The Six Emotions Behind Every Buying Decision with Randy Riemersma

0:10Randy Riemersma: Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Today we're joined by Randy Riemersma, founder of Sell With Precision and a longtime sales leader, advisor, and coach to B2B technology companies. In this segment, Randy breaks down the six emotions that influence how buyers move through a deal. Fear, curiosity, hope, desire, confidence, and urgency. He explains why elite sellers create discomfort early, resist the urge to educate too soon, and use subject matter expertise to build trust as the deal progresses. For revenue leaders, this is a useful lens on what actually moves buyers.

0:45Randy Riemersma: Strong execution requires process, discipline, business fluency, and a clear understanding of human behavior. Let's dive in. Randy, you talk about these six emotions that drive decision-making. Walk us through how a sales rep or account executive can leverage these different emotions during the sales process. Love to. I'm an electric engineer, mathematics guy by training. I come from a very Germanic family, immigrant family. We repress a lot of our feelings. So it might seem odd that I would talk about emotions during the sales process. But hear me out. Hear me out. I'll get uncomfortable now.

1:31Kathy, you uncomfortable? No, I'm good, man. I spent time with this dude before. All right. Good. Yeah. Kathy, we can hug it out later. So as we go through the sales process, you know, much like we have a sales process that we follow that's very rational, right? You know, do this validation, collect this data, share this business case. and it's strategic as we go left to right through that process. And, you know, it's not straight across. It's bumpy and all that other stuff. But in the same mindset, I encourage reps to also remember, we are first emotional beings and second rational beings. If you look at like the way we have developed over the years, we make emotional decisions and we back them up with intellectual alibis.

2:14So I want to harness, why would I leave something unused use when I can harness that to my benefit in the sales process. That's why I love these six emotions. John McMahon, thank you for giving me a chance to talk about this. I want us to think about them, the prospect, and I want them to think about you, the salesperson. These are emotions that I want them to have about themselves and them to have about you. This actually goes back to what we were just talking about. Early on in the sales process, early stage, mid-stage, late stage, early stage, they must feel some level of fear or pain and awareness that something is not the way it should be.

2:51Getting them out of the zone of small decisions, below the line, current state negative consequences, they must have an experience emotionally that something is not right. Fear, pain, whatever you want to call it, but something is not okay. And because you tease that out, I want them to feel curiosity about you. This guy or gal is a person of interest. They know something that I don't know. They've exposed this to me. So I'm feeling some discomfort and I'm feeling curiosity about that. And we'll pause here real quick. A lot of sales reps love to educate. And whether we agree with this or not, this is a firmly held belief that I have.

3:32If you educate too early, you eliminate your value. You're much better off creating curiosity and your value because you're a person of interest. Educate you early. They're done with you. Moved on, right? So it's early stage. Some sort of discomfort. I've seen it where they're done with you because you've done such a good job of educating them. They don't need you anymore. So then you try to associate on price or you try to gain metrics and you try to implicate things and they don't want to hear it because they're like, I already made my decision whether that's for you or against you. And then you try to drive the price of the value up and you can't.

4:07giving away the goodies, right? We're also talking about a psychological phenomenon that we've talked about many times on this podcast before, is that the human condition prefers to be talking to somebody who is interested in what I am saying versus trying to be interesting to me. Right. And that's just the human condition. And so I'm really tapping into what you're saying there, bud. But it is a body language. It is a mentality. It is a, you know, the human condition can tell when somebody is interested or they're trying to be interesting. And so you can't, you know, you got to be authentic here.

4:53You got to, that's why I believe, you know, if I'm talking to anybody today and anybody's kids, I always tell them the same thing. Yeah, I would definitely get a business degree and I would definitely get a minor in psychology. And people think I'm crazy. They say, psychology, you can't do anything. I'm telling you, some of the best business people, this is setting up our topic, Randy. But the best business people I've ever met have a definite, you'd think they'd have a degree in psychology if they don't because they understand human behavior. And this goes back to my comment, John. I couldn't agree with you more, right?

5:28Because, again, we are emotional creatures first. That's psychology. We're rational creatures second. That's math. Life is applied math. Life is applied psychology. If you're great at those two things, you're going to be fine, right? But to your point, I cannot create curiosity about myself if I am a nervous person, if I don't know what I'm talking about. Again, this goes back to you must be Kobe Bryant level type stuff, or at least aspiring to that. So when you show up in that meeting, you have the confidence because whether they know it or you know it, this is a weird thing. We understand pupils at a base level back in our amygdala.

6:09When we see someone's pupils dilate, that bothers us. Right. So we need to be people of confidence. We need to know what we're talking about. We need to create this discomfort in a way that's caring. But, you know, John, you asked about the execution with empathy. I care deeply for the people that I sell to. If I didn't care for them, I wouldn't do what I was doing, right? I don't want to do people as a paycheck. I mean, I love to help. I love to serve. To do that, I know I can take them to a place of discomfort to start. And I do that in a caring way. I do that in a very informed way. I will always be a subject matter expert.

6:42I get this stuff. So we create a little discomfort, early stage, create a little discomfort. We show up as a subject matter expertise. We create a little curiosity. We slide over a little bit, right? Well, because I've been working with Randy or Sally or Timmy, whoever it might be in a little while, and what they're talking to me about, about themselves, my prospect, they start to feel some hope. They need to feel hope. If the human spirit feels hope, any amount of hope, they will continue to move forward. When you lose hope, the deal will die. I promise you that. Victor Franco, all these guys and gals in war camps, they maintained hope of a different day and they survived.

7:24The ones that lost hope died. So as we move forward, we're educating them. We're showing them some stuff. We're showing them use cases. We're doing some great storytelling. They feel a little hope. You know what? They start to think, hey, I might want what this guy or gal has. Desire begins to build. Desire with the seller. Desire to the instinct that I'm describing more than what I'm selling. Just trying to make sure that everybody's following. I have fear with the customer. It generated curiosity in me as a seller. Then they have some hope. It generates some desire to understand more from me, right?

8:03Exactly. And as long as the hope candle is lit, they're going to be interested in talking about that. That's early stage. Then we do a great job with like references, use cases, proving this thing out. And what they end up feeling is like they start to feel confidence. When they feel confident, they start to say, OK, I get it. Moving through, I'm feeling some confidence. This is starting to make sense. I did a customer referral call. We did that evaluation at Bake Off, whatever that was. This feels good. And because we did a great job of showing the current state negative consequences, future state positive business outcomes, They know that delay is a failure strategy.

8:42Around us, it creates urgency. I want what he or she has now. Basically, John and John, as we're going through this, why buy? Why buy for me? Why buy for me now? Those emotions help guide that behavior. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate, and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.