We know it is easier to ‘connect’ with prospects who are similar in personality to ourselves. But what happens if the prospect is quite different to us in outlook, drivers and style? Often these prospects are dismissed, or we become less curious or less proactive with developing potential solutions to discuss with that prospect. This can limit our business development effectiveness and therefore reduces our success in winning business.
The link between empathy and curiosity is crucial to recognise for business development in those industries selling solutions to complex problems. Global design and innovation experts IDEO say that:
“Empathy allows employees to listen thoughtfully and see problems or decisions from another person’s perspective, while curiosity can then extend to interest in other people’s disciplines, so much so that one may start to practice them”.
Empathy is key in consultative selling as creating rapport and eliciting insightful answers to questions as part of defining the best answer relies to a large degree on a consultant’s ability to demonstrate empathy.
In our interpersonal interactions someone who can recognise the emotional drivers of others quickly and reasonably accurately is described as ‘empathetic’. Empathy can obviously help build our personal relationships but does it really matter in our business life outside of sales that we have a high level of sensitivity to the drivers of others? Research tells us that one’s EQ (Emotional Quotient) and empathy are also crucial indicators to leadership performance.
We know that helping employees develop both their soft skills and technical skills are important to client retention – particularly in the professions. Francesca Gino, an award-winning professor at Harvard Business School writing in the Harvard Business review, said:
“Leaders can help employees adopt a learning mindset by communicating the importance of learning and by rewarding people not only for their performance but for the learning needed to get there”.
Learning about empathy can make a big difference to people’s satisfaction with their role. It allows them not only to be more effective at business development and client management, but it can help mitigate frustrations one can have with others on the job, and learn how to better work together.
There are various books on the market that you can get a perspective from, but the best way is to use one of the empathy evaluation tools on the market. Some empathy evaluation questionnaires can be self-administrated, but the more sophisticated ones will be conducted by a specialist in the area who will then give each participant a nuanced debrief on their relative empathy strengths and weakness, and importantly how to improve their abilities to connect and work with people better.
It is clear that we should care about the level of empathy skills in team members involved in professional sales. The good news is that it is easy to evaluate levels of empathy awareness, and there are proven development steps one can take to improve it and in so doing become more proficient at business development.