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Emotions & the Coffee SalespersonRevised Article © 2001 Stuart Daw (Originally appeared in American Automatic Merchandiser, November 1989) Imagine a room, a laboratory in which stands a table with a microscope focused on a slide. The slide contains a small amount of human tissue. A primitive savage enters. He looks through the microscope, sees creepy, crawly things moving around and runs from the room, shrieking in terror. The emotion he felt? Extreme fear. An ordinary man enters and sees the slide. He knows it must be some kind of safe scientific experiment, but he has no real interest in such things. He laconically peers through the microscope, observes some strange things moving around, but merely shrugs and walks out of the room. The emotion? Total indifference. A doctor enters, sees the tissue and begins to weep, for he recognizes that it is a cancer test having to do with a dear friend and it appears the test is positive. The emotion? Deep sorrow. Enter St. Augustine who looks through the microscope and is filled with anger. For this must be the result of one of those new-fangled scientific experiments of which he disapproves. It has to do with industry, the production of worldly comforts, perhaps; what he calls "the lust of the eyes." He's angry. Then the ivory tower scientist who set up the experiment walks in. He peers through the microscope and feels great elation, for he sees that the new drug he is testing on cancer tissue is working. It's a success! Different emotions And so we have five different emotions, some good, some bad: fear, indifference, sorrow, anger and joy. The tissue obviously was not the cause. It was the context of the observers' knowledge, particularly their subconscious value judgments that dictated their emotional, automatized reactions. It's useful to grasp this when trying to understand our own emotions. And there is a valuable lesson for salespeople in the above little parable (the idea for which I am indebted to philosopher Leonard Peikoff). We can’t live without emotions and the salesperson who understands what they are, their source, and how to control them has a terrific jump on the competition. Unfortunately the buyer doesn't have to understand his own emotions. He just reacts. He may like you or not like you from the moment you enter his office for reasons that seem inexplicable to you. He is reacting emotionally. And he may buy or not buy for entirely emotional reasons that have nothing to do with your product or service as such. So a salesperson might say, "I don't know what's wrong with that buyer. I made my usual presentation, the one that normally works, and all I got was the cold shoulder. I wonder what went wrong?" It's a good question. Why is it that the same salesperson, wearing the same clothes and saying the same words in exactly the same way to two different buyers with exactly the same needs, gets an order from Mr. Jones, but gets "thrown out" by Mr. Smith? Why? In learning to understand the reason one can find an important key to sales success, or to success in any field of human communication. Dangerous territory When speaking you can operate at the conceptual level, thinking before you speak, and the more carefully you think about it beforehand the better. But important for the salesperson to remember is that the buyer may be responding not at the conceptual but at the emotional level; what Ayn Rand called "the pre-conceptual level of cognition." This is dangerous territory for a salesperson to enter in the prospect's mind, the area inhabited by emotions. So where do they come from, anyhow? In the above parable it was not the slide that caused the emotional feelings in the observers. It was the same slide to all of them. It was obviously something within each observer that triggered their reactions. Handle delicately Thus, when you enter a buyers office you are approaching a hornet's nest of opinions, prejudices and pre-formed mind-sets. If you say just one thing that triggers a negative emotional reaction the sale could be lost and you will never know why. But you can learn to avoid negative reactions by training yourself to operate at the conceptual level, carefully avoiding anything that will provoke a "bad vibration." Let me cite an actual, short example from my own past experience. Many years ago as a young coffee salesman I wheeled into the driveway and entered the office of a motel that served food as well. I asked the rather sedate, dignified-looking woman who was obviously the proprietor if I could have her name. "Mrs. Anna Koslowski" was her reply. Thinking her surname was more of a sneeze than a word, I said, "I think I’ll just call you Anna." "I’d rather you didn’t attempt to be too familiar," she coldly told me. She didn’t like me! It was a rash misjudgment of the situation on my part, and I was off to a shaky start in the interview. Some thing(s) about me put her on guard. I always drove too fast and walked too fast and spoke too quickly, and she had seen me coming. My brashness and attempt at being chummy might have worked in many situations, but obviously not with Mrs. Koslowski. I had to assume my most humble manner to recoup the situation (incidentally, I did get the coffee business). Goodness knows the source of her negative reaction to me. But the message for all salesmen is clear: avoid negative emotional responses at all costs. Enter the sales interview as neutral as possible, spouting opinions on nothing. In any case the buyer will get vibes from you the moment you enter. You’re too short. You’re too tall. You’re too slim. You’re too fat. He doesn’t like the way you’re dressed. He likes to see men with short hair. Who knows? Even he might not consciously know. It may not matter what else you say during the interview for you may have lost the race coming out of the gate, turning him off with a simple look, word, or phrase. When you hear a modern motivational speaker telling you about things like the buyer's "hot button," what he is saying in rather simplistic terms is, "say something that provokes a positive emotional response." In fact, for proof ask yourself why you reacted positively to such a speaker at a past convention. You will find that he did it by merely saying pleasant things that all salespeople like to hear; nice things about the sales profession, and positive things that may help your career, giving you visions of future success. And so you would do well, through a process of introspection, to examine your emotional reactions to the things said and done around you. In that way you can begin to be super-sensitive to the effect, for better or worse, that emotions play in your buyer's decisions. © 2001 Stuart Daw
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