Emotionomics

The science of using facial muscular reactions to gauge emotion – often called facial coding – can be traced back to Darwin, but studies have become significantly more sophisticated in the last decade, with the publication of such best-selling books as Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (Bantam, 1997) and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown and Company, 2005). Dan Hill, an authority on emotions in consumer and employee behavior, founded Sensory Logic (www.sensorylogic.com) in 1996, and his recently published book, Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds (Adams Business and Professional, 2007) is a composite of information he’s collected while working with companies like Target, Allstate, Toyota, and Kellogg.

“Over the past few years we’ve located and begun to study the hot buttons in the brain, especially those that deal with fear and anger,” says Dr. Hill. “Everyone feels before they think – it’s just how the human brain is wired – and one of the realities of sales is that there’s always fear in the room. The buyer fears being taken advantage of or told what to do, and the salesman fears the prospect isn’t going to buy. But no matter what side it’s coming from, fear isn’t a good lubricant for communication. You counteract these negative emotions by becoming more customer-centric. It isn’t about your offer. It’s about the buyer and, more specifically, what the buyer is feeling.”

Facial coding may have been around for more than a decade, but business has been slow to embrace the research. “People in sales are under so much pressure to keep the numbers high that they tend to ignore emotions,” Hill says. “If it can’t be qualified, managed, and put on a spreadsheet, they tend to think it doesn’t exist.” Hill’s experience with one insurance company was typical: “When I asked trainers what they did to get people ready for the field, 60 percent of the training was about delivering the offer and the rest was about the logistics of company bureaucracy, things like filing expense reports. When I asked, ‘But does your training cover emotion?’ they assured me that it did, but their comments were very nonspecific.”

Business not only doesn’t know how to deal with emotion, but also, ironically, the corporate world fears fear. Hill cites Walt Disney as one of the few businesspeople who was truly savvy about the role emotion plays in sales. “He was consciously aware of what feelings his park guests would take away from a ride or show,” says Hill, “and he realized that by creating a certain emotion, you could profoundly affect people’s behavior. In contrast, most businesspeople are so uncomfortable with the whole concept that their reaction is more like ‘Feelings? Oh no, let’s bat them back down as soon as possible.’”

But emotions can’t be batted down, at least not if you want to close that sale. “People make decisions quite differently than it once was believed,” says Hill. “We feel before we think, which means, quite literally, we don’t think our way to our decisions, we feel our way to our decisions. Rather than trying to conceal our emotions behind closed doors or ignore them in favor of rationality, we need to understand and accept the major role they play in everyday business transactions.”

Since emotion beats out logic every time, the ability to read emotion can mean the difference between success and failure, between a connect or a disconnect. Being what Hill calls “on-emotion,” that is, generating an emotional response in your prospect that supports your business goal, is even more important than being “on-message.” “Rational messages alone won’t persuade someone to buy from you,” says Hill. “You have to communicate in a way that touches them on an emotional level.”

facial coding
Of course, in order to relate to your client’s emotional state, you have to figure out just what those emotions are. Fortunately, that isn’t hard. As a species we’re not very good at hiding our feelings. There are seven core emotions – happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and contempt – and the way in which each emotion shows on our faces is so uniform that it cuts across age, gender, and cultural differences. A surprised little girl in China will display the same basic facial expression – wide eyes, raised brows, open mouth – as a surprised adult male in New York City. Coding seems to be innate; even people who are blind from birth automatically assume the same facial expressions as those who can see.

This is key, because your client’s facial expression is virtually a preview of coming attractions. If you can understand what he’s feeling, you can predict what he will soon be thinking. Although it seems to happen instantaneously, the decisionmaking process is actually three-fold. First we see, then we react, and finally we rationalize to reinforce our reaction. In other words, we make up logical-sounding explanations to support our gut feelings, and this is the final stage in the “thought process.”

The chief sales-buster is fear. The client has a natural nervousness about being approached. Is that an ally across the table or a predator who just wants to make the deal, take his money, and disappear? “An emotionally literate salesperson,” Hill says, “helps people feel that they’re making a safe, beneficial choice.”

The process of removing the prospect’s fear has three basic steps. First, create hope: You’re going to show them how to do something differently and better. Second, build trust: This is an ongoing relationship, not a quick deal. Third, create pride, so that the prospect walks away thinking, “I’ve made a smart decision.” Sounds simple, but Hill says many salespeople have trouble keeping their own emotions out of the process. “For starters, salespeople often talk too much,” he says. “I’ve made this mistake myself. You’re thinking that you’ve worked so hard to get this hour of your prospect’s time that you simply must fill it up with words. If you talk enough you might hit the magic button and get them to buy.”

A more likely result of over-talking is that you wear clients out and blow the chance to really get to know them. “If you sit calmly and listen,” says Hill, “you can not only take in what the other person is saying, but you can also use facial coding to observe how they’re reacting.”

Shutting up also keeps you from unwittingly triggering the other negative emotion most likely to blow a sale: anger. “I’ve made this mistake, too,” Hill laughs. “I was once meeting with a manager who had used an alternative research method from the one I was suggesting, and he seemed quite pleased with it. The rest of our conversation went well, but when I made a critique of the method he was currently using – basically threatening a choice he was happy with – I saw anger on his face. It flashed for maybe one-tenth of a second but that was long enough to end the sales opportunity.”

the relationship approach to sales
When you schedule a meeting with a prospect, it’s easy to assume that your focus should be on quickly moving through the points of the presentation and persuading them to buy. But you’ll get much further by not rushing it. Before you make the offer, make the connection to the person, whether it’s just noticing the pictures on his desk or taking the time to truly understand his problems. The average first sale takes seven calls to close and during this time, as Hill says, “The prospect is trying to figure out if he truly likes and trusts the salesperson. Building trust is a gradual process.”

Likeable, trustable salespeople exhibit these traits:

1. They ask a lot of questions. Skilled negotiators ask more than twice as many questions in interviews as the average negotiator does.
2. They focus on client needs, without over-talking or over-selling.
3. They mirror people’s behavior back to them, reflecting the client’s own values and beliefs.
4. They don’t forget small favors and signs of courtesy.
5. They are consistent, displaying the same personality throughout the sales process. This makes the buyer feel that the salesperson has integrity, that he isn’t fake, and that he’ll display the same level of interest when it’s time to service the account.
6. They stick around. Your client’s fear is a bit like the wistful pop song lyric “Will you still love me tomorrow?” If they don’t have contact with their salesperson after the sale is done, clients may feel duped, abandoned, and used – one reason that dumping customer service questions into a hotline can be a huge mistake. Cus-tomers want to talk to a real person in real time – preferably the salesperson they already know and like.

the great chain of buying
Gradually building trust can help salespeople avoid another common pitfall: going for the close too quickly.

“There are two primary cycles in buying,” says Hill. “If the client is in the first cycle, the cycle of satisfaction where he is happy with what he has bought in the past, the smartest thing you can do is just let him be. You can bring in an awareness of an alternative but if he’s presently satisfied you’ll only displease him if you push him too hard toward a new idea.”

The other cycle, the cycle of opportunity, is where the sales are made. “It’s largely driven by timing,” says Hill. “If they have recently bought and are under no pressure to buy again, then there’s no sense of urgency – and thus no chance for you to sell that day. Accept that you’re going to have to come through their door again at some point and use this meeting to get to know them better. As the urgency builds over time your conversations will become more serious, but it still has to be a dialogue. It’s respectful and without pressure. Then when the cycle of opportunity is at its highest and the need to buy is more urgent, you already have their attention. That’s when your patience pays off.”

managing emotions within the company means building trust with your staff
About 50 percent of a company’s emotional climate is determined by the personality of the CEO, and this is a major factor in the bottom line. A Time magazine report estimated that emotional happiness in employees can make them up to 25 percent more productive.

“There’s always going to be a bit of an ‘us vs. them’ mentality between CEOs and employees,” says Hill, “simply because there’s a gap in the power and pay scale. But this can be mitigated if management shows their employees the same level of emotional reassurance they expect their sales team to show customers.”

When it comes to creating trust between managers and sales staff, there’s no substitute for face time. “Small talk isn’t always small,” says Hill, recalling one CEO who “had a frosty personality from afar but who was exceptionally personable when talking to people in smaller groups. Relationships aren’t built on a single annual review. The process needs to be organic, with management and salespeople addressing issues as they come up, having conversations, and then circling back and revisiting the issues later.”

Hill admits that in a busy, high-pressure office a series of one-on-one meetings with each employee isn’t always easy to achieve, but just as relationship-driven sales can reap big benefits, so can relationship-driven management. “We see a lot of churn in many companies,” he says, “with management spending huge amounts of time and money to get the right people on board. Using these soft techniques to subsequently keep these people loyal and productive makes economic sense.”

Hill also stresses that if management expects the sales staff to actively participate in customer service – a key component of the relationship sales model – they reward them accordingly. “After-sale customer support takes time,” he says. “People need to be given incentives on a broader basis than sales volume alone, which may mean creating new ways to measure and reward customer satisfaction and the longevity of sales relationships. High pressure sales are short-term in nature, so if companies want their salespeople to have repeat sales they must compensate them for fostering long-term relationships.”

So what have we learned about the brave new world of emotion-driven sales? Being aggressive doesn’t help you close the deal. Perhaps more surprisingly, being rational doesn’t help either. What matters is creating an atmosphere of mutual trust.

“When people are asked to part with their money, there’s nothing calm or logical about that process,” says Hill. “The successful salesperson identifies and understands clients’ emotions and gives them security and comfort. The relationship is reciprocal, nonexploitative, and long-term. The clients don’t walk away feeling like they’ve been sold anything. They walk away feeling good about themselves, good about the product, and – most important – feeling good about the person they bought from.”