The Secret for Sales Success in the Tech-Driven, Evolving Marketplace: Empathy
Technology advances are driving extraordinary changes across the marketplace with much impact on the profile and dimensions of sales processes. The balance between buyers and sellers has shifted, affecting the importance and dynamics of relationships. Integrating empathy into your individual and team sales routines is now essential to stay competitive and break through faster-evolving, more complex and crowded markets.
Paradigm Shifting
As a seller, you used to have more power. Buyers needed to interact with you as a key source of information about products and services they desired. Now, easy access to data allows buyers to conduct extensive research, find countless verified opinions, as well as solicit specific recommendations. Before you ever come into contact with potential buyers, they are now well-advanced in the sales process, with much more knowledge about your offering and your competitors’.
The bar has been raised. If you want to convert leads into sales successfully, you need to be able to differentiate yourself and your offering. In order to do that, empathy is the essential skill to use — to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and experience what they are going through. Empathy allows you to connect with prospects and their situations, develop lasting customer relationships, hire the right team members, and collaborate effectively to achieve optimal results.
In-depth Insights
Stacey Justice, VP of Sales Strategy at Workfront, shared that everyone in the sales group asks specific empathy-driven open questions at the beginning of every sales process to “get to the pain”. The objective is to discover the root causes and extensive impact of prospects’ problems, not just superficial symptoms. Proposals can then be more compelling, identifying the full potential value of implementing their software solution, making a purchase more likely.
As Head of Sales at Fuze, Chris Doggett, has frequently coached his team to use empathy skills to relate to potential customers’ mindsets when they are at early stages of appreciation about the benefits of Fuze’s services. He established empathetic active listening practices for all sales teams, especially during initial interactions. When prospects feel heard, trust-based relationships can build more easily, and when current experiences are properly understood, solutions can be proposed that are accurately-targeted.
Customer Connections
To stand out, developing meaningful rapport with possible customers is essential, especially as the sales cycle becomes more involved, and sales often continues to be engaged after the initial conversion. Practicing empathy, team members can recognize their prospects’ points of view and connect with how they feel, generating appreciative responses in return and encouraging relationships to strengthen during the sales process. The head of one sales group for a financial services company reckons 90 percent of his teams’ sales are relationship-based. He only hires people with a genuine interest in people and a well-developed ability to connect with them.
A senior financial trader explained that when she calls any client, she connects first on personal elements and taps into their emotional state and receptivity to explore new opportunities. She builds relationships based on carefully-tailored, client-specific experiences that must also be compliant with company policy and regulations. Navigating relationships and new legal parameters, utilizes all her well-practiced empathy skills. Hazel Lyons, International Advertising Director at Travel Weekly USA, uses empathy to be highly-attuned to servicing clients’ needs, providing numerically-weighted proposals and reports that respond to clients’ focus on ROI.
Communication & Collaboration
The ‘lone wolf’ image of a successful salesperson is outdated in the current environment. Brian Bresee, Senior Sales Manager at HubSpot, confirms that the most successful teams collaborate. At HubSpot, they lean in to the Cultural Code of H.E.A.R.T. Two years ago, the ‘E’ changed from ‘Efficiency’ to ‘Empathy’. Katelyn Craine, Culture Program Manager at HubSpot, described how managers are coached to promote psychological safety using inclusive language, so every team member can feel comfortable to communicate and collaborate openly and support each other’s successes and boost team outcomes.
Bresee pairs up his teams’ members to share skills, which also increases dialog, cooperation and deepens their mutual understanding. Similarly, at Fuze, sales team members confer after every call to explore how they can help others make progress and convert sales, improving overall team results. Within teams, there are high levels of mutual respect, supported by strong interpersonal relationships. Another empathy-related strategy is practiced by the head of a financial sales group. He deliberately maintains his own clients so that he can relate personally to his teams’ daily experiences and better support them and the group’s performance. He believes he can manage most efficiently with empathy.
Recognition, Relationships & Recruiting
He also heavily weights relationships in team members’ compensation. 50 percent of bonuses is determined by individual financial performance and the other half is based on their attitude — looking at external and internal relationships and interactions. HubSpot regularly surveys employees about their happiness and sense of inclusion — closely related to empathy — to monitor progress and identify potential training needs.
Relationships are important to nurture — within sales teams as well as with clients both facilitating and facilitated by empathy. At HubSpot, Bresee’s team — which is almost entirely distributed — has regular ‘remote water cooler’ video chats to share experiences, ideas, and catch up personally. They also have monthly online and in-person events such as Remote Trivia and Mystery Dinners.
In recruiting efforts, HubSpot emphasizes behavioral questioning to be able to figure out a potential hire’s empathy skills and how well they will likely connect and work with customers and team members. A bank sales lead seeks out individuals who are open-minded and curious as well as personable. Justice commented how Workfront looks for people who are driven and passionate about helping clients succeed. They underscore the benefits of empathetic interactions when interviewing candidates as well as with existing employees.
Empathetic Habits
To integrate empathy into your sales process, prioritize the critical moments of personal interaction — with prospects, existing clients, and team members. At these moments, purposefully pause to consider other parties’ perspectives and experiences. Emphasize listening over speaking, watch for visual and audio clues and cues, and verify your understanding. Incorporate what you learned about others’ situations to fine tune your responses, interactions, and proposals. Your efforts will yield significant dividends.
Use empathy to boost your external connections and conversions and your internal communication and collaboration. In these new conditions, emphasizing interpersonal skills is essential for you to thrive in a sales role.