Building Trust through Empathy: A Practical Guide

Trust is the single most important purchasing factor in any sale. Trust is the buyer’s confidence that the seller will do right by them, and becomes more important as the level of vulnerability (risk, significance of the decision) and dependence (technical, knowledge, time) rises. As I am sure you can imagine, the importance of trust is highest in a strategic sale. Buyers will never work with a seller that they don’t trust, and will most likely choose to work with the supplier that they trust the most. The irony with trust is that most buyers don’t trust sellers. Look at mainstream media and its portrayal of salespeople; they’re dishonest, immoral, manipulative, and will do whatever it takes to meet quota. When I told my college roommate that I took a job in sales his first question was, “How do you know a salesman is lying? Their lips are moving!” Now I’m sure you’re saying “That’s not me”, but studies have overwhelmingly reported that people think others trust them at significantly higher levels than they actually do. Given the fact that trust is important yet buyers don’t trust sellers, it blows my mind that I have never seen a sales training that focuses around trust! It is a HUGE opportunity to win business. Although there are many ways to build trust (honesty, integrity, etc.), cultivating empathy for your customers and prospects will build trust in a way that will differentiate you from your competitors. Empathy is a fundamental building block of strong relationships and will allow you to build the foundation for a trusting relationship, encourage your customers to surface information that they normally wouldn’t, give you insight into what makes your customers tick, and form a connection with your customer that cannot be broken. Empathy is the ability to place ourselves in another’s situation, experiencing their emotions and perspective. If you’re worried that you aren’t good at empathizing, don’t. We actually have specific neurons in our brains, called mirror neurons, that help us with empathy. So we all have the tools to empathize, we just need to start working them out. So here are a couple tips to cultivating empathy within yourself; a fair warning that these things need to be practiced every day, as often as you can. Yes, they are soft and touchy-feely. But after all, you’re selling to people, and people buy with emotion. --Be cognizant of Your Own Emotion: It doesn’t matter how emotionally hardened you are, we all have emotions. Emotions are a survival mechanism embedded deep into our psyche, we’ve just been trained to quickly repress them because it isn’t professional. As emotions pop up that you want to immediately repress, hold it there and observe it. You don’t have to act on it, just observe it. After all, the more familiar we are with our own emotions the greater the chance that we will be able to read others’. --Practice Curiosity: Ask open ended questions, and listen to the answer for the sake of the answer (most people listen to the answer only to formulate a response). That should lead you to ask more questions, and the answers usually result in a pretty interesting story! Open ended questions start with “why”, “how” “tell me more about…”, “you mentioned…”. Ask yourself “How would that make me feel?”: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes as they’re talking, and try to figure out how you would feel if you were in the same situation. This will give you insight into their experience, perspective, and emotion. --Mirror: Repeat back what your customer said to you and try to guess their reaction: emotionally, physically, mentally, etc. If you’re right, you’re on track. If you’re wrong, the customer will correct you and know that you are truly curious about them. --Pull Out!: Experiencing someone else’s emotion can be intense. Learn to pull out of your empathetic state after you have gotten a taste so you can think about the situation rationally. --Identify their Master Character: Every society has a number of character types that are consistently in movies, TV shows, novels, and stories. Whether it’s the underdog that pulls through, or the powerful bad guy that gets what they deserve, these master characters are based on common personality types in society. Chances are your customer resembles a master character. If you can identify your customer’s master character, you can infer and anticipate how they will behave. Empathy isn’t the only aspect of trust, but it is the foundation to building it. Practicing empathy will also allow you to know your customer better than your competition. Would you be open to a trusting relationship with a person who treated you with the above empathy? 2009-10-12T18:25:52Z

-1.5995

179 6897

true

44037

building-trust-through-empathy-a-practical-guide

2009-10-13T07:33:13Z

2009-10-13T14:34:22Z

Trust is the single most important purchasing factor in any sale, yet buyers naturally distrust sellers. That is why it is important to build a trusting relationship, and there is no better way to do that than through empathy.

Building Trust through Empathy: A Practical Guide

2009-10-13T14:34:22Z