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Deposits and Withdrawals at the Trust Bank

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I’m going back and re-reading Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s excellent new book Trust Agents.  At #25 on Amazon’s sales ranking, it’s “only” at 425 tonight. Look for a review upcoming on the book from this blog.

One of (many) points it re-emphasized for me was the nature of trust value creation.

How often have you said something like, “I can’t ask that question, or discuss that topic, or have that conversation—we haven’t established enough of a trust relationship yet.”

Maybe you think of trust in the way you think of deposits at the bank: you need to make enough deposits before you can make withdrawals.

But trust relationships only follow that metaphor up to a point. Trust is, after all, a relationship; it takes two to tango. One-sided “deposits” don’t build a relationship–they make a relationship uncomfortable.

If all you do is do favors for someone, you don’t create trust—you create guilt. In order for trusted relationships to work, you need to allow the other party to discharge some of the accumulated obligations that you create by being trustworthy and trusted.

If you allow the other party to do you favors—to trust you in turn—you actually deepen the relationship. Asking someone a favor—far from drawing down on deposits at the trust bank—actually builds the net trust between you.

It’s an issue of balance between deposits and withdrawals, and of activity in the account. If the balance between deposits and withdrawals is roughly equal, that’s good; gross imbalance is not good. And the level of activity has to be maintained; a stagnant account negates all the deposits.

Yes, it’s good to make “deposits” in the “trust bank.” But withdrawals are equally important. All trust “accounts” are truly joint accounts. Both parties have access to it, and both parties must play their roles.

If they do, then double-entry bookkeeping does not apply to trust accounts. Some other law of multiplicative value applies.

The trust bank operates by those multiplicative laws.
 

The Paradox of Selling, Simple and In Your Face

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rantRantmaster (among other titles) Jack Hubbard , over at St. Meyer & Hubbard, has a lovely little blog piece whose simple charm belies the depth of its message.

Seems Jack’s wife got laid up due to a fall. So Jack had to curtail his travel schedule.

This meant two things. First, an exploratory trip to a piano store to satisfy a long-lasting desire by Jack which would keep him (and his wife) entertained for the weeks of enforced home time.

Second, a call from American Airlines Platinum asking Jack if his many cancellations meant they’d done anything wrong.

The details are worth reading, but basically, the piano guy kept calling with harassing product-based demands for Jack to buy a piano. And the American Airlines guy called back just to see how Jack’s wife was doing.

Small difference? Big difference, as Jack explains well.

Buyers Are Happy to Buy, They Just Don’t Want to be Sold

The paradox of selling, put as simply as I can, is that if you are willing to give up your attachment to the sale, you are more likely to get the sale. And that is counter to almost every sales program you’ll read, which all teach you—in the latest and greatest neuro-behavioral-process language–precisely how to get the sale. Now, that’s attachment.

The real answer of how to get the sale is: stop trying to get the sale.

You do not increase sales by concentrating all your energy and attention on getting the sale: paradoxically that just broadcasts how selfish you are.

Instead, you do what the American Airlines guy did: you focus on the customer’s needs—even if those needs don’t immediately have to do with your product.

Does that mean the American Air guy didn’t want to sell? That he had no quota, or interest, or that he was giving away free product? Heck no. He just saw the bigger picture.

Stop Trying the Close the Sale

It’s accepted wisdom in most parts that you should pretty much always be trying to get, and to close, the sale. Well, not so fast.

The bigger picture is, people buy from those who actually seem to give a damn, to actually care about their customers. Customers know the deal, they know how you get paid and that you’re in business to make sales. They just don’t want you shoving it up their nose at every turn.

The paradox is: if you’re willing to help people and not turn every interaction into a “closing moment,” ironically people become more willing to buy from you. It’s not a trick, it’s not a gimmick: people genuinely prefer to deal with people who behave generously toward them.

Does it work? Of course it does. The amazing thing is, it’s so simple. Be decent to people–people prefer to buy from decent people. Why haven’t sales authors and sales trainers picked up on this non-secret?

Here’s Jack’s take-away:

Mrs. Hubbard? She is fine now, thanks. And she is much more likely to step onto an American Airlines plane in the future than to ever step foot back in that piano store.

‘Nuff said. Thanks, Jack.

Buying Lessons from a Master Salesman

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts. I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

I spent some time in South Florida this weekend with Sam, a retired former rep for a national clothing manufacturer—that is, he wholesaled clothing lines to retail stores and chains. His territory was New York. Here’s what he taught me about buying.

How Buyers Say They Buy–from Expertise

A few years ago, he got a terrible pain in his left knee. Three doctors in a row said he needed either a knee replacement or arthroscopic surgery. A fourth doctor said he suspected it was actually a hip problem which caused a pinched nerve, which resulted in knee pain.

“I’m not a hip guy,” said doc four, “but my new young colleague is. I’d like you to have a chat with him. “Fine,” said Sam, “anything to get rid of this debilitating pain so I can get back to tennis and golf.”

“The doctor was young,” Sam said. “That was no problem. But he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me it was a hip problem all right, and all those other fancy doctors had it wrong. None of them had even taken an x-ray of my hip, but he did.”

“Problem was, I couldn’t get over him not looking me in the eye. If a buyer or a seller won’t look the other in the eye, I just don’t trust him. Kiss of death and all that. So I says to him, ‘hey, I’m over here—who you talking to?’ He just said he was a distracted kind of guy, nothing to worry about.”

“But that’s exactly what I worry about. So I went back to his boss, Doc 4, and I said no offense at all, I just think I’ll look for someone with a little more experience.”

I asked, “Sam, you told me you didn’t trust the guy; why didn’t you tell his boss?”

“Well,” Sam said, “I don’t want to be ruining some kid’s medical career, so I just made a plausible excuse.”

And there you have it. Sam—a highly experienced and successful salesman, basically says people buy on trust, including him. And yet, when asked by the seller (Doctor #4) why he didn’t buy, he lied—he said it was lack of experience. He didn’t tell the truth–which is that he didn’t trust the young doctor.

How Buyers Really Buy–From Trust

So it always is. Sellers think buyers buy on expertise; they don’t. They buy on trust. And when they ask buyers why they didn’t buy, the buyers claim it was on expertise. And since that’s the answer sellers want to hear, they believe it.

The truth is otherwise. As Jeffrey Gitomer puts it, people buy with the heart, and rationalize it with their brain. We overrate the importance of processes–and underrate the importance of connection.

The irony is that young doc was right. Sam underwent arthroscopic knee surgery with a high-reputation doctor in South Florida, and the result was nothing but more pain.

A year later, Sam visited a hip specialist in NY who diagnosed hip troubles just by watching Sam walk. He got a hip replacement two months later, and shot a 47 on the front nine a few weeks ago–pain free.

The young doc was right. Unfortunately–So What. He treated the patient like a case study, not a human being.

Sam would be the first to tell you: being right is vastly overrated. Earning the right to have people believe you’re right—that’s where the trust comes in.

That’s trust. That’s how people buy. That’s good selling.

Selling Without Making the Buyer Feel Sold (Part 2 of 2)

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(This post was originally published in RainToday.com).

In yesterday’s post, I suggested that most salespeople feel a tension between the felt need to sell, and the desire not to make buyers feel like they were being sold. There is a solution, I suggested, which parallels some characteristics of gifts. They create an obligation to buy, but not in the tight, transactional, market-based way we think of as selling. Instead, they create a friendly, bonding form of loose-obligation. Selling based on that approach–being willing to give freely of sample advice for a period of time to a select group of candidate firms, ends up being highly profitable. Today: Why it’s hard to do, how to do it, and thoughts on the paradox of selling this way.

Why This is So Hard to Practice

The best salespeople practice this technique already: they freely give of their expertise—a tiny bit to everyone, and a lot more to a select group of people.

They don’t expect sales from any particular person at any point—yet they definitely expect an aggregate amount of sales from an aggregate amount of leads. They just don’t know from whom or when. But as long as the return rate remains high, they are quite happy not to be more controlling with any one lead.

Unfortunately, this line of thinking is the opposite of what passes for Received Wisdom in sales these days. Tools like Salesforce.com reinforce the idea of more control, smaller time increments, and more metrics. The dominant theme in improving sales is about efficiency, not effectiveness.

Every transaction is treated not only in isolation from others but is broken down even more finely. Behaviors are sliced and diced, incentives more finely tuned. Qualifying the lead happens more frequently and at shorter time intervals. The net effect on customers is to feel more mechanically processed. They will resent the actions and will push back.

How to Do It

It takes a strong personality to not give in to the general business demand for short-term and impersonal sales techniques. But the rewards of staying the course are great. The way to think about it mainly comes down to two changes: less control in timing and in metrics.

Timing: Take a longer view of the desirability of a particular lead. It’s the ability to show a sustained, genuine interest that offers the chance of a relationship. This doesn’t mean you don’t screen and exclude buyers; it means you do it more definitively and less frequently.

Metrics: In a longer timeframe, decision metrics become far simpler, and selling can focus on relationships, not evaluating transactions. Are you being invited in? Are they returning calls? Is there a real project being discussed? If yes, keep it up. If not, stop it.

The Paradox of Selling

Yes, you still want to sell what you sell. And yes, they still don’t want you to control them.

Don’t choose one or another, and don’t sub-optimize. By lengthening your timeframe and reducing the precision and number of metrics, you open up space for natural human instincts to work. In that context, you can intelligently give the gift of sample selling, and you can reduce the need to control that gift. That way people can feel the natural inclination to reciprocate rather than the resentful guilt or rejection that short-term control induces.

Selling Without Making Buyers Feel Sold (Part 1 of 2)

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(This post was originally published in RainToday.com).

One obvious purpose of selling is to persuade buyers to buy what you are selling. Most people have no trouble agreeing to that proposition.

Yet the harder you try to get people to do what you want them to do, the more likely they are to push back, resist, and generally behave contrarily.

Again, I think most people would agree.

Put those two statements together, and we can easily see selling as an ongoing struggle to get people to do what we want without making them feel that we are trying to get them to do what we want. Selling has at its heart a struggle to reconcile these two truths. You want to sell. They don’t want to be sold.

When two truths collide, one tends to lose, or they both tend to get watered down. But the way out is not to give up one goal (to sell) or the other (to not cause the feeling of being sold); it is to fully recognize both and transcend the apparent paradox.

It can be done. Here’s how.

The Tension Between Sellers and Customers

This paradox is hardly new. Sellers have palpably felt since time immemorial the tension to selling. Most sellers resolve the tension by one of three strategies:

  1. Defaulting to Truth One: hard selling 24-7 to anyone who comes within feeding range
  2. Defaulting to Truth Two: being nice and giving away money, relying on the hope that guilt will induce a sale
  3. Living With It: internalizing some form of denial, schizophrenia, or multiple personalities.

But there is another way.

The Other Way to Sell: Time, Gifts, and Trust

People resist being sold. But people love receiving gifts. In fact, receiving a gift induces a sense of obligation on the part of the recipient. Which suggests a strategy of "feels like" gift-giving might be the best form of selling.

For services businesses, there is an analogue to gifts—it’s what’s called sample selling in product businesses. Sample selling in the services might mean brainstorming, a small project, a "lunch and learn," a webinar, a series of articles, a series of conversations for which you don’t bill time, or sharing of some previous work.

Sample selling works even better in intangible services than in businesses that have "hard" products. The best way for a client to learn how to work with you is to let the client work with you. Create a sample experience.

But that’s only half the problem. The other half: if you set out to give a gift with the express intent of inducing guilt-based buying, you’ll get the reverse—outraged backlash at what is perceived as bait and switch, duplicity, two-facedness.

A gift has two features: it is open-ended, and it implies an ongoing relationship. (Think of Don Corleone in the movie The Godfather: "Perhaps, sometime in the future, and that time may never come, I will call upon you for a favor.") It is non-specific. It is not legally or logically binding, but it carries huge emotional obligation.

When we try to use the language of the market: "If you give me this, I will give you that" or "If you do this for me, I will do that for you," things change. That is the language of a contract, of money, of transactions.
The trick is for the seller to give up attachment to the specific short-term outcome of a particular gift to a particular buyer in a particular timeframe. The seller needs to give a sample as a gift, a generally social-obligating offer, not as a hard-obligating transaction.

Applied to selling, this means a strategy of loosely controlled sample selling is far more powerful than a tightly controlled strategy of transactions.

In simple terms, if you’re generous as a policy to a sensible group of people in the short term, many of them will buy in the long term.

Part 2, tomorrow: Why this kind of selling is so hard; how to do it; the paradox of great selling.

Seller’s Remorse in the Marketing Business

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Courtesy of Advertising Age,  a peek into a catfight; a domestic squabble; a business story right out of a Hollywood fanzine.  Famous buyer vs. aggrieved seller.

The Famous One here is Zappo’s, beloved by the online set and poster child du jour for customer service.  The aggrieved party (picture them throwing a pair of stiletto high heels at Zappo’s head) is marketing agency Ignited.

With what crime does Ignited accuse Zappo’s?  Disrespect, it would seem. The disrespect of a seller by a buyer. 

The horror.

When Buyers Disrespect Sellers

Seems that Zappo’s sent out an online RFP to some 100 or so of their closest-friend ad agencies, asking for first-round pitches.

Of course, Ignited didn’t make the first cut. Ah, but they had a trick up their sleeve.  Using Google Analytics allowed them to see how much time the reviewer—Zappo’s—had actually spent reviewing Ignited’s proposal.

Zappo’s had reviewed only 20% of the pages, about 15 seconds per page, before relegating Ignited’s work to the digital circular file.  Whereupon Ignited went public with its “gotcha,” announcing the horrible 15-second truth to the world.

Unfair! said Ignited. They didn’t even look at our brilliant methodology, insights, testimonials.  How dare they! And then–as if it were the clincher in an argument–Ignited’s Wolfsohn says, “they never clicked on the page that outlined our approach to measurement. Which may explain why they didn’t know we’d be monitoring how much time they spent looking at our proposal."  Gracious me.

What’s wrong here?  Where to begin…

The Customer Owes You Nothing

If you click on someone’s personal ad in an online dating service–what do they owe you in return?  Bupkus.  Zip.  Nada.  The same is true of a seller whose sole connection to the buyer is an online response to a 100-company RFP.

(Why Zappo’s would run a 100-company RFP is another question.  Maybe to screen out those who respond to mass RFPs?  Or those who can’t manage to get ‘round them?  Hey, maybe Zappo’s is clueless (though I wouldn’t put big money on that hypothesis)).

But that’s irrelevant to Ignited.  Or should have been. 

I know what I’d do with 100 first-round sections on qualifications, methodologies, and testimonials.  I’d ignore them completely until I’d seen if they had anything interesting, original, provocative, value-adding to say about me–the customer/client. 

If they do have something to say about me, then I’d go back and check the testimonials to see if I knew anyone.  I might or might not look at the qualifications or methodologies at all.

And if there was nothing in it about me in this first-pass attempt to impress me, the customer?  Then it’d take me, oh, I don’t know, maybe 15 seconds to conclude this act was not going on to Hollywood. Simon may get there faster than Paula, but they both end up at the same conclusion.  And purchasing people can make Simon look indecisive.

And from all that I have seen, my response is the rule, not the exception, on this one. 

Buyers Buy from Trust

One of the biggest fallacies sellers make is that buyers buy based on their own stated rational criteria.  The truth is, a dose of trust overwhelms rational data like methodologies—(which are, frankly, more similar than sellers like to think).

What sells best is a sense that the seller cares about the buyer—cares enough to actually distinguish this buyer from another, to take a risk and make a client-specific suggestion, to focus on the client rather than on oneself–to say something that is of value and that makes the buyer feel heard, seen, recognized, understood.  A sample of your wares, please, customized to me.

Earth to Ignited, a little multiple choice: every client’s favorite subject is:

a.    Ignited
b.    themselves

Think carefully now…

You can recognize sellers who don’t get this.  They confuse sample selling with theft of intellectual property.  Says Ignited’s Wolfsohn: “When I go to my mechanic, he won’t do work on spec. We’re a very rare industry that is willing to give stuff away for free, and it escalates to a point where it’s self-defeating to the industry that we’re all in." 

Maybe that’s true–if you’re a mechanic. (Though I’d love to hear from insulted mechanics who disagree with Wolfsohn).  It’s not true, however, in services businesses like marketing. You’re selling air, for heaven’s sake; give a little away to let them feel you.

Zappo’s response, incidentally—to publicly engage in a dialogue about the event—strikes me as incredibly gracious. 

Yet I suspect it’ll be a long time before Ignited does marketing work for Zappo’s.   

 

Everything I Needed to Know About Sales I Learned From my Father

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I grew up in New Jersey, The Garden State. At least that’s what it said on our license plates. My dad was a salesman, selling fertilizer and other products to mom and pop farmers in the 60’s and early 70’s. I went with him on sales calls, spending the day riding around the state with him, and watching him work.

He wasn’t like the other salesmen. He didn’t like pushing people. In fact he truly cared about them. Here was a typical sales visit to a farmer:

Farmer (either spouse): “Morris – come on in.” They liked Dad (still do).

Dad: (After sitting with the first cup of coffee, which he didn’t like but drank anyway because he didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings). “How’s your family?”

Farmer: “The kids don’t want to do anything…[complain, complain, brag brag for 10-20 minutes].

Dad: “How’s Rosie” [Names the farmer’s wife if she’s not there, otherwise asks her directly].

Farmer: “The best” [complain, complain, brag, brag for 10-20 minutes]

Dad: “How’s things going on the farm?

Farmer: [Complain only for 20-30 minutes].

Dad: “Do you need anything?”

Farmer: “I need…” [places an order].

The farmers knew why Dad came – he never had to say. Often they told him that they liked buying from him, not because his product was better, but because he took the time to listen to them. They trusted him. He kept his word. When there was a problem, and there always was, he dealt with it.

Yep. I learned a lot about selling watching my Dad with farmers. He was caring, a listener, credible, reliable, and he rarely talked about himself unless asked. Totally trustworthy. Still is.

 

Great All-Time Trust-based Selling Insights, #17

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I’m going to hand over the space today to a guest-blogger: Walt Shill at Accenture.  Walt does a weekly internal blog for ACC, and was kind enough to grant us permission to slavishly “re-tweet” his recent blogpost.

If you’re wondering just how to make sense of Trust-based Selling, or to see the power of low self-orientation in the Trust Quotient, I can’t think of a better story than the one Walt shares here.   (Look for the ZZ Top reference).

Take it away, Walt.

Bob and his Two Simple Questions

Years ago I was assigned to work with Bob – a senior Director. I was a struggling manager. People whispered about Bob and many avoided working with him … You see, he had an unusual style that was reminiscent of Columbo – the brilliant TV homicide detective from the 70s played by Peter Falk.

Bob was never accused of being a sharp dressed man …. He always seemed a bit disorganized and seemingly slow to pick up key points …. Bob was unfailingly polite, but he had a way of asking clients odd questions at awkward times… I must admit, as I started I was a little embarrassed to be with him.

I did most of the grunt work of analysis and preparing decks for Bob, but I also accompanied him to many meetings in the C Suites of half a dozen companies…. And just like Columbo’s (and Steve Jobs’) famous line, “Just one more thing”, Bob somehow managed to always ask some version of two simple questions in every meeting……

How’s business? As a meeting started Bob would casually ask “So… How’s business ?” The client would start with a basic answer, but Bob cleverly teased out evermore detail by mumbling: “uh huh”, “yea”, and innocently asking over and over again – “hmmm, so why is that?”

He never, never, never responded that we could help…. in fact he hardly spoke at all… he was just listening very, very intently… and asking gentle questions with such childlike curiosity that the clients could not resist telling him more.

Sometimes the entire hour would pass with Bob’s wandering questions and we would have to reschedule. …Frequently I had been up all night preparing a document for the meeting –and I would get angry that he was wasting valuable time that I could use to impress the client with my brilliant charts and precise data and blinding insights…..

Weeks or even months later, we would follow up on the key issues. …. And our proposals were always spot on – Bob had an incredible insight to the core issues facing the company…..

I began to realize that Bob’s simple question – “How’s business?” had been creating a massive pipeline for us.

How are YOU doing??  As we were wrapping up a meeting, Bob would innocently ask, “So, how are you doing ?” If the client started talking about the company or business, Bob would gently interrupt them and say, “no, I meant how are YOU personally doing ?” ….followed by his usual “why is that ?” ..his odd style conveyed genuine interest and caring … After just 2 or 3 meetings Bob had started a deep personal relationship because of how much the client had revealed about their aspirations, frustrations and personal lives… all of which were filed somewhere in the recesses of Bob’s complex but powerful brain.

My respect for Bob grew ……and today I marvel at how he faithfully served senior leaders on their most critical issues, grew a very big practice and built his career (and helped mine!) … all by simply asking and then intently listening and genuinely caring about the answers to two simple questions:

“So, how’s business?”

“So, how are YOU doing?”

———

What Walt said. 

 

Collection Agents: Trusted Advisors, or Creepy Hustlers?

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Good salespeople, psychologists and counselors know one basic truth: people are influenced by (and buy from, and take advice from) those who listen empathetically to them before selling, advising, etc.  (This beats approaches like value propositions, for example.)

So what happens when these techniques are used by credit card collection agents seeking repayment from people who are seriously underwater with their credit card? See What Does Your Credit Card Company Know About You?

First, it works. Second, it’s hard to avoid feeling creeped out.

My question: how do we reconcile these two observations? Can you use “good” trust-building techniques for “bad” ends? Does it mean these techniques are manipulative? Or does it mean collection agents are getting a bad rap, and actually raising positive karma in the world?

I mean the question more seriously than you might think.  It has implications for how we try to restore trust by regulation in the financial sector. 

Therapist, or Credit Collections Agent?

Consider Donna Tiff, a 49-year-old Missouri woman who owned $40,000 on multiple cards. Tiff became adept at countering aggressive collection agents by threatening suicide.

And then Tracey came along. She worked for a company that today is a subsidiary of Bank of America. Tracey had talked to Tiff several times and noticed that there was a mistake on her account — an automatic payment was going to be deducted twice from her checking account. If that happened, Tiff’s other checks would bounce.

“I told her, thank you so much for catching that,” Tiff recalled. “And then we talked for over an hour about my problems and raising kids. She was amazing. She was so similar to me. She gave me her direct number and said that I should call her directly anytime I had any questions or just needed to talk about what was going on.”

Over the next three years, Tiff paid off the entire $28,000 she owed Bank of America and spoke regularly with Tracey, she said. And the $12,000 she owed on other cards? Well, those companies didn’t have a Tracey. They never got fully repaid.

It’s a heartwarming story. Unless you’ve seen how people like Tracey are schooled in the art of bonding. What are the odds that the random customer assistant who dealt with Tiff would have so much in common with her and manage to strike such a close bond? I tried to call Tracey myself, using the information Tiff provided. But I was told she didn’t work there anymore.

I asked Tiff if she ever asked Tracey to write off the late fees and the interest charges.

“Oh, no,” she told me. “She was so kind to me. How could I ask her for something like that?”

I remember when Bill Clinton was first running for president in New Hampshire, and his nickname “slick Willy” was brought up. He reportedly asked a friend, with all the sincerity he could muster, ‘am I really a slick Willy?’

I took that story to mean that someone as smart and as good at empathy as he was ultimately had to wonder about his own motives, and whether he himself could tell the difference.

Or, take Bernie Madoff. He flawlessly imitated nearly every aspect of the trust equation. Does that mean that being credible, reliable, intimate and other-oriented are bad things?

Take the classic Turing test.  If you communicate, via a computer keyboard and screen, with two closed boxes—one with a real person inside, and one with a computer—just how do you tell the difference?

And if you can’t, does that mean the computer is human? We want to say of course not—but try explaining just why.

Trusted Behaviors Without Intentions are Empty

In this case, most of us would say the difference has to do with motives.  Does Bank of America intend to help raise the psychic health of credit-battered Americans, and get paid in the process? Or is it in the business of extracting wealth from people to whom BofA sold their credit cards in the first place, cynically using Maslow’s hierarchy as a tool to get there?

It isn’t just hypothetically relevant. It goes to how we regulate trust in society. It shows the bankruptcy of ever and ever-greater reliance on purely behavioral and metrics-based approaches to trust.  Trust without motives is the computer in the box.

If legislators and regulators cannot figure out a way to put integrity into regulation instead of dealing solely with procedural “compliance,” there will always be a Madoff who figures out how to mimic acceptable behavior.  (See Harry Markopolis’ congressional testimony for a far more workable approach).

You can’t strip trust down to behaviors alone without squeezing the soul out of it. When it comes to trust, intent is relevant.

The Great Empathy Famine

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I spent the weekend in California. It started as a mini-vacation—joining a friend’s 50th birthday celebration. It ended with most of the time in my hotel room with the flu.

At first, my demeanor was positive (why compound physical misery with a bad attitude) but steadily declined as I negotiated all the logistical changes required to extend my stay until I could haul my ailing self back across the country. 

Of all the service providers with whom I interacted (hotel desk clerks, cleaning ladies, airport rental car attendant), not one acknowledged my matter-of-fact revelation that I was asking for help because I was sick and couldn’t go home.

Why Is Empathy So Hard to Find?

Now, I wasn’t looking for sympathy from these folk (well, maybe a tad).  It just would have been nice if, when they learned of my situation, they had given some hint that they had actually heard what I said.  "Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” would have completely sufficed. Or “Oh dear!” Even “Bummer, dude.” 

But no.  Nothin’.  Nada. When I finally emerged from my room, the cleaning lady had an attitude – the Do Not Disturb sign that hung on the door for 48 hours straight had kept her from doing her job.

The Alamo car check-in guy dutifully read – word-for-word – the statement on the back of my agreement justifying the additional $10.99 late return charge.  Waiving the $10 might have made me a customer for life.   Just saying, “I’m so sorry that my job requires me to tack on this extra fee under the circumstances” might have led me to consider  renting from Alamo again.

These are not unhappy or unfriendly people. Hey, it’s California. They get a lot of sun. And it’s not like they were in roles not requiring interpersonal skills — I’ll give the hotel housekeeper a pass, but the rest were front-line customer service types.  And honestly, I wasn’t being a cranky-whiny-pain-in-the-you-know-what sick person – I promise.

I’m not sure what the problem was.  Perhaps they weren’t really listening. Or they just didn’t know what to say.

Empathy Isn’t Really All That Difficult

The thing is, empathy isn’t that hard. It comes in many forms: “I’m terribly sorry,” or “I’m sure that wasn’t how you wanted to spend your weekend here!”  or even “That sucks!” (sorry, Mom, I know you hate that word).

Just acknowledge — rather than avoid — the emotional reality of the human being on the other end of the phone/service counter/board room table.
Are you uncomfortable in this touchy-feely zone? That’s perfectly normal.  But it’s also a bad excuse for doing nothing. Awkward empathy beats no empathy any day of the week.

In our Trusted Advisor and Trust-Based Selling  programs we spend a lot of time practicing empathy. Put in the terms of the Trust Equation, empathy creates intimacy and intimacy builds trust.

Empathy is imperative in professional services; listening is what drives influence.  Just asking good questions is not enough to be a good listener.

Having your client get that you got him — emotionally as well as cognitively — is what earns you the Top Listener award, which in turn earns you the right to be heard.

Next time you ask your client how her weekend was, and she mutters “Not quite what I expected,” try putting the meeting agenda aside just long enough to say, “I’m sorry to hear that” or – context-permitting – “Bummer, dude.”

And if your client ever reveals something that leaves you feeling itchy and unsure what to say, say that (“Oh … I’m not sure what to say”). Any attempt will do.