When people buy an ice cream cone, they don’t buy a lump of fat and sugar. To the ice cream lover, a delicious cone is a spirit lifter, stress buster, or hunger reliever.

When your prospect buys your product or service what emotion are they buying? While you may be providing perfectly practical benefits, selling features and benefits is purely intellectual. Most customers are motivated more by the emotional benefits they get from what you sell rather than logical benefits. People buy emotionally and then justify logically.

For example, people don’t normally buy a car strictly because it is a good way to get across town. Instead they purchase the thrill of speed, the prestige of getting admiring looks, or the confidence of safety.

Recently, I got a book from Amazon.com. It came packaged with a free bookmark. On it was a quote from Christopher Morley: “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him twelve ounces of paper, ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.”

Make sure your sales and marketing effort shouts the dream you provide. Learn to appeal to the emotional nature of your prospects humanness.