Why empathy is your marketing department’s most important sales tool
Customers aren’t just a number. Of course, they aren’t. But with a heavy reliance on hard data in marketing, marketers run the risk of neglecting one of the most vital skills in the marketing toolbox: empathy.
Empathy in marketing equals an understanding of your buyers, their problems, and what keeps them up at night AND actually caring about what you know about them. It’s a combination of head and heart — and it’s an invaluable sales tool.
Let me show you what I mean.
Imagine there’s a company that sells SAAS solutions that helps your finance and accounting teams save time, reduce manual errors, and be compliant. So you head over to their website and check out their content. And there’s a lot of content to sift through. But, as you read, you notice something.
It’s all about them.
Their website, their webinars, their blogs…it all centers on the SAAS company, on their experience, their expertise, their strengths. And sure it sounds impressive, but what it doesn’t do is speak to the challenges that you, as a potential customer, are currently navigating. It doesn’t convince you that this SAAS company truly understands you, your problems, or what type of solution you are hoping someone can deliver.
And so, you decide not to fill out a form for a sales demo and focus on trying to find a different provider instead.
You’ve wasted a bunch of time…and they’ve lost a sale.
Let’s imagine now that you’ve found a different SAAS provider and you’re taking a look at their website. Everything you read or watch convinces you that this business understands your world. They understand not only the challenges you face as a company, but as an individual responsible for certain tasks that can be accomplished in this SAAS solution. You instinctively know that they see what success looks like for you, that they’re listening to you, and that they’ll be responsive to your needs.
They get you.
And because of this empathetic approach to their marketing, you’re ready to schedule a meeting to learn more and to figure out how you can get this product implemented quickly.
That’s the power of empathy in your B2B marketing.
As we’ve seen, company-centric or product-centric marketing will lead to lower click rates and even lower conversion rates. But a lack of empathy in your marketing can hold you back in other ways too.
For example, sales teams might struggle to get meetings with senior decision-makers, which will negatively impact their closing rates. And customer services teams who don’t understand customers on a deeper level will find their renewal rates and NPS scores remain stubbornly low.
Making the shift to a customer-centric approach.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that all of those problems — the low conversion rates, the difficulty in closing sales, the high rate of customer churn — can be fixed by making a conscious shift from a product-centric approach to marketing to an empathy-fueled customer-centric approach.
Because marketing is about far more than “selling product”; it’s about understanding the people whose businesses we’re trying to improve and genuinely caring about helping them.
So how do you make that change to a customer-centric approach?
You have to get your marketing department — and every precious internal advocate your business has — on board by:
Educating and convincing them that there is a better way of running things.
Convincing them that the benefits will far outweigh the risk and the work involved in changing.
Encouraging them to incorporate new processes — and making it easy for them to do so.
And advocating for this change over the many others the company needs to make.
Essentially, you need to convince your marketers that they cannot sell their customer a solution until they have successfully “sold” them the problem. You have to help them understand that marketing today goes beyond numbers and figures and that behind each data point, there is a real person who needs your understanding and your empathy, every bit as much as they need your product.
If you need support in making this crucial shift from a product-centric approach to a more empathetic customer-centric approach, we’d love to be there for you. At Emerje, we have experience in helping companies across various sectors break through the internal noise to make significant changes in how they do business, connect with potential customers, and fine tune their marketing efforts to even greater success. Connect with us and see how we can help you and your business too.