Rational vs Emotional Impact - Buyer Psychology

Hey everyone, got some feedback on my last posts which I appreciate.

Coming back with a new topic that has helped me tremendously with my selling. I've been better at diagnosing my prospects/customers situation and delivering value

Conventionally, we sell our stuff based on needs and benefits, or highlighting our sweet features. But something i've come to believe is that buyers today don't want features, they need impact.

There are two main types of impact to dig into.

Emotional Impact includes things like keeping peace of mind, while Rational Impact entails thinks like saving money.

The impacts the customers are truly seeking or in the back of their minds, may require you to go many questions deep (digging for impact inherently will make your discovery calls better). By diagnosing the customer’s situation, you can uncover the underlying Impact they are looking to achieve. Impact is what differentiates the nice-to-have from the must-have solutions.

Example:

If I sell a backup and recovery solution - but the customer has never had a dataloss they may not want to pay for the features of my solution since they seem unnecessary.

But if we dig into the impacts of a data loss, even though it hasn't happened we get

rational impact: down time will cost the company xyz/ per hour down + it can be undetermined how long it takes to get back up and running + they might need to hire external consulting entities to assist with restoring data

emotional impact: will the head of that department lose their job for not having a failsafe? will they get to sleep or see their families when they are heads down for months working through the crisis? will their career be tanked when the news report they lost customer data? how will their reputation suffer (ties into rational impact of growth slowing)?

The key here is to be compassionate when the customer shares these details around these impacts. You don't tell them these impacts, you let the customer tell you.

Now we are hitting the points that matter to a customer and have their attention! We craft a story (read my last post) that nails these points home and create a champion who helps us win our deal.

Again, this is something that has helped me move on from feature dumping and doing shallow discovery calls and I wanted to share.