Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach?

Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, “empathy” is the one word that matters most to sales [and marketing] success.

It’s tough to buy. B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information and too many choices, trying to get their colleagues to agree, not to mention second-guessing.

This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson (@brentadamson), Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

You’ll learn ways to apply empathy and how to solve buying problems.

Writers note: You can view part of our interview here: New research: Boost organic growth from current customers.

Does empathy capture everything your book, The Challenger Customer, is about?

Brent: The idea that empathy is the core principle of the entire book The Challenger Customer, I admit, is more of a personal opinion based on all of our research.

You’ll notice the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the proper book. It’s only in the acknowledgments where I made just a little blurb at the very back (a short note to my daughters). And I used the word empathy there.

But in many ways, for me personally, one word captures everything that the book is about.

I know this is a topic not only near and dear to your heart. But your expertise here is far deeper than mine.

But when I think of empathy, I think of two components to it, but it’s almost a right-brain, left-brain, or the rational versus the emotional.

I don’t know what the right way to think about it is.

But from my perspective, empathy is, at a fundamental level, your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.

And that might be logical (how they view the world from their perspective), or it might be emotionally (what the world feels like from their perspective).

I find both of those attributes of empathy to be potentially hugely powerful for anyone in sales or marketing.

How customers think

For example, whenever we’re talking about Customer Improvement or even the broader work in Challenger, is this idea of mental modeling.

The whole idea being, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you must understand more than anything else?

How would you answer that, Brian?

Brian: If I were to do that, I’d need to understand their experience and how they see things.

Brent: You got it. This is where I have fun talking to you because you get this stuff. And I say this with great, hopefully, empathy and respect for anyone out there.

What I find when I ask most leaders, sales, and commercial marketing leaders that question is: “If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand?”

Virtually everyone will say, “Their business.” So, then they start reading 10K’s and the annual reports and the financials and all that kind of stuff.

We saw in our research closer to where you are, which is, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you must understand is how they think about their business.

That’s the thing you’ve got to change.

Map customer thinking  

We find it can be very productive to draw a “map” on a piece of paper. A map of their thinking.