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“Empathy? I hate that touchy feely stuff”

Written by: Sam Allman

Article Overview: Study after study has shown that KEY to solid relationships, selling, leading and parenting is empathy. Indeed, empathy is the prime characteristic of great salespeople.

“Empathy? I hate that touchy feely stuff”

A few years ago in New York, I was explaining how salespeople increase their sales by showing empathy. A male attendee complained, “I hate this touchy, feely stuff.” Well, this “touchy, feely stuff” puts the best salespeople at the top of their game. If you aim to become a top performer, you’d better learn to relate to customer’s emotions. It could double your sales.

Study after study has shown that KEY to solid relationships, selling, leading and parenting is empathy. Indeed, empathy is the prime characteristic of great salespeople.

Empathy is the ability to feel and understand what others feel. Exercising empathy, you can appreciate things you don’t agree with … from another’s viewpoint. Specifically for a salesperson, empathy is the ability to sense, understand, and respect the customer’s perspective, ideas, and feelings. To paraphrase the old Indian proverb: “If you want to understand me, walk a hundred miles in my moccasins.”

Empathy increases your selling productivity, because it increases your INFLUENCE over others. Empathy increases influence, because it’s a pre-condition to influence. Dr. Daniel Goleman, describing his decades of studying human behavior in Working with Emotional Intelligence, found that without empathy, our ability to influence and interact with others is severely limited.

We all become most open to influence when we feel the other person understands where we’re coming from. We drop our natural defenses, open our minds and listen to him or her. By contrast, if you’ve ever tried to influence a teenager, you may have heard the wail, “You just don’t understand.”

For salespeople, the desired outcome of showing empathy toward customers is simply stated: customers feel safe adopting the salesperson’s conclusions about the purchase, because those conclusions, in fact, support their interests. Isn’t that exactly what you seek from your customers? Their buy-in!!!

Therefore, if you want to sell to customers repeatedly and create “customers for life”, you need to link (or connect) emotionally with them. Empathy solders the weld for the two links.

Some believe that either we have empathy, or we don’t. However, Daniel Goleman has found that empathy has elements of skill and habit that we can acquire and extend. By working to deepen our empathy and compassion, we help ourselves to learn and grow.

Growing your empathy works when it comes from inside you. It must be genuine, or it crashes. Empathic feelings spring from the roots of our compassion. The best salespeople I’ve studied have their hearts in the right place. They deeply care for their customers.

In my experience, when we feel for people, we feel with people. Empathy and compassion connect us with others through a shared language of feelings and experience – one heart to the next. We enable our customers to begin to feel safe enough to talk about themselves – without fear of being judged, criticized, or abandoned.

The most productive salespeople show their compassion and empathy by listening, asking questions, connecting through common experiences. When they finally “get” the customer’s message, they echo it back. When it’s correct, it resonates. The customer connects. The customer relaxes and opens herself to reveal more, and then to listen to the salesperson.

“Listening is the art of using empathy to reach across the space between us. Passive attention doesn’t work.” (Michael P. Nicholsby) With your next customer, try listening with both ear and heart. Listen to uncover her inner wants and needs. If others have told you that you talk more than you listen, put this motto on your desk: “You can’t learn anything through an open mouth.”

Thus, people who love to serve others, who care about people, who can feel sincere empathy for others, make the best salespeople.

They also relate to the customer’s emotions. They empathize and connect. Having captured the customer’s imagination and trust, they can influence the customer’s thinking and emotions about the recommended products and services. Customers tend to buy in.

Have you ever sold a customer a second time? How big of an issue was price the second time? How does your approach differ when a happy customer re-enters your store? The fact is: when your customer feels you care about her, her trust for you increases and builds a foundation of the sale.

May I reiterate: this “touchy feely stuff “ is the essence of influence. Examine yourself, “How sensitive am I to customers’ feelings? Do I really listen to my customers? Do I try to understand how they feel? Or do I talk too much? Or assume too much?” Don’t be too lenient in grading yourself. The lack of this “touchy feely stuff” may be hurting your sales.

Remember, your customers are not thinking beings who also feel. They (and you) are feeling beings who also think.

Related Articles
  New Rules for Listening
  Games for Team Building That Everyone Enjoys
  “Funnel” or “Incubator?”
  Spiritual Coaching Practice
  Touchy Feely Is Not My Style

Article Tags: attendee, conclusions, daniel goleman, desired outcome, dr daniel, emotions, empathy, human behavior, moccasins, natural defenses, paraphrase, parenting, productivity, proverb, salespeople, salesperson, top performer, viewpoint, wail, working with emotional intelligence



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