Emotion In Decision-making: Sales

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Albert Einstein

A nurse in an intensive care unit for neonatal babies notices something wrong with one of the babies. She can’t pinpoint it exactly, but she immediately urges the doctors to prescribe a course of antibiotics.

The next day, tests show that her recommendation was correct when they revealed a potentially fatal condition.

She doesn’t know exactly how she knew, but her intuition – or her emotional decision — saved the baby.

"The theorists say decision-making is a logical process," writes Jeremy Hardie, former chairman of WH Smith Group, "but new research shows emotion is just as important."

Decision-making is a cognitive process, one which gives us a subconscious choice between logic and emotion. It might not seem that way in the middle of a heated argument or when faced with sudden danger, but the feelings that arise when we make an emotional decision from our "adaptive unconscious" are a subtle and sophisticated form of pattern recognition. These gut reactions, in other words, are a form of thought, and not just a knee-jerk reaction.

What does this emotional decision-making have to do with sales? How important is it for a sales person to pay attention to the first response from a customer? It is crucial for sales people to understand emotional decision-making simply because it explains how the brain works and how decisions (particularly buying decisions) are made. When a young woman walks into a car dealership and sees the shiny red convertible (even though she’d planned on a mid-size sedan), which decision-making process will operate in her mind first?

Yes, you guessed it. Probably the convertible.

And Paul Cherry in a June 2007 article backs it up when he writes: "Research confirms what you’ve probably suspected: Buyers are deeply irrational beings."

Scientists from CalTech and MIT, among others, reviewed studies which examined how people make purchases. Although most of us, including economists and sales people, may assume that logic enters into buying decisions, they found that: "Buyers buy with their hearts first. When money changes hands, the primitive, emotional part of the brain calls the shots."

Emotions are fast and reactive. They kick in before logic has a chance since it only takes 0.1 seconds for the rational cortex to get going and much longer before the logical thinking begins. Emotions are really signals from the brain, telling us the intuitively correct thing to do – the best decision to make.

It’s the right side of the brain vs. the left side of the brain. The left brain processes in a logical, linear manner while the right side is our creative, imaginative and playful side. Creativity comes from the right side; paying the bills comes from the left. And when that emotional decision-making occurs on the right side, what are the underlying reasons for the varied reactions?

Of course, since all humans are different, there’s no one reason. We all react emotionally for different reasons. And we all make purchases for different reasons, generally to:

1. Avoid Pain
2. Gain Pleasure

Much of it has to do with self-esteem, with making yourself happy, to "show off" to the world. Some people even place a premium on the emotional value of "prestige" purchases, like BMW….Mercedes…. (Keep that in mind when setting a price.)

Emotions guide our decisions. Rooted internally, they lead us into the better place. They lead the customer into a correct decision. Though the customer has researched the automobile market, compared every model on the internet and test driven five cars before they see the shiny red convertible, sometimes, and more often than not, emotions play not an unimportant role but a dominant role in the decision they make that day.

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