Why Empathy is Critical for Sales Calls and How to Develop It

Summary:

• Empathy is essential for connecting with prospects on a personal level, helping to build authentic relationships that enhance sales conversations and results.
• The right technology helps you have more conversations where you can meaningfully connect. Tools like PhoneBurner’s single-line power dialer can facilitate more genuine connections by eliminating the common barriers introduced by other dialing technologies.
• Empathy can be learned. To develop more empathy for your sales calls, ask the right questions to understand the prospect's situation, visualize yourself in their position, be present during conversations, and practice active listening.
• Incorporating empathy into daily interactions can improve sales effectiveness. This involves being vulnerable, supporting causes, engaging with diverse people, and using empathetic communication to foster deeper connections and better understand customer needs.

Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and imagine the world through their eyes. It’s not something you hear a lot about at sales meetings—but it’s important nonetheless.

Why? It’s simple—empathy is at the root of how humans connect to each other. If you’re trying to have more quality conversations with prospects, you need to base them on authentic connections and understanding. That means learning how to empathize, in sales and in life.

Why Empathy Is a Critical Sales Skill

Sales occur when a prospect is facing a challenge or struggle, or has a want or need—and they believe that you can help.

In other words, there's a connection between your prospect's situation and you. That's the power of empathy.

The deeper your understanding of your prospect's condition, the better your ability to find solutions, and the greater your ability to build a relationship and influence them in a positive way.

At PhoneBurner, we believe that empathy is not just an innate quality. It is a skill you can practice, learn, and grow. Today, we’ll lay out a process for you to start showing more empathy on your sales calls.

How to Develop More Empathy on Sales Calls

Use Tools that Facilitate Genuine Connections

Empathy is hard to foster when the technology you use to reach people makes the conversation feel impersonal. This is a common problem for sales teams that use auto dialers or predictive dialers—where delays after the prospect picks up the phoneget in the way of meaningful conversations.

Using a single-line power dialer like PhoneBurner can help you maintain your call cadence while still ensuring that the prospects you call always have delay-free, 1-to-1 connections with a human, when they answer.

By streamlining repetitive tasks and follow-up sequences, our platform gives you more time to focus on quality conversations with your leads—since time-consuming busywork is handled for you.

Plus, the clarity of a Tier One carrier, optional Branded Caller ID to increase live answer rates, and built-in noise reduction help ensure that conversations leave a positive impression.

Ask the Right Questions

You can't put yourself in someone's shoes without knowing their story. Your script needs to include questions geared toward uncovering your prospect's situation, asked in a way that positions you as someone trying to help.

So what do you need to know to be able to help your prospect? Every prospect is different, but try some of these: 6 Sales Prospecting Questions You Need to Ask.

Picture Yourself in Their Position

Asking questions is not enough. That's because empathy occurs on an emotional level, not on a logical one. So once you have an idea of the situation your prospect is in, ask yourself:

• What emotions are the prospect experiencing right now?
• What do those emotions feel like if I experience them?
• Have I ever been in a similar situation? How did I feel?

Maybe your prospect is feeling afraid about spending money on your product or service, because they’ve spent money on similar products that didn’t work.

When you can connect and even feel this fear yourself, you can understand your prospect on a deeper level, better work through the objection, and earn their trust. You might even have a story of yourself, or another client, that was in a similar situation.

Be Present

Instead of pushing an agenda or trying to push a product that your prospect might not need, take time to be present in the moment. This present focus is key in having empathy.

How can you be more present on sales calls?

• Listen to what they’re saying and don’t come into the call with assumptions
• Ask questions and focus on understanding their perspective
• Be conscious of their emotions as well as your own
• Don’t be dependent on the outcome—allow yourself to accept whatever happens
• Be open-minded—if your product isn’t the right fit for their problem, be honest about it
• Don’t multitask while on the call

Learn More: How to Increase Sales Through Active Listening

Make Empathy a Habit

Empathy is not something that’s easily dialed up and down. If you’re not empathetic in your daily life, you’ll have trouble being empathetic on sales calls.

To make empathy a habit, you can start by following the above with people you talk to throughout the day.

Here are some other ways to build your capacity for empathy:

• Practice being vulnerable. Many of us go through life with masks, afraid to show our true selves. But in order to really connect and show empathy, you need to take off the mask and be vulnerable with people.
• Support a cause. Whether you support a cause financially or with your time and effort, you're exercising empathy. Find a cause or condition you sympathize with, and help.
• Talk to strangers. Increased empathy comes by interacting with more people and understanding the situations they face.
• Get out of your comfort zone and try new things. When you expose yourself to different people, places, and lifestyles, you start to eliminate the differences between your life and others’, which makes it easier to relate and feel others’ emotions.

Support Meaningful Conversations with Reliable Dialing Technology

Empathy is all too often overlooked when it comes to sales. But if you can develop and show more empathy, it can help you improve your numbers, make better connections, and build strong relationships with your customers.

Use the right tools to reach your prospects more effectively, then employ the techniques in this article to make sure you’re naturally empathizing with their situation. Doing so will help you provide the solutions they need in a genuine way, and ultimately help you close more deals.

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