emotions have a particular sound

I am even more convinced that the sound of a sales call really matters and have proved my radical predictions based upon voice mapping to be uncannily accurate.

In a recent workshop, a young lady came up with a new Mantra "get the customer on our side" and we had a good discussion about this. I suggest that a Mantra helps with motivation to call and keep calling and they are usually very seller centric. This was a new approach and one that got us talking about trust and emotion. We can win the trust of a buyer if they believe that we really do care for an outcome that suits them. The important thing is to say it like you mean it. Try saying "I really care about you" and you will find that there are many more ways to make it sound like you don't care than you do.

So we started to consider how emotions sound and fortunately Charles Darwin has started the process with his theory of Prosody. During his extensive study of animals, he concluded that the four core emotions are anger, fear, sadness and surprise. It is easy and very interesting to sound these out but it surprised me that only one quarter could be described as a happy emotion. Do animals have less opportunity to be happy than humans I wondered.

Wikipedia took me to Paul Ekman who has extended this research to humans. His original theory added only two more core emotions to the list - disgust and joy. This improved the ratio of happy emotions slightly but it still only left humans with one third happy emotions. Somehow that didn't feel right.

In the 1990's the list was extended by amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure and shame making 17 emotions in all. Now we can see eight happy emotions and so I will rather cheekily conclude that modern man does have more opportunity to be happy.

Good telephone sales consultants can deliver happiness with a good sales call. We can actually elicit a biochemical reward and that is why our motivation can always be described as true, pure and well meaning.

I know this doesn't make sense "yet" but I often say that "it hardly matters what you say, what matters is how you say it" and one day I may prove this to be true. For now, however, we rely on an audience specific language but I would venture that the way we speak accounts for slightly more than 50% of the overall effect on the potential customer. So what emotion we project is of crucial importance to the buyers experience.

Eric Berne and his theory of transactional analysis seems to be the best model so far but I have adapted his parent to "directive", his adult to "logical" and his child to "passionate" and have added positive, negative, informative and enforcing traits to the adult or logical "way that we sound".

If you make the right sound, the other human being will trust you, allow you to deliver a biochemical reward and the sale will invariably be made happily.