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.

Full post can be found at: http://www.executivesalesstrategy.com/2009/09/21/empathy/