Opening an Emotional Bank Account

by Graham Denton

Stephen Covey, whose book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the most successful self-help books of this century, writes about opening Emotional Bank Accounts with the people who matter to us. He's speaking chiefly about the intimate relationships of friends and family, but much of what he says is directly applicable to business, particularly for the professionals who are most clearly in the "people business" -- sales professionals.

An Emotional Bank Account, Covey says, is a metaphor for "the amount of trust that's been built up in a relationship. It's the feeling of safeness you have with another human being." Just as with a financial bank account, you can make deposits into an Emotional Bank Account, only here you do it not with money but with courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping your commitments. If you do that with another person consistently, you build up a "reserve" of trust that you can "draw on" even in those times when your communication is rocky or threatening to break down. If, on the other hand, you consistently betray the trust of another person, eventually your Emotional Bank Account with that person gets "overdrawn." The trust level gets low, and you lose flexibility.

The relevance to the world of selling may not seem obvious at first, but if you'll substitute the word "customer" for the word "person," you'll appreciate the connection. Customers are people, too, after all. Treat them with honor and respect and that's what you'll get in return. Treat them like they don't matter and you'll get that in return. So paying attention to and respecting your customer's attitudes and feelings is only common sense. It's a "deposit" of consideration that is highly professional because it helps to establish the reserve of mutual trust that is essential to any long-term business relationship.

The details of Covey's discussion expand on this basic point. Consider only a handful of the "major deposits" that he identifies as contributing to an Emotional Bank Account.

Understanding the individual. What's important to one person may seem trivial or irrelevant to another. Yet to sustain a high level of deposits with another individual, you have to consider what is important to him as being important to you. This sounds an awful lot like "customer focused selling."

Keeping commitments. "Keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal." The reason goes to the heart of every business relationship: "People tend to build their hopes around promises, particularly promises about their basic livelihood." A valuable point to keep in mind if you're in the selling business, where overpromising and underfulfilling is a constant temptation.

Clarifying expectations. "The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals." That fits the buy-sell relationship to a T. And it serves to emphasize the point that, in any new buy-sell relationship, it's worth spending some time in the early stages defining the ground rules of how you want to do business together. "We create many negative situations," Covey writes, "by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people."

Apologizing sincerely when you make a "withdrawal." Or, in the business context, doing so when you fail to deliver. Whether the results your customer expects are concrete or more personal, a failure to deliver to expectations is a withdrawal of trust. The first step in restoring that trust is to acknowledge the withdrawal. That's not always easy. But if you want a healthy Emotional Bank Account with your valued customers, it's an essential part of creating an atmosphere of mutual dignity. And you can take that atmosphere to both banks -- the emotional and the financial.