The Foundation of Sales EQ

Cognitive intelligence is empty without empathy. In one of my favorite quotes about empathy, author Dean Koontz explains why IQ alone isn't enough for ultra-high performance:

Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, and empathy.¹

Ultra-high sales performance requires intellect and empathy. Both play vital roles in relationships, communication, and helping people win.

Empathy is the foundational pillar of Sales EQ. It is the beginning and the end. Empathy is the ability to step into someone else's shoes and experience emotion from their perspective—to understand and identify with another's feelings and motivations. You demonstrate empathy for people by identifying with them, emotionally.

Empathy gives insight into the perspectives of others. It helps you see each person as a unique individual and understand that, regardless of how common a problem may seem to you, each stakeholder believes his or her problems, opportunities, and situation are special. It is from this perspective that ultra-high performers bridge to personalized solutions that validate that they understand that stakeholders view themselves as unique.

Empathy Scale

We all possess the capability of relating to the emotions of others.² For some people this comes easily, whereas for others tuning in requires intentional effort. My wife, for example, is highly empathetic. She doesn't need to work hard to feel what other people are feeling. I, on the other hand, am naturally egocentric. Because of this I must remain consciously aware of my emotional blind spots and be intentional with my efforts to be empathetic.

In his dissertation, Personality Characteristics and Superior Sales Performance, Dr. Marc Hamer makes the case that good salespeople are naturally self-centric rather than other-focused.³ If you don't have a competitive drive to win, if you are not motivated by achievement, if you don't have a bigger ego than most people, you're probably not going to last long in the sales profession.

For this reason, most salespeople, like me, must intentionally focus on developing empathy and tuning in to the feelings of others.

Empathy begins with self-awareness. In other words, to become effective at tuning in to the emotions of others, you must first become adept at tuning in to your own emotions and acknowledging your emotional blind spots.

I know that I'm not naturally gifted with empathy. I am aware that in most situations I'm going to default to focusing on my own emotional needs before I attend to those of others. I'm also aware that these traits help me as a salesperson because they allow me to do difficult things that most people will not—like run headlong into rejection—and hurt me in relationships.

Each person occupies a unique place on the empathy scale (Figure 8.1). Your natural gift for empathy is mostly innate—it's baked into your genes. So it's necessary to be honest with yourself about how you view the world.

Are you more other-focused like my wife or more self-focused like me? Most people fall somewhere in the middle of the scale—3s and 4s for the self-centric crowd and 6s and 7s for the other-focused.

One way of knowing where you sit on the empathy scale is to consider how you tend to interpret the behaviors, communication styles, and emotions of other people. Your snap judgments about people tell a great deal about how tuned in you are to the emotions of other people.

There are two general heuristics people employ to interpret behavior:

1. Situational attributions: Upon observing a person who is angry, you interpret this to mean that he or she is having a bad day or experiencing a difficult circumstance.
2. Dispositional attributions: Upon observing a person who is angry, you believe that it is a result of his or her underlying personality and subsequently label that person as an asshole or a jerk.

People who interpret human behavior based on situational attributions tend to be more empathetic than those who rely on dispositional attributions and labels.

So, we have a conundrum: people lower on the empathy scale tend to perform better in sales, yet the ability to tune in to the emotions of stakeholders in the context of the sales process is a fundamental key to ultra-high performance.

Intentional Empathy

The question: How to bridge this empathy gap? The answer: Conscious intention.

“We need you to help us teach our folks to spend less time on e-mail and more time on the phone interacting with people,” Patrick, a sales director for a 4-billion-dollar company, explained. Across his inside sales team of 25 reps there were mostly average salespeople, a handful of people exceeding their goals, and two ultra-high performers.

The two UHPs weren't just outperforming the group by a little bit. They were crushing it: the performance of the ultra-high performers was 300 percent better than the average group. Let that sink in for a moment—300 percent! The curious thing was that no one knew why.

I spent two days observing the team to learn what was going on. What I discovered wasn't shocking but it was eye-opening. Patrick's intuition that his people were spending too much time on e-mail was right on the money.

Almost 80 percent of the communication to prospects and customers from the average group was via e-mail. They sent e-mail after e-mail, with a few text messages sprinkled in.

In contrast, almost 90 percent of the outbound communication from the ultra-high performers was by phone—human to human. Let me disabuse you of the notion that the UHPs were older—perhaps Gen Xers who grew up using the phone. It's what most people think when I tell this story. However, one was 23 and the other 26.

Patrick's company does an exceptional job attracting talent and has a meticulous hiring process with a battery of assessments. The average performers had the same credentials, same skills, same intelligence, and same training as the ultra-high performers. Every person on the team was intelligent and talented.

The only real difference between UHPs and the average group was that the UHPs intentionally sought out and invested in relationships, whereas the average performers erected barriers between themselves and human interaction.

You must make the conscious decision to become other-focused when interacting with stakeholders. This begins with developing competence across four core dimensions of empathy:

1. A desire to understand stakeholders and view things from their perspective
2. Concern about how stakeholders feel
3. A focus on serving stakeholders and solving their problems
4. Deep listening

Deep listening—listening to stakeholders with all your senses (ears, eyes, and intuition)—opens a window into what your prospects are feeling and helps you tune in to their emotions.

Empathy comes easily when you intentionally give others your complete attention, turn off your self-centric thoughts, and become genuinely interested in what they are saying.

Regulating Empathy

Empathy is the most important of all Sales EQ traits. Period. The more empathetic you are, generally the higher your EQ. But too much empathy can also be a problem.

James came up to me on a break. He was participating in a Fanatical Prospecting Bootcamp and we'd just finished a short phone block.

“Jeb, you know the hardest part about this for me? If I were in the prospect's shoes I'd just hang up the phone. I hate when people call me. That's why I can't do this. It just feels wrong.”

James had been fiddle-farting around, playing with papers and doing anything other than pick up the phone. Meanwhile the other 25 people in the class had been kicking ass and taking names.

His empathy was getting in the way, causing him to project his feelings onto other people. This made it difficult for him to interrupt prospects. He didn't want them to feel the same way he did when he received a prospecting call; therefore, it was difficult for him to make calls.

Projecting is a common disruptive emotion for salespeople, especially those who are higher on the empathy scale.

James and I ate lunch together that day and discussed his feelings. He acknowledged that if he didn't start interrupting he was not going to be able to keep his job and feed his family. Since he wanted to do both, James came to the self-centric conclusion that picking up the phone was in his best interest.

Once that decision was made, we discussed the way prospects would prefer to be interrupted—we stepped into their shoes. We came to the other-focused conclusion that those interruptions should be fast, to the point, and relevant so that we would achieve our objective quickly without wasting their time.

James then deployed the 5-Step Telephone Prospecting Framework from Fanatical Prospecting because it allowed him to: (1) set the appointments he needed in order to make his number, keep his job, and feed his family, and (2) be respectful of his prospects' time.

He went to work and set four quality appointments that afternoon. Once he changed his mind-set and gained control of his disruptive emotions, he changed his game.

In the right measure, empathy helps you avoid intentionally injuring other people—physically and emotionally. Empathy regulates greed, hate, jealousy, anger, fear of scarcity, and a host of other potentially destructive emotions.

Without empathy, we'd have no compunction about steamrollering right over other people. Hence, extremely low-empathy people, like narcissists and psychopaths, use hyperempathetic people as doormats or worse.

Yet, in the sales profession, empathy has the potential to become a disruptive emotion that costs you money, career advancement, and potentially your job. In sales, you must be empathetic—tuned in to the emotions of buyers and stakeholders—while keeping your ultimate objective in perspective. This is Dual Process.