Empathy is at the core of consultative selling and leadership skills

Empathy is an emotional intelligence skill defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.?If we can honestly step into someone else’s shoes and understand their situation, we are empathetic.?This however, is not as easy as it sounds.

Empathy happens to be at the core of consultative selling and leadership skills. In sales it refers to?prioritizing the emotions and feelings of the customers. By respecting and understanding customers' perspectives and thinking, a salesperson can build trust and foster a healthy relationship with them. People buy from the people they trust.?Empathy elevates trust, which is the foundation of great conversations and relationships.?It helps salespeople deal more effectively with potential objections and roadblocks, and improves closing ratios because soft skills do produce hard sales results.?Good salespeople listen to their clients / prospects and are present with them.??It’s important to recognize that some view empathy as a hard business skill that impacts an organization's bottom line.

The honest demonstration of empathy is not something that can thoroughly be acquired in a one-day training program.?It could take significant follow-up training and coaching to create empathy proficiency in a sales team.?The demonstration of empathy can really differentiate you from your competition.?It allows you to build a level of trust that’s difficult to reach with pure personality or superficial banter.

But how does one effectively use empathy in sales? Here’s a list of six tips that can help you incorporate empathy into every sales conversation. If this list feels like too much, try just a few, and you’re likely to see an immediate improvement in the depth of your rapport.

1. Slow down and listen. Then listen some more.

2. Ask the prospect for their thoughts and feelings.

3. Accept the prospect’s interpretation.

4. Think before you respond.?

5. Imagine yourself in the prospect’s shoes.?

6. Make the decision together.?

The bottom line: Everyone wants to feel heard and understood by others in the communication process.?You are demonstrating an emotional response to the other person in the communication.?This demonstration of empathy allows your prospect or client to feel like this has transpired, they feel like you “got” whatever they are experiencing.?????

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered, “We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.”?Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery that when emotions are impaired, so is decision-making. This means we need to go beyond logic to understand how our customers feel.

Customers aren’t saying, “We need solutions.” Instead, they’re saying, “We need to solve a problem.” What would happen if your sales team focused on helping them do just that? To do that, you need to train your team to think empathetically—to share your customer’s feelings and think what they think.

Our flagship program, “Presenting Your Best Self: the 12 Essential Skills of Authentic Communication, addresses empathy as an integral part of the communication equation.

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