A few years ago I was told that I would be speaking to a potential investor on a Friday at 5PM. It was 10AM. I really, really wanted this call to go well. I spoke to a colleague called Sabina, to get some advice. I asked her how I should approach it, what I should say / shouldn't say. It was a very important call. After listening for a while, she said something to me, in a very frank, direct way, that I have never been able to put down.
"James, you're at your very best when you speak to people on an emotional level."
She wasn't talking about sales. She was just describing what she saw in me as a person. But it stuck, because it named something I had felt for years and never had words for. It really stuck in my head because I thought about all the times I've been at my best in life. Not just work, but life. It was when I had three things: Genuine drive, passion & conviction. After much thought - that conversation with her, named the company.
the thing sales training gets backwards
Almost everything written about B2B sales treats emotion as the enemy.
Be professional. Follow the process. Trust the data. Hit your activity numbers. The buyer is a rational actor with a budget and a scorecard, so bring them a business case and may the best spreadsheet win.
I have sat in the rooms where that philosophy gets taught, and I have sat in the rooms where deals actually happen, and I am telling you they are not the same room.
Don't get me wrong, the business case matters. Its real job is translation: it takes the conviction you have built with your champion and arms them to sell for you in the rooms you are not in, all the way up to the economic buyer. But a business case gets you compared. It does not get you chosen. Buyers have options, and every shortlist is full of sensible companies with plausible spreadsheets. The science narrows the field. The gut feeling about who to trust with the order picks the winner.
where I actually learned to sell
I learned to sell in places nobody puts on a LinkedIn banner. Boiler room floors, phones and noise and adrenaline. The crude version of emotional selling: all conviction, very little method. It worked until it didn't, and it taught me something most polished salespeople never learn. Nobody buys anything until they feel something.
Then I went to the opposite end of the universe: enterprise cybersecurity. Supposedly the most rational buying environment on earth. Technical buyers. Procurement gates. Evaluation frameworks. Six-figure decisions made by committees. Throughout my whole 12 year career in cybersecurity sales, from cold calling as an SDR, to working deals as an AE, to managing a 10 person team, here is what I realised:
The frameworks were real. The committees were real. And underneath every single deal, the decision was still emotional. The CISO who feared a breach on their watch. The IT director who wanted to walk into the board meeting feeling ahead of the problem for once. The founder who needed to know the person on the other side of the table would still pick up the phone when something broke.
The bigger the deal, the more emotion, not less. More fear. More politics. More careers on the line. The spreadsheet came out afterwards, to justify what somebody had already decided to feel safe doing.
People make decisions emotionally and justify them rationally. That is not a motivational poster. It is the most commercially valuable observation I have ever heard (Alchemy, Rory Sutherland), because once you see it, you stop selling to the spreadsheet and start selling to the person. Once you see it, you'll start realising the exact point that you have your prospect hooked. You're probably already doing it now. You're on a Google Meet / Teams call, you get them hooked, and you send a cheeky message to your other colleagues who are on the call saying something like, "We've got them"
You have to believe in what you are selling. Absolutely, with no slight uncertainty in your voice. Because if you don't - you won't get to that point of "we've got them" - you'll just come off the call thinking, I wonder what went wrong. And usually the "fix" is more process, more scripts, which only compound the issue.
the name
When I started my own company, I remembered Sabina's line. And I stopped overthinking it.
Emotive is not a soft name. It is a precise one. It is the entire methodology in one word: buyers move when they feel the cost of doing nothing, when they feel understood rather than sold to, when they feel safe saying yes. My job is teaching founders and their teams to sell the way human beings actually decide.
That is why this is called Emotive.
the asterisk
If you have seen our mark, you might have noticed it is a bit odd. An asterisk, sat on an upward trend line. Half of it is geometric. Half of it is drawn by hand.
That is not a style choice. That is the job description.
Sales is science and art. Process and person. The geometry is the method: discovery structure, qualification, forecast discipline, next steps. The hand-drawn half is the human: belief, empathy, conviction in the voice. Either half on its own fails. The process-only team runs beautiful pipelines full of deals that never close. The passion-only team closes deals nobody can repeat.
And an asterisk has always meant one thing: there's more to this. In sales, the more is always the human.
what this means if you're a founder
If you built something great and selling it feels harder than building it was, the answer is not to become more corporate, more scripted, more armoured. Buyers do not need you to feel less. They need your selling to understand how they feel.
That can be learned. That can be taught to your team. That is the whole point of the Emotive Methodology, which we are publishing chapter by chapter: taking what I did on instinct for a decade and turning it into something your salespeople can run without you in the room. Start with chapter one on founder-led sales, and the rest of the method as it lands each week.
You built something great. Now let's sell it.
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James Irving is the founder of Emotive JLI, a sales consultancy for technical founders. He learnt to sell the old school way: 50 cold calls per day in a Manchester boiler room, then enterprise cybersecurity, then ThreatSpike, where he joined as the first commercial person and left with a £10M sales engine. Tell him what you've built or watch the stories.