Active Empathy: The Secret Sauce in Sales

There are many tried and true techniques when it comes to executing sales effectively and closing business.  At the tactical level, these tools become fundamental to your success.  But at the strategic, long-term level where relationship is vital and your company's brand, as well as your personal brand, are at stake, sales requires something deeper.  Genuine empathy.

Empathy at its most simplistic is your ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes.  But sales is not about validating someone's feelings.  It's about motivating someone to take action by purchasing your good or service.  You can use empathy to be manipulative in this endeavor if you have a one-time sales opportunity and are not concerned about your brand's value.  But for those operating in a highly competitive, relationship business, empathy must be actively engaged to meet the buyers' personal and professional needs in addition to those of his stakeholders.

Active Empathy and Personal Objectives

I'm a big fan of Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling.  The acronym stands for Situation | Problem | Implications | Need-Payoff.  What I typically see in sales people, and try not to replicate in my own behavior, is SPN selling.  Ask the right questions; Identify the right problems | Apply your solution to those problems.  This is how most people approach semi-complex and complex deals.  And this misses the most important element: the implications.  We miss this because we are focused on the sale and not the customer.  We miss it because our empathy is passive and we are using it to identify a problem.  When our empathy is active, we use it to solve a problem.

Active empathy means not just understanding how our product or service meets the business needs of our customer, but how we can meet her personal needs.  Did your customer just come off a failed software acquisition and roll-out?  Is he gun shy about making the same mistake twice?  Is she in line for a big promotion and doesn't want to rock the boat?  Maybe there's internal resistance to the new DM's vision.  These are the problems that active empathy can uncover and position you to solve.  If you are a relationship manager charged with driving renewals, up-selling, cross-selling and otherwise increasing and enhancing your customer book of business, then active empathy is requisite.  

Active Empathy Enables Targeted Communications

With multiple stakeholders, active empathy enables you to identify and address individual demand drivers.  When you need to sell the Manager/Stakeholder, the Director/Decision Maker, and the VP/Economic Decision Maker its imperative to understand not just the business implications of sale/no sale but also the personal ones.  

For example, the VP's business need centers on a robust real-time dashboard that supports c-suite communications.  Her personal needs center on incentive compensation around 2 tech projects (not yours) and conflict with the CIO that will preclude your project from getting in the IT pipeline.  Because you understand this you can clearly articulate the light footprint of your SaaS solution and proactively propose her CIO speaks with 2 of your customer CIOs to put his mind at ease.  Of course by being empathetic you may also discover that the CIO is less concerned with roll-out and more with ongoing maintenance and incentives around meeting internal Service Level Agreements.  Either way, active empathy can position you as a solution partner rather than just a solution vendor because you are actively driving the success of each of your stakeholders.

Active Empathy Facilitates Internal Articulation

Have you ever had your product tossed out even when it appeared to be performing well?  Often this occurs because internal articulation of success is weak.  As a relationship manager who practices active empathy, you are well positioned to advise and assist all levels of stakeholders in articulating the success metrics that matter to both up-line and down-line stakeholders.  In the example above, that means your VP/EDM is regularly reporting to the CIO that your SaaS solution's support numbers are improving his IT organization's SLA metrics (thus helping him earn his incentive comp).  For the Director's down-line stakeholder it may be that the new solution makes cross-training simpler and has positioned more people for promotion than ever before.  Thus you are able, as a partner, to make your clients more successful at the business, organizational and personal levels.  That's a partnership that's very hard to compete with and one most clients will want to expand.

Conclusion

Active empathy is the difference between being a vendor and a partner.  It's the hidden element that makes your service more competitive despite pricing and feature variances that might not favor you.  It's the element that helps you penetrate an organization and then radiate and grow.  Ultimately, it's the difference between a good brand and a great one, both yours and your company's.