In a recent interview with Selling Power magazine, Carew CEO Jeff Seeley identified Three Skills Needed for Sales Professionals to Survive: collaboration, insight and empathy. Empathy is essential for sales success because we need insight and understanding of customer needs and motivations to deliver solutions of superior value. Viewing the world from the customer’s perspective also helps cultivate common ground and strong interpersonal relationships.
Here are two tips for taking your empathy to the next level for greater sales success.
- Seek to understand your customer’s customer. Why take your empathy one step further to consider the needs and motivations of your customer’s customer? It’s the most impactful way to support and facilitate your customer’s success and deliver exceptional value to him/her. And since few sales professionals take the extra step with empathy, doing so creates an immediate and key competitive advantage for you.
- Consider the personality type of your customer. In Dimensions of Professional Selling sales training, we address four distinct buyer types and the very specific needs and motivations of each. Using this consideration as an additional filter enhances our understanding of customers, sharpens our view of their needs, and facilitates solutions precisely targeted to meet those needs – both spoken and unspoken.
Sales professionals who are empathetic and function in their customer’s “Odds Are” will cultivate stronger and long-term relationships, gain greater influence and develop superior solutions for their customers. Taking empathy one step further amplifies its benefits and creates differentiation through exceptional value delivery. All of these factors make great strides in our pursuit of Preferred Position with customers.
