Empathy
Becoming the most successful sales professional you can be certainly doesn’t happen overnight. Nor does it happen without self-awareness and good relationship building skills. And we know that those skills take time to develop. You don’t automatically become a better listener or more self-aware overnight.
A perfect companion to boost your relational skillset is to invest time working on your empathy muscle. Empathy includes listening both to yourself and others. It’s taking your relationship with a client to the next level, by metaphorically putting yourself in their shoes and truly connecting with their pain points and grievances. Why DO they need you? Until you master the skill of empathy, you’ll only be guessing.
At the risk of repeating myself, because it is so vitally important, empathy starts with listening. Really and truly listening to your clients. Colleen Stanley puts it excellently in this Sales Force article, “the empathetic salesperson treats his prospects the way he likes to be treated. He doesn’t avoid tough subjects or potential objections to doing business. He knows concerns are part of the day in the life of his prospects and a natural part of doing business.”
Exercise Empathy
Growing in empathy is like growing in any other skill. You’ve got to practice. Practice putting yourself in the client’s shoes, understanding how they feel. But before you make your next client your empathy guinea pig, feel free to start with yourself.
That’s right, empathy includes listening to yourself, as well as your clients. What do you want, specifically? What’s keeping you from your goals? How can you get past those barriers? Empathy and self-awareness are clear companions on this journey. Growing in one helps you strengthen the other almost automatically.
List goals you want to accomplish
Look at processes in place
Find the point of pain -- What is it that you can’t seem to get past?
Analyze WHY this is a pain point -- What’s the real issue?
FINALLY, decide how to change or adapt
If you find the above steps difficult to get through or you encounter mental roadblocks along the way. You might try these tools:
Meditation
Clearing your head can help solutions arise. Usually we have the answer to a problem somewhere in our busy brains, but with all the things we have to do it’s difficult to fish it out! Starting a daily meditation practice can help those solutions swim to the surface.
Role Play
Get with a coach, co-worker or mentor to simulate typical client situations. You can listen to feedback from them as well as record yourself and listen back. We often think we sound different than we are coming across to clients. But the tape doesn’t lie! Be open to hearing your own habits or mistakes and working to change these for the better. This can be tough on the ego but helpful in the long run!
For example, I’m typically a fast talker, but when I’m going into a presentation or interview I know I have to actively work against this habit. I became aware of this finally because I started rehearsing and role playing situations with my coach, I recorded myself and listened back, hearing what I actually sound like in client situations. And luckily, because I have an amazing coach, they didn’t just say “Wow Keril, you need to slow down”. If they had I would probably just have developed a new nervous mantra in my head: SLOW DOWN KERIL SLOW DOWN KERIL SLOW DOWN. Instead my coach gave me a concrete assignment: Pause three seconds before I respond to anything the client says. This helped me create a NEW habit instead of berating myself for the bad habits already in place. I also learned what it must feel like for a client to be bombarded by my pace of talking and used this knowledge to adjust my speed and tone so I’m not “selling” to them, but engaging in conversation more actively.
“Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt
Empathy vs. Sympathy
It’s fairly common to confuse empathy with sympathy, but oh so important to distinguish between the two.
Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone: “Oh that really sucks that your boss made you work overtime to fix someone else’s mistake and didn’t compensate you fairly.”
Empathy is feeling WITH someone: “I feel your pain because I’ve heard clearly what you’ve related to me and perhaps also I have past experiences that are similar.”
Sympathy is a one-step process.
Empathy moves a person to action.
Sympathy says “bummer” and moves on. Empathy says “I feel what you feel and use this feeling to motivate real change.” As sales professionals, we must cultivate true empathy in ourselves each and every day.
The Galvin Blog summarizes it so well, saying that “to lead with empathy means to prioritize other people’s emotions. As a salesperson, this requires reflecting on existing habits and adopting ones that widen your understanding of your customers’ emotions, thoughts, and experiences. This may include changing your perspective, being more present, actively listening, asking clarifying questions, or pausing before responding.”
Some would say you should abandon selfishness in order to speak to and hear clients effectively, but I disagree. I don’t think we, as humans, have the capability to abandon selfishness completely. But, if you use empathy as a tool to understand the client’s point of view, you can use this perspective to work towards a mutually beneficial outcome for both yourself and the client.
Helping others get everything they want benefits you as well. If you focus on solving others’ problems, you’ll also benefit by building strong client relationships, which leads to, you guessed it, LOTS OF SALES.
I want to wrap up with this brilliant insight from Heather R. Morgan in a Forbes article from a couple years ago. She says, “instead of fixating on your pitch and your features, take the time to learn as much as you can about the other person and view the situation with their eyes. Good salespeople will do this before the meeting. Great salespeople can empathize and adjust in real time, as the meeting is taking place.”
Separate empathy from sympathy. Work on it in tandem with self-awareness and you’ll be well on your way to building quality relationships that create excellent clients for years to come.
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Becoming the most successful sales professional you can be certainly doesn’t happen overnight.