Weekly Sales Tips: Flexing Your Empathy Muscle
Let me ask you a question, how empathetic are you? Maybe a more important question, how do you turn your empathy into action?
There’s a lot of talk about empathy and its importance in sales, but what is it really?
The technical definition is feeling what someone else feels. It’s not feeling for someone, that would be sympathy. It’s feeling with someone. It’s about getting into their mind and even their soul and adopting their experience, be it positive or negative, but is that really possible?
Are we capable of getting outside of ourselves enough to feel what another person feels? I would say yes, to an extent. We cannot fully adopt another person’s feelings and experiences, for a simple reason, we all have our own agenda.
In the world of buyers and sellers, this is quite obvious. I can only be dominated by one agenda at a time. If I’m not careful, I will be so into my desire for empathy, that when a customer says, “We’re not going to make a decision today.” it would be easy for me to just accept that and back off.
Flexing Your Empathy Muscle
How do you practice empathy if you have a different agenda? Well, you don’t. Instead, you look at complementing agendas. You look for common ground. Now the most obvious common ground between a buyer and a seller is when you consider the end result. That is, the buyer bought, the seller sold, and everyone is pleased.
There is a common ground that we can establish. The buyer has a need and you have a way to fill it. They have pain, you have a cure. And that right there is our goal. Getting to the common ground of shared experience.
Flexing our empathy muscle doesn’t mean abandoning our own feelings or perspectives. In fact, that’s not possible, but it does require having a strong “want to” when it comes to understanding the feelings and perspectives of your customer. This provides us both a mind-frame and a mantra by which we can flex the empathy muscle. That mantra is this, ease the pain.
Ease the Pain
Now, how do you do that? Number one, of course, find the pain. This is what great discovery is all about. It has to start with both our desire and our ability to determine where it hurts.
Think like a doctor. We have to find the source of the pain.
- I need to know where it hurts
- I need to know why it hurts.
For example, suppose I’m selling brand new homes and my customer tells me that they need more space and more bedrooms than they have right now. Great. I have a clue as to their pain, but I need to know the source of their pain. So I ask, where specifically do you feel that? What drives you a bit crazy about the home you’re in right now?
The customer tells me that she has four kids sharing one bathroom. It’s a fight every morning.
Aha, there is your source of pain. How do you know that you’ve found the source? You’ll know it when the emotion comes out, the frustration, the aggravation, the tension. That’s what you need to see.
Relieve the Pain
I found the source of the pain. What’s next? I need to lessen the pain as the customer looks at her future. So let me put this into some sales verbiage here.
- Discover the buyer’s problem. Everyone has a problem, or you wouldn’t be talking to them.
- Discover the source of the problem. This is where you find the emotion.
- Solve the problem. Show them a future that is full of peace and relief, once they have moved forward.
Empathy itself is worthless without action. Please read that again; it’s so crucial.
I can’t talk about empathy without reminding you about the opportunity from Shore Consulting to help the Gathering Inn. The Gathering Inn is an organization near where I live that is dedicated to providing food, shelter, job training to the homeless population. It’s to get them off the streets and into permanent housing. Through the end of the year, Shore Consulting is donating 20% of all sales from the Shore Store.
Flex the empathy muscle, my friends, and until next time, learn more, to earn more!
