1. – Your customer’s perception of the points they were sharing with you.
2. – What was troubling them about what they told you?
3. – What emotions are being expressed by your customer in this moment?
4. – What does your customer need from you at this moment? Just to listen and reflect back what they are saying? Or are they in discursive mode? Have they moved into a more rational, problem-solving mode?

2 Recognize your own emotions and then you will be able to recognize other people’s more easily

Empathy is about the ability to share in another person’s emotional experience. You need to pay careful attention to their verbal cues and their body language. How do their words and body language tell you about what they are feeling?

1. – Ask a family member or friend to observe you as you tell them an emotive story.
2. – Ask them about the verbal and body language cues they can observe in you. What are they? How do they manifest?

1. – Ask them to tell you an emotive story about something that happened to them.
2. – You need to suspend all your judgement and just listen.
3. – Occasionally paraphrase small parts of what they told you and repeat this back to them.
4. – Ask them at the end if they felt you were truly listening and were really trying to understand what they were telling you.

4 Use emotions to drive actions

As we have seen in this chapter already, there is an emotional journey in telling a good sales story. Good salespeople use negative emotions to create a case for change and drive the customer to take action. They use positive emotions to build hope and a vision for a positive solution to the customer’s problems:

1. – Make a list of questions that uncover the implications for the customer if there is no change.
2. – Then make a list of questions that elicit a vision of the implications if the change is made.
3. – Describe what that change would look like.
4. – How would the customer know that the change had been made?
5. – What actions would have to be taken to get there?