I just attended the Women’s President Organization conference in Fort Lauderdale with hundreds of multi-million dollar women business owners who’ve sustained success for decades regardless of what’s happening in the economy. The biggest reminder when you gather high-achieving women together? They use emotion a lot. They have really high EQ – emotional quotient – the ability to understand and speak to needs of their teams and clients. Here’s the research backing it up: one in five B2B businesses lose more than 40% of their clients each year (Upcity survey of 400+ B2B businesses). 66% of B2B decision making is done emotionally – only 34% with logic. Emotional buys spend 23% more and stay 59% longer. My sales coach used to say it takes one second to decide if they’re going to buy, but sometimes hours and days to convince themselves and rationalize why they’re either going to buy or not buy.

Map Their Emotional Hotspots and Deliver Against Them

Here’s the first step of how to keep clients by leveraging emotion in your dealings: map and deliver which emotional value using Bain’s 40 elements – ie. ease of doing business, reduced anxiety, reputation safety. Interview all the various people in the buying committee (the average is now 13!) and find their hotspots. If their top value is ambition, design presentations showing how they’ll benefit personally or how their role has contributed more to the company because of working with you. It’s like their business love language. Step two: become more reliable and increase trust. Look at your delivery metrics – on budget, on time, enough ROI? Communicate frequently around their KPIs and proactively develop programs to outperform on metrics they’re looking for. Build relationships with multiples so if one walks away, you still have all the others. Use regular executive check-ins with transparent reporting and dashboards against their KPIs.

Focus on Personal Stakes, Not Just Business Value

Another key step is to focus on the client’s own personal stakes. Google research says when you give the buyer perception of personal benefit – career advancement, pride, confidence, awards, filling KPIs – it delivers twice as much impact as if you’re only giving them business value. Ask: “If this engagement is wildly successful, what changes for you personally?” Create brag sheets for them to regularly forward up to bosses and the other 13 buyers showing how they were instrumental in increasing ROI, meeting KPIs, increasing sales, decreasing cost. Make them look like heroes. Spotlight the buyer in permanent case studies on your website, LinkedIn, webinars, shared with peer community.

Increase Their Sales, Even if Not Your Job

Next step in the emotional loyalty plan is to increase your clients’ sales or the equivalent –  for example, this could be donations for nonprofits, tuitions for schools. Proactively come up with ideas to introduce them to new clients or networks, increase their margin, increase efficiencies even outside your service. Publicly celebrate their milestones. And most importantly, make it low risk to work with and easy to stay by auditing friction points, establishing systems to overcome them, and proactively engaging in forgiveness practices if you drop the ball – give credits, gift back, offer makegoods. Offer low-risk options like pilots, phased rollouts, cancel anytime.

Once you offer these emotional levers, you will have made sure that your clients never want to leave you.

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