Selling in a Crisis

44Control Your Emotions

Selling in a crisis can push you to the edges of emotional extremes. These emotional extremes become your Achilles' heel. Unmanaged, they betray you, make you weak, cause you to lose self-control, and make it impossible for you to effectively influence buyers, who are likely being impacted by similar emotions.

The brutal truth is that in every sales conversation, the person who exerts the greatest emotional control has the highest probability of achieving their desired outcomes.

To effectively engage and influence buyers in an economic downturn, you must master and rise above the disruptive emotions that can produce destructive behaviors that fog focus, cloud situational awareness, cause irrational decision-making, lead to misjudgments, and erode confidence.

There are seven disruptive emotions that weaken you and impede your ability to sell effectively in a crisis:

1. Fear causes you to hesitate and make excuses rather than confidently and assertively asking for what you want. Fear inhibits prospecting, leveling up to the real decision makers, getting potential objections on the table, moving to the next step, asking for the sale, and negotiating effectively. It clouds objectivity and breeds weakness and insecurity.
2. Desperation causes you to become needy, weak, and illogical, and to make poor decisions. When you are desperate for a sale, you'll skip steps in the sales process, push too hard, and pitch rather than listen. Desperation is the mother of insecurity. ...