Just walk a mile in his moccasins
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse.
If just for one hour, you could find a way
To see through his eyes, instead of your own muse
Mary T. Lathrap – 1895
The main line from this poem excerpt above has stuck with me from the first time I heard it in a poetry class in College. It often comes to my mind when I am struggling to understand others.
Understanding others, our having empathy, is the basis of how we connect.
Empathy goes a long way in our marketing and in doing business in a meaningful way.
If we do not understand what our customers are facing, how can we find ways to solve the issues they are up against?
What does your customer want?
In an earlier post, we talked about the value of being specific about who you serve. We need to take that a step further and clarify what it is that our customers are looking for.
What problem or frustration are they facing that your product or service offering can help resolve?
To answer this question, we need to take the focus off ourselves. To have empathy means to seek to understand others and what they are going through.
Shifting the emphasis of ourselves is part of what communication expert, Nancy Duarte, call making the customers the “hero” of your idea.
Daniel Goldman, who populated the area of self-awareness with his book Emotional Intelligence, writes about empathy in his book Focus:
Empathy entails an act of self-awareness: we read other people by tuning into ourselves.
In Focus, Goldman points out something fascinating about doctors and empathy.
To an extent, doctors need to block their empathy when they see a patient in physical agony or when they need to inflict pain on the patient during a procedure.
The research found that doctors with good bedside manner, those empathize and ask “Let me see if I have this right…” make better diagnoses and their patients have better outcomes.
This is key:
Orienting to the patient’s emotions builds rapport. Tuning out feelings and focusing only on clinical details builds a wall.
Focus, pg 110
As salespeople or business leaders, we can have more influence when we seek to understand and empathize with our customers.
This reminds me of a great marketing piece from Cleveland Clinic that demonstrates empathy.
Having empathy for others was one of the biggest lessons I learned from Seth Godin’s altMBA class. The most challenging question Seth floated my way was about understanding why people use our competition.
Why are people who buy from your competitors right?
Given the fact that you don’t have 100% market share, and the customers of our competitors are not stupid. Why would they buy from someone other than you?
For me, it has always been more fun to hate our competition and ridicule those who “get into bed with them…”
There might be a dozen reasons a customer chooses to use someone else, but the customer is always going to make what they feel is the right decision.
Take some time to think back to a customer or a piece of business that you lost. Why did they make the right decision to go with someone else?
Sometimes the competition you are facing is when the customer doesn’t do anything. They didn’t go with you, or someone like you, they didn’t do anything. Why?
What if you don’t know what your customers want?
If you are unsure of what it is that your customers want, it is okay to take a guess. That is what I have had to do with my sales coaching program.
Now that I have started to work with a couple of clients, I am starting to see things that they are facing:
- Under pressure to grow sales
- Wanting to increase commissions
- Finding time to do activities that grow the business
- Have a greater impact, make a bigger contribution and grow influence
- Have more time for things that are passionate about
- Developing employees while still running the business
May we remember that Jesus is our model for empathy. When we see his empathy towards us, we can be empathetic and love one another.
—
Greater love has no one than this,
that someone lay down his life for his friends.
John 15:13
—