford it, and/or (iii) does it look good on me?
But if the dress doesn’t catch your eye – if it fails Type 1 thinking – there is no Type 2 thinking applied. You won’t think about it for a moment longer.
All decisions are emotional because they must first filter through a person’s Type 1 emotional filter. It's a biological shortcut to manage the enormous number of decisions we have to make. Humans are constantly “judging books by their cover”.
Emotional Interest is a Requirement for Every Sale
Sales decisions follow the same process as all other human decisions – first analyzed quickly and unconsciously under Type 1 emotional thinking, and then analyzed rationally under Type 2 rational thinking.
As a result, emotional interest in Seller’s value is a requirement and prerequisite for every sale. Prospects who are emotionally interested are willing to invest time into understanding Seller’s solution with a bias towards buying, despite the uncertainty about whether the product works.
Some Prospects – like early adopters and those actively seeking a solution in the market – engage at a time when they are already emotionally interested in a solution. These Prospects will respond positively to Type 2 analytical arguments about product features and outcomes.
The large majority of Prospects in an early-stage Seller’s market, however, don’t know anything about the Seller or its products. Even if they do, they likely haven’t thought about how it may help their business.
These Prospects will rely on their immediate feelings and perspectives – their Type 1 emotional analysis – to determine whether to further engage.
But most sales never get past Prospects’ Type 1 thinking because emotionally, the status quo (i.e. saying “no” to the Seller’s offer) is generally the easiest, safest and most convenient option for a Prospect.
Saying “no” avoids interrupting current priorities and the risk of a bad purchase. It allows a Prospect to see if others derive value before taking a risk. And because so many sales offers are frivolous and a waste of time, probabilistically it makes sense to ignore most offers.
Influencing Emotional Interest
This is why companies have sales and marketing departments. Their goal is to positively and emotionally engage Prospects to “pass” their Type 1 thinking.
Effective sales consistently overcomes Prospects’ natural biases, generating desire and interest in your offer. This is not a nice-to-have, but existential to the company’s success.
For example, early-stage companies are hyper-focused on achieving “Product-Market Fit” (PMF) – unrelenting demand that is a prominent signal of a company’s long-term viability.
The “fit” in Product-Market Fit is emotional interest.
A Seller’s product value to Prospects is the same before PMF and after PMF. What’s changed for those Sellers with PMF is Prospects’ growing desire for that value. Only emotional interest could yield that type of exponential growth. And that’s precisely why PMF is so important – long-term growth requires sustainable and growing emotional interest.
The market’s Type 1 analysis - determining their degree of their emotional interest - is based on what they know about Sellers and their offering. There are 4 general channels that trigger a Prospect’s Type 1 analysis.
Product Value
Brand/Reputation
Sales Team
Messaging
All Sellers, purposefully or not, develop an identity based on how the market perceives them through these channels. Their opportunity is to use them to positively influence Prospects’ emotional reactions.
1. Product Value
Sellers commonly hope that their product value is so transformational that it will, by itself, generate demand with their market – a “product that sells itself.” This approach is often a combination of explaining product features and offering demos or trials.
But, beyond early adopters, a product alone is unlikely to emotionally engage most Prospects in the market.
Prospects are focused on their business and goals, not Seller’s product. Prospects must infer business value from product outcomes – generally too complex an analysis to pass Type 1 thinking. Further, proof of product value is not possible at the time of a sale (only after the sale). Discussions about product value are therefore simply claims from a Seller.
Sellers try to mitigate these limitations by allowing the Prospect to demo or trial the software. This can be effective, but in B2B the users of the software at a Prospect are not the same as the buyers at that Prospect. The buyers must still be emotionally engaged, shifting the burden of generating emotionality to other channels mentioned below (or worse, relying on the users at the Prospect to emotionally engage the buyers).
2. Brand/Reputation
Social proof makes Sellers appear more trustworthy, more likely to deliver value and less risky. This helps shift a Prospect’s emotions and make them more amenable to engagement, particularly when there is a need for similar type of value. When competitors are buying (and reaping benefits), social proof can create an urgency in the market, even if there is no immediate or direct business need. At the extreme, a company can go viral, a collective emotional response where Prospects act like herding animals in a stampede.
A high-value brand is a more stable version of “going viral”. The brand, by itself, represents quality and trustworthiness to the market. For example, Nike and Apple don’t need to rely on reviews or new product features to emotionally engage their Prospects. They instead focus on maximally leveraging their brand to grow sales.
Brand and reputation, while powerful at creating emotionality, take time to develop (or in the case of going viral, is luck). The emotionality necessary to create them often must come from some other source.
3. Sales Team
An effective salesperson is transactional with their emotionality. In a meeting or call, they can consistently elicit, manage and engage a Prospect’s emotions, passing Propsect’s Type 1 thinking and enabling a rational discussion about the offer.
Another type of effective salesperson uses their reputation and personal stature to generate emotionality, enabling engagement. They usually are personally well-known independent from their company. “When X speaks, people listen.” For example, the former head of the Department of Justice will always command a (legal) Prospect’s attention.
“Founder-led sales” is the reliance on the Founder(s) (as the Sales Team) to emotionally engage the market. Steve Jobs is the most famous example, and he succeeded in both salesperson roles – his product presentations are legendary - and he became a celebrity in his own right, demanding everyone’s attention when he spoke.
An effective sales team allows a technical founder to outsource generating emotionality, but in practice, hiring is a time-intensive task prone to trial-and-error. And many technical founders struggle in founder-led sales roles because their expertise is their product, not the emotions of their Prospects.
4. Messaging
Messaging is how a company describes itself. Messaging is emotionally engaging when, in addition to conveying factual information about the sales opportunity, it elicits a positive emotional response from Prospects that biases them to invest time into the sales offer.
It's the most scalable way to generate attention and emotional interest because every Prospect interaction – website visit, webinar, sales engagement, viewing marketing collateral – offers a viable path to pass Prospects’ Type 1 emotional thinking. It improves sales management and also empowers every employee to become a salesperson - each can use the company’s messaging to emotionally engage their counter-party.
For example, many companies are developing a “company narrative” or “strategic narrative” to generate emotionality at scale. The overarching narrative serves as a guide and framework for all corporate activity. Those focused on external stakeholders – Investors, Recruits and Prospects – tell the same or similar emotional story to help these stakeholders believe in the company’s vision. Those focused on internal operations – product, for example – also use the narrative as a guide. Their mandate is to ensure the company’s vision comes to fruition.
Emotional messaging is not easy. It must focus on Prospect’s perspective and feelings, not Seller’s product. And it must have broad appeal in the market.
However, the same decision-process described above offers a path forward. In B2B, Prospects universally seek profit and growth, and individuals at those Prospects seek personal, career and income growth. Because these goals are future-looking, Prospects have emotionally-driven beliefs about how to achieve them, and follow that chosen path despite its uncertainty.
The way to make messaging emotional, therefore, is to position Seller’s product on the critical path of meeting Prospects’ emotionally-driven goals. There are two options – position Seller’s product as an important part of the story the Prospect already believes about their goals or change the story Prospect believes about achieving them.
This enables Sellers to leverage the positive emotions Prospects already feel about their goals. I’ve previously written about developing emotionally engaging messaging with numerous examples here. Note, there are no shortcuts. Emotional messaging depends on deep comprehension of product value and human perceptions, together with creativity to develop an effective message.
Getting Emotional
It can feel odd that no one talks about the emotionality of sales, despite its importance.
Sales advice is framed as “5 Steps to GTM Growth”, “Grow 50% this year!” and understanding the precise definitions of words like “positioning” and “pitching”. But these frameworks are valuable only to the extent they create emotionality. It's not clear how these do that, or how they apply broadly to generate emotionality for every product and market.
Similarly, new marketing approaches like Product Led Growth (PLG) are positioned as massively transformative, but it simply shifts responsibility for generating emotionality from the sales team to the product and marketing (messaging) teams. Surely, that transition alone isn’t sufficient to grow sales for every company. The relevant question is the same – how and why does it help generate greater emotional interest for this product in this market?
The “chasm” is “Crossing the Chasm”, one of the most famous books on start-up sales, represents the shift from Prospects who are emotionally interested to those who are not. And as mentioned above, the “fit” in Product-Market Fit is emotional interest. But neither Geoffry Moore’s book nor Marc Andresson’s famous article on PMF mention the word emotion once.
This oddity, however, is explained by the same two-part human-decision process described above.
Sellers also make emotional decisions, including about how to engage in sales. Sales offers to Sellers incorporate Sellers’ Type 1 analysis. Emotionality isn’t discussed because it's more convenient for Sellers to believe sales is an analytical exercise focused on choosing and applying the best framework. It makes Sellers feel in control. And to call out sales as emotional can also be insulting to a technical founder, who often emotionally believes the market should and will buy based on product value.
While understandable, this thinking must change because it's hurting many Founders’ ability to connect with their market and achieve the sales their product deserves. It also infantilizes them. Founders are capable of managing whatever challenges are thrown at them to succeed – the emotionality of sales is no different.
But Founders can’t help their organizations generate emotionality if they don’t know what it is and why it's important. So while controlling the market’s emotions are hard, and controlling Seller’s own emotional biases is even harder, the most important step is for Founders to simply admit:
“Sales are Emotional.”
Once Founders appreciate the nature of the challenge, no one is better positioned to overcome it.
