I was waiting in the packed stadium for my team to take the field. Fully decorated in my team?s colors from head to toe, I felt camouflaged in the sea of fans. Finally, the team appeared. My body shook as I joined in with the slowly building thunder of applause; I was emotionally overwhelmed with pride.

How often do your customers stand and cheer like this for you?

There is a huge difference between a fan and a customer. That difference lies in the customer?s emotional involvement in the experience. Fans support their teams with unwavering loyalty. They are personally connected to the foundation upon which the company stands, and they are emotionally attached to the people and the products the company represents.

Without emotion, you are dealing solely with logic, and logic is not a salesperson?s friend. With logic alone, you are stuck using flipcharts to justify your existence, or hiding behind crafty verbiage and fancy pie charts. With logic alone, you will always lose to the company who uses both emotion AND logic.

If you want to change your customers into loyal fans, don?t just tell your customers how you can help them. Try starting their experience with you on a more personal note. Evoke powerful emotions by painting yourself as a real person. Bear your emotional personality by taking a moment to explain why you do what you do, instead of bombarding them with a vomit session about how you do what you do.

If you want your customer to tell you about themselves, then you must begin with telling them about yourself. This doesn?t mean boasting that you represent the biggest company in the world, that your company has been in business for 75 years, or that your company has the largest fleet of trucks in the nation. Who cares about that?

Let them know how proud you feel driving home each night because you represent a company with integrity. Tell them that your products are products you?d be proud to sell to your mother. Explain how you can look your children in the eye and tell them you enjoy helping other people.

When you are able to selflessly bear your reasons for doing what you do, you make yourself emotionally available and even somewhat vulnerable. You show the customer your emotional reasons for wanting to help them. Once this emotional foundation is set, you can work on getting your customers excited about your product, your company, and yourself. It is this type of communication that creates a true understanding of how you can help the customer.

With this understanding, you no longer need to resort to creating fear in order to make a sale, or explaining a new feature or new product to your customer in the hope of creating the interest necessary to make a sale, make a friend, and create a relationship.

You can let go of the frustrating bouts of sputtering explanations you have used to try to logically convince the customer of what you know in your heart to be true ? that your product can and will provide help, answers, and solutions for them and their business.

Take a moment and examine the methods and techniques you currently use to peddle your wares all about town. What emotions do they evoke in your customers? Are they positive? Probably not.

Instead of following some technique, jumping on some latest trend in selling skills, or using some other fancy non-you version of selling ? get back to the basics. If you hide behind appointment-setting trickery and crafty closing techniques, you are doomed to a frustrating and fruitless career in sales. However, if you spend your time and effort trying to create a fan, your customers will support and follow you, proudly.

Tom Richard conducts seminars on sales and customer service topics nationwide. Tom is also the author of Smart Salespeople Don't Advertise: 10 Ways to Outsmart Your Competition With Guerilla Marketing, and publishes a free weekly ezine on selling skills titled Sales Muscle. To subscribe to this free weekly ezine go to http://www.tomrichard.com/subscribe

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