Listen to Your Gut When Making Decisions

Most professionals and sales representatives are under the impression that sales decisions must be made purely on logic. When reasoning, they mistakenly think emotions shouldn't play a part in business decisions. However, your gut feeling is an indicator of your ethics and it plays an important role in your actions. Avoid ignoring your gut and allow these feelings to partially influence how you develop reasoning.

Gut instincts often produce a sinking feeling that taps into your intuition but not necessarily fear, explains Clate Mask with Small Business Trends. Even though facts and logic should be an important element of any type of sales decisions made by sales representatives and sales managers, facts can sometimes paint a false picture. Investigate what your gut tells you and gather more research and facts before making an informed decision about a business procedure, policy or customer problem.

Your gut instinct also provides you with a reminder of useful information stored in your long-term memory. As representatives are talking with customers, clients or co-workers and working to determine a final sales decision on the sale of a product or service, the brain is processing related information and experiences. Your gut feeling serves as a reminder of the knowledge you have and your feelings about the particular decision you have to make. Professionals may not always be able to articulate why they feel a certain way or have a gut feeling, but the information stored in the brain often triggers these feelings.

The type of sales decision a representative or manager may have to make influences the intensity of the gut feeling. For example, sales managers have to make decisions about business processes, operational tasks and personnel issues. A gut feeling may indicate an employee has good intentions and a strong work ethic even though the overall performance doesn't reflect the results found in sales reports and performance reviews.

Representatives may need to trust their gut instincts when negotiating with clients. A client who is displeased with service or products may indicate something other than dissatisfaction with the products or services. Representatives can tap into their emotions and gut feelings to uncover if the client is backing off from a sales decision for other reasons, and then appeal to the client's needs in a more effective manner.

Emotions play a key role in making virtually any decisions. Regardless if representatives and managers have to make sales decisions immediately or long-term, factoring in logic, reasoning, facts and gut instincts offers a much more well-rounded decision-making process. Tap into your gut, uncover why you feel this way, and evaluate the facts and emotions as a whole to make sound decisions that benefit both your career and your company.

Photo Courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net