Customer Empathy and How to Solve Buying Problems with Brent Adamson, VP at Gartner

Summary: Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach?<br> Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, “empathy” is the one word that matters most to sales [and marketing] success.<br> It’s tough to buy. B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information and too many choices, trying to get their colleagues to agree, not to mention second-guessing.<br> This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson (<a href="https://twitter.com/brentadamson">@brentadamson</a>), Principal Executive Advisor at <a href="https://www.cebglobal.com/">Gartner</a>, and the co-author of <a href="https://www.challengerinc.com/sales">The Challenger Sale</a> and <a href="https://www.challengerinc.com/sales">The Challenger Customer</a>.<br> You’ll learn ways to apply empathy and how to solve buying problems.<br> Writers note: You can view part of our interview here: <a class="yoast-link-suggestion__value" href="http://www.markempa.com/research-boost-organic-growth-current-customers/" rel="noopener">New research: Boost organic growth from current customers</a>.<br> Does empathy capture everything your book, The Challenger Customer, is about? <br> Brent: The idea that empathy is the core principle of the entire book The Challenger Customer, I admit, is more of a personal opinion based on all of our research.<br> You’ll notice the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the proper book. It’s only in the acknowledgments where I made just a little blurb at the very back (a short note to my daughters). And I used the word empathy there.<br> But in many ways, for me personally, one word captures everything that the book is about.<br> I know this is a topic not only near and dear to your heart. But your expertise here is far deeper than mine.<br> But when I think of empathy, I think of two components to it, but it’s almost a right-brain, left-brain, or the rational versus the emotional.<br> I don’t know what the right way to think about it is.<br> But from my perspective, empathy is, at a fundamental level, your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.<br> And that might be logical (how they view the world from their perspective), or it might be emotionally (what the world feels like from their perspective).<br> I find both of those attributes of empathy to be potentially hugely powerful for anyone in sales or marketing.<br> How customers think<br> For example, whenever we’re talking about Customer Improvement or even the broader work in Challenger, is this idea of mental modeling.<br> The whole idea being, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you must understand more than anything else?<br> How would you answer that, Brian?<br> Brian: If I were to do that, I’d need to understand their experience and how they see things.<br> Brent: You got it. This is where I have fun talking to you because you get this stuff. And I say this with great, hopefully, empathy and respect for anyone out there.<br> What I find when I ask most leaders, sales, and commercial marketing leaders that question is: “If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand?”<br> Virtually everyone will say, “Their business.” So, then they start reading 10K’s and the annual reports and the financials and all that kind of stuff.<br> We saw in our research closer to where you are, which is, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you must understand is how they think about their business.<br> That’s the thing you’ve got to change.<br> Map customer thinking  <br> We find it can be very productive to draw a “map” on a piece of paper. A map of their thinking.