How To: Empathy Selling – Why Empathy Works


We’ve examined empathy as a vital part of any well-executed consultative sale. Anecdotally, empathy has been proven successful, but why does it work? The obvious reason is that once you look at a transaction from the Buyer’s viewpoint, you see more clearly where issues surface. For instance, maybe your offering is priced fairly for its value, but putting on the empathy hat may point up the fact that your buyer may be stretching budget dollars to avail himself of your offering.

Similarly, empathy is the easiest way to deflate concerns. Old school sales methodology preached ‘objection rebuttals’ as a way of getting to ‘yes’. That was then. Nobody today likes to be ‘outtalked into a sale’. Empathy tells us this. By holding your prospect’s fears to the light using empathy, both of you take the mystery out of it and it usually isn’t as big of a dealbreaker as it seemed.

On a deeper level, empathy moves the sales process forward by giving the Seller power. It takes the adversarial potential of a transaction away, leaving Buyers and Sellers on the same side of the desk solving a problem, not fighting a tug-of-war. Similarly, Buyers treated empathetically by Sales people are likely to respond empathetically themselves, securing the interrelationship between them.

Empathy also works in a Customer Service or Client Relationship Management sense. If the entire relationship between Buyer and Seller is based on putting one’s self in the other’s shoes, when glitches or snags arise (as they always do), once again, both parties are on the same side of the fence in fixing the problem, rather than the Buyer pitting himself against the Seller. And, the more complicated the transaction (large projects affecting the entire enterprise), the more empathy comes into play, with numerous Users, Influencers, Economic Buyers, Technical Advisors and Executives all either ringing alarm bells or calmly solving the problem as partners.

Empathy works because the Seller takes responsibility for the transaction. Even things that go wrong that are a result of User error can be shouldered by a Master Empathy Seller. When the potential of fingerpointing is defused, cooler heads tend to solve problems more quickly.

Empathy works because it unites the efforts of all parties involved, moving as one to solve business problems—growing and sustaining companies.




1. Introduction, Empathy Selling
2. Adjustments
3. Break down the transaction
4. Focus Power, Daniel-san!
5. Sell an Asteroid to Captain Kirk
6. Can’t build a bridge? Build a pipeline--Can’t tear down a wall? Build a ramp.
7. Employ Empathy Marketing for Biz Dev
8. Empathy Selling, Mastery is Transparency
9. Empathy Selling, Stir of Echoes
10. Empathy Selling – Why Empathy Works?
11. Empathy Selling: How Do The Other Guy’s Shoes Fit?