Clinical empathy is key to survival in todays world.
When sellers understand the human experience of decision-making, they win, according to advisor and best selling author of The Transparency Sale: How Unexpected Honesty and Understanding the Buying Brain Can Transform Your Results, Todd Caponi.
Buyers are in a completely different mindset than they were in January. They need sellers who understand what problems they are managing and what goals they are trying to reach. Beyond that, they need to feel that sellers can empathize with their experience.
Clinical empathy consciously centers the buyer’s emotional response in the sales process, and according to Caponi, it’s the difference between effective selling now versus six months ago. When a business’ very survival is on the line, real empathy and honesty are more imperative than ever before.
Understanding every company’s three basic survival instincts.
Caponi argues every company is focused on three basic survival instincts, right now. This puts them in the mindset of scarcity, and it’s going to impact their willingness to do business.
Using a little behavioral science combined with practical application, sellers can actually read the buyer’s mind, allowing them to more easily connect to their experience and anticipate how to help them.
To understand the human decision making process in business decisions we need only look to ourselves for insight. Our basic response to financial insecurity is threefold:
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Eliminate discretionary spending
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Extend runway while reducing costs on the essentials
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Avoid downside risks
In times of scarcity, both personally and professionally, our lizard brain kicks in and we start to think about survival over everything else. The same instincts driving personal security are motivating global business decisions. This is because your prospects are, in fact, human beings.
When done right, customers stay, buy more, and advocate on your behalf.
The old adage of under-promising and over-delivering creates expectation inflation that works against our natural instincts in stressful situations. When everything is on the line, what we really want is the path of least resistance that fits within the new paradigm.
Effective sales reps and marketers create empathic routes for their prospects and customers by anticipating and removing friction from the purchase before they encounter it on their own.
A successful sale meets the customer where they are now, under stress, and grows with them when they are ready to scale up. For instance, reduced spending may have included the difficult decision to reduce workforce, but the work still needs to get done. By automating your Partner Program companies can save money and keep their partnerships on track. Visit Torchlite.com to learn more.
Todd Caponi
Author, Speaker, Workshop Leader
Todd Caponi is the author of the best-selling and 3x award-winning book, The Transparency Sale, a speaker & workshop leader as CEO & Founder of Sales Melon LLC, and Managing Director of Chicago’s VentureSCALE. Previously, he had spent almost 4 years building the revenue capacity of Chicago’s PowerReviews from the ground up as their Chief Revenue Officer…turning it into Illinois’ fastest-growing tech company. Prior to that, he’s held sales leadership roles with 3 other tech companies, including ExactTarget, where he helped drive the organization to a successful IPO and a $2.7B exit through the acquisition by Salesforce.com. He’s a former American Business “Stevie” Award winner for VP of WW Sales of the Year, and also once owned & operated a sales training company.
Learn How Transparency & Clinical Empathy Can Be Your Superpower
Todd Caponi, author of the award-winning book, The Transparency Sale (and former sales leadership team member for the Marketing Cloud), and Susan Marshall, Torchlite founder and CEO, talk effective selling in an uncertain market.
