With intense emotion fused into the day, logic is suffocated, need becomes craving, and price is deemed irrelevant
Valentine’s Day selling teaches powerful lessons. Learn how emotion, preparation, and understanding pressing needs can transform your sales approach.
Pause. This is a sales column, not a relationship one, so let me stick to the point. What does Valentine’s Day teach us about selling? Three powerful lessons.
Emotion sells
On Valentine’s Day, intense emotion suffocates logic, need becomes craving, and price becomes irrelevant.
Whereas this is most profound on Valentine’s Day, it only mirrors everyday purchases.
No purchase is based on logic alone; logic follows to justify the emotion.
The gynaecologist is good because he is tender and listens, not just because he has several initials after his name; we chose the school for our child because we admire how the neighbour’s child who schools there presents himself, and not because the curriculum is superior.
It would take an extremely depressing host to kill a radio show that is based on relationships (emotion).
Therefore, explaining that “Given your needs, you do not need to incur the extra cost of a higher package” connects you emotionally more to the buyer than does, “Refer to the link below for our terms and conditions.”
Emotion sells because people buy feelings, not features.
Know your customer—and prepare
Valentine’s Day comes and goes.
My friend Kanyi runs a creative agency; she started selling customized hampers through social media last week. Her target market? Men.
Because, she told me, “I know how stressed they get during Valentine’s, and so I took the opportunity to reduce their stress levels by showing them the image of the product—I received mine via WhatsApp, ahem, ahem—and delivering it for them. They pay via M-Pesa, and most don’t even get to see it.”
Girls reading this must be disgusted, thinking “How unromantic!” And that’s the point, really. The sale is never about the seller.
Kanyi has managed to remove herself, as a woman, from the equation and looked at it from her buyer’s (men’s) perspective.
What does my buyer struggle with, and how can I help him resolve it? Could I arrange a payment plan in tandem with his cash flow, for instance? Because Valentine’s is one day, Kanyi has buffered her distribution infrastructure to ensure that all deliveries are made on time.
This calls for preparation.
Read: Adequate preparation is the cure for most sales mistake
There are prospects we come short of stalking in our quest to meet them. They are decision makers; and then “Valentine’s Day” arrives, and they agree to meet us… and “err, uumm, you know” punctuate the presentation.
We planned the hunt but not the kill.
Mould it while it’s wet. The opportunity is gone before you send the gift.
Mercifully, in business you only feel the loss of the sale; in relationships, you will feel the mistake that night and every day thereafter.
Price doesn’t matter when the need is pressing
When we must travel in December, that the fare is three times higher will not matter much; when the craving to keep up with the Joneses must be appeased, we will not “see” the price of the loan to buy the trendy car.
“Hurry while stocks last” rides on this stance.
Progressive salespeople show how their product or service solves the customer’s need, because once this is achieved, price falls away as an objection.
For instance, instead of just saying your two-way lift affords convenience, paint a picture.
Explain to the hospital administrator that installing the through-way elevator will save lives because it cuts down by half the time it takes in an emergency to wheel a patient from casualty to theatre—and because entry and exit are possible without turning the stretcher.
Read: Avoid using the word convenient while selling
This Valentine’s Day, a stem of rose will retail for 100 bob.
Those remembering Valentine’s Day on their way home at night, reminded by the hawkers selling roses in traffic, will buy it for even more. They’ll give their arm to avoid the cold shoulder from the wife or girlfriend because they forgot. When the need is pressing enough, price is of little consequence.
That is the ultimate lesson of Valentine’s Day selling: emotion, preparation, and urgency will always beat logic and price.
Have a peaceful Valentine’s Day!
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