Keeping Disruptive Emotions Out of the Employee Benefits Sales Process 

Summary

Every decision starts with emotion, and in sales, ignoring that reality is costly. Disruptive emotions like fear, insecurity, desperation, and the need to prove yourself can derail even the strongest pitch. When you learn to regulate your own emotions and connect to the buyer’s emotional drivers, you create trust, confidence, and positive influence. Sales success depends on emotional awareness and control. Selling is a transfer of emotion as much as it is a transfer of confidence.

In a recent blog, we talked about how emotion drives client experience and how leaders can’t afford to overlook it. The same is true in sales. Emotion is baked into how people process, decide, and act. 

Biology makes this unavoidable.  

Our brains govern feelings through the limbic system, which is like your emotional engine. It fires first, and then the neocortex steps in with logic.  

All this to say that we don’t think our way into or out of a decision.  We feel, and then we think. It’s how our wiring works, so in sales, you can either work with this or against it.  

Recognizing and regulating emotions is key to a successful selling career. If you had known and understood this concept earlier, maybe you would have made some different choices along the way.  

But no better time to start than today! 

If you can master your emotions, you can positively influence the buyer’s emotions. If you cannot regulate your emotions, then expect the buyer to go down the emotionally irrational path with you. 

Where emotions collide 

No matter how much we might wish for sales to be based on “purely rational” decisions, it’s just not. Every sales interaction is a mix of both thought and feeling. 

In employee benefits sales, three processes happen at once: the sales process, the buying process, and the decision-making process. Each one carries its own emotional load, and when those emotions clash, things get messy.  

As the salesperson, it’s your job to connect emotionally with the buyer from the beginning. If you don’t tap into their emotion about their employee benefits program, you will have a hard time convincing them to make a change.  

1. So, job #1 is to find their emotional driver regarding their employees and benefits.
2. Job #2 is to regulate your own emotions throughout the process, which does not mean being emotionless. It means checking the negativity at the door.  

Negative or disruptive emotions wreak havoc on the sales process because they cloud judgment, create stress, and interfere with awareness for both the producer and the buyer. 

Understanding disruptive emotions and learning how to manage them is one of the most important skills a salesperson can develop, especially when you’re faced with a buyer who is not making rational decisions.  

We hear this a lot. An employee benefits agency will work overtime to prepare a plan for an employer that clearly needs to make a change. They’ll present the plan, saving the employer hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of dollars, and the employer says no.  

It's hard NOT to become emotional and irrational at such irrational behavior. But this happens more often than you’d ever imagine.  

If you dissect those opportunities, you probably have clues along the way that you did not make an emotional connection with the buyer, and they did not emotionally buy into the path you were leading them down. Therefore, the rational decision point at the end is irrelevant. They were emotionally committed elsewhere, and you had no chance all along. (In this scenario, the buyer's readiness to make the change you're proposing is also a significant factor.)

Selling is a transfer of emotions 

You’ve likely heard us say that selling is a transfer of confidence. And it’s true.  

It’s also a transfer of all the other emotional energy a salesperson expresses.  

If the producer emits positive emotions, they will likely impact the buyer's emotions positively.  

If the producer expresses negative emotions (intentionally or unintentionally), such as fear, anger, anxiety, or insecurity, the buyers will feel the negativity. The opportunity will likely break down with all the negative emotions going back and forth.  

Pay close attention to the buyer’s emotions and see if they are connecting with you and mirroring your positivity or actively working against you and displaying neutrality or negativity.  

The producer who can regulate their emotions is most likely a high-performing salesperson. If you want this to be you, focus on building emotional connections into your sales process and learning to recognize and regulate your emotions.  

Disruptive emotions in action 

Let’s look at some of the common emotions that derail conversations and outcomes: 

• Fear 
  Fear is one of the biggest barriers in sales. It stops people from asking potentially difficult questions, being assertive, asking for what they want, or walking away from a bad deal. Fear clouds objectivity, fuels insecurity, and distracts from trust-building behaviors. 

• Insecurity 
  Buyers gravitate toward confidence. When a salesperson appears insecure—hesitant, uncertain, or disengaged—it raises red flags and risks for the buyer. On the flip side, authentic confidence is attractive, and people want to mirror that feeling. 

• Desperation 
  When desperation creeps in, judgment falters. The producer begins to focus on the fear of losing instead of the possibility of winning. It makes conversations feel forced, and buyers can sense it and want no part of it. 

• The need for significance 
  When the focus shifts too heavily toward proving worth or importance, the conversation becomes centered on the salesperson rather than the buyer. When a producer talks over people, fails to listen, or dominates the discussion, they are actively destroying connection and trust with the buyer.  

• Need to win 
  Sometimes, a salesperson is more committed to winning than helping the buyer make a good decision. The buyer can easily see they’re just a checkbox on the scorecard, and they want no part of that ick.  

• Worry 
  I love this definition of worry: anticipatory fear. The brain responds to imagined threats the same way it does to real ones. So if you give it imagined doomsday scenarios, it drains focus and energy into obsessing over what could go wrong instead of rehearsing what could go right. 

Building self-awareness 

In high-stress moments, the rational brain actually loses blood flow. The fight-or-flight response kicks in, and the ability to think clearly drops. That’s why emotional management is a survival skill in sales. 

Self-awareness is the foundation. Recognizing when fear, insecurity, or worry are creeping in allows you to stop them from driving the conversation. The same goes for anger and uncertainty. The more control you have over your emotional state, the better you can create a space where buyers feel emotionally connected and confident in their decision.