If you follow my blog you may have noticed that I rarely refer to someone who has bought from you as a “customer”.  I do this consciously for a very specific reason.  The word customer has a connotation of a one-time sale or event sales.  When someone is your client it is expected that you will look out for them and their interests.  And that, my friend, is exactly what you must do if you aspire to be a top producer.

No matter what service you provide, if you aren’t careful, you can become thick-skinned.  You’ve experienced this, and you know how shocking it is to you that someone simply stops caring and ignores normal human compassion.  If this has happened to you I recommend you either snap yourself out of this lack of empathy for others, or transition into another career.

Top producers appreciate that to earn more sales than their peers they must act as their prospects/clients advocate first.  To make sales a smooth seamless experience enjoyed by you and your prospect you must be able to sit in both chairs.  This is empathy, and to be empathetic to your prospects you must first understand them and their situation.

Never confuse empathy with sympathy.  As their advocate you do need to be empathetic, however, you don’t want to be sympathetic.  When your sympathetic you commiserate with your prospect and that’s doing them a disservice.

They need you to understand them and help them as their advocate.  As their advocate you may have to help them discover what they’ve overlooked in their thought process.  As your prospects become aware that you’re acting as their advocate on their behalf they lose their fear of you as a sales person.  And that means it’s easier for you to do your job helping them to make the best buying decision for them.  It also means you aren’t fighting an adversarial position where your prospects feel like they have to protect themselves from you.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.