Don’t Be A Sales Zombie! How Empathy Helps You Win the Sale
A few weeks ago, I met a seasoned salesperson at a training session I conducted in Atlanta.
For his entire career, the salesman — we’ll call him Tom — thought the secret to sales success was taking control of his prospects.
In fact, he confessed, the trainers at his last session six months ago urged salespeople to actually follow customers out the door to their cars and stay there — until they agreed to buy or drove away from him.
Seriously? That sounds like a scene out of The Walking Dead , where zombies in a post-apocalyptic universe climb onto the hood of your car and pound on the windshield.
No wonder so many individuals have a negative image of salespeople! Human beings demonstrate empathy. Zombies blindly chase their victims.
In a recent survey of over 7,000 people, Daniel Pink, author of the bestseller To Sell is Human, asked: “What’s the first word you think of when you hear the word ‘sales’?”
Do you think the #1 answer was empathy? Nope.
Overwhelmingly, respondents offered negative words like slimy, pushy, dishonest and manipulative.
Let’s assume that most people have such unpleasant associations with sales before they ever meet you.
If you’re going to truly succeed in sales, you need to create a radically different experience for the customer.
It starts with taking off your sales hat and putting on your empathy cap.
Here are seven tips to help you develop your empathy.
1. Redefine your Endgame. It not about making the sale. It’s about helping the customer.
2. Work hard to achieve your customer’s Mission. Understand the problems they face before you start closing the sale.
3. Be 100 percent Present. Don’t get distracted by phone calls or other tasks on your plate. Pay attention to what your customers are saying and really listen.
4. Align yourself with your customers’ problems, desires and needs. Great communicators take responsibility for both sides of any communication.
5. Be Thankful. You can’t have empathy for customers if you aren’t humble. The quickest way to become humble is show gratitude for what you have. Every day, list ten things you are thankful for.
6. Act like a Human being. Forget those cheesy sales lines and really talk to your customers.
7. Stop Yapping. Don’t drone on about your product’s features and benefits. Start truly listening. Ask customers to give more detail. Be more interested than interesting!
Hone these qualities of empathy and your odds of changing someone’s world, and making the sale, will increase dramatically.
I think you’ll find it a lot more effective than jumping on someone’s windshield.
In fact, empathy might just be the key to changing someone’s world…
