The art of selling has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. Personal door-to-door and “press-the-flesh” selling made it easy to identify good salespeople. The metrics were quite simple: those who sold the most were the best.
Today, the new yardsticks for success take into account one’s ability to fully exploit smartphones, social networks, and other emerging technologies of human contact. But these are merely tools. What companies look for are how these tools are used to drive the sale and make the customer truly embrace a product and the company behind it.
One trait today’s companies look for in their salesforce is the ability to empathize with a customer. These salespeople drill down to a customer’s needs. They ask the question: why does this customer need our product or service? They go out of their way to match needs with benefits. Customers appreciate this so much so that they’re willing to do business with that salesperson on a continuing basis. For these customers, it’s more than one sale. It’s, “What else can I buy from this company via this salesperson?”
In Apple’s Genius Training Student Workbook, "empathy" is repeated endlessly and prospective geniuses are encouraged to "walk a mile in someone else's shoes." Apple's two-week, strictly regimented, tightly scheduled training program includes a major section on the "Power of Empathy." A key part of a Genius’ job is to make the customer happy. This simple truth is underscored by the following Apple maxims: "We guide every interaction," "We strive to inspire," "We enrich their lives," "We take personal initiative to make it right." In fact, sales are actually less important than establishing a good vibe with the customer. The entire workbook is built around empathizing, consoling, cheering up, and addressing a variety of Genius Bar confrontations.
New research by Case Western Reserve University reveals the selling power of empathy (see also the abstract).
When the brain allows an individual to empathize, it suppresses the neural network used for analysis, reducing the ability to appreciate the cost of one’s actions. In a normal healthy adult, the brain alternates between the social and analytical neural networks, ultimately choosing the appropriate neural pathway. The study basically says that humans can’t be both empathetic and analytic at the same time.
"This is the cognitive structure we've evolved," said Anthony Jack, an assistant professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve who lead authored the new study. "Empathetic and analytic thinking are, at least to some extent, mutually exclusive in the brain."
Perhaps nothing so eloquently capsulizes the importance of empathy in the art of selling as novelist, educator, Maya Angelou, who said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
Image courtesy of Nutdanai Apikhomboonwaroot/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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