Through Their Eyes - An Empathetic Sales Professional's Guide to Success (eBook)

Introduction

Why this book?

I wrote Through Their Eyes, an Empathetic Sales Professional’s Guide to Success because I want to help anyone interested in learning how to interact more effectively with people. The book shares ideas I’ve learned about applying the positive use of empathy, attitude, imagination, creative visualization, and self-image in my sales career and life in general. These concepts have benefited and have been written about by many of the most successful, famous, and highly accomplished people. I provide examples of how several of them have applied these valuable ideas.

Anyone, ranging from college students to recent graduates interested in a business career, to others who may want to learn more about working more effectively with people, can benefit from these insights. Although the book’s subtitle is “How to Succeed as an Empathetic Sales Professional,” it contains vital messages for success that may be useful for anyone.

On June 11, 2018, an article by David Eagan appeared on the LinkedIn Talent Blog. The title was “Here is What It Takes to Become a CEO, According to 12,000 LinkedIn Profiles.” This study looked at the profiles of more than 12,000 chief executives from over twenty countries. The study was motivated by a perceived fact and some folklore regarding today’s millennials’ interest in the fastest path to the organization’s top. LinkedIn looked at the ways taken by leaders of some of the top companies in the world. They wanted to help millennials gain insight into what plans and moves they should be making now to get to the C-Suite in the future.

The study mapped the first jobs of these chief executive officers. Merely listing the most common first jobs of CEOs didn’t tell the whole story. The leading contender title was the “consultant.” Considering that consultants focus on solving complex challenges across many business and work environments, this is a plausible choice. Consulting is, of course, high training ground for the skills that CEOs need.

Interestingly, when the folks at LinkedIn dug deeper into their data, a different picture emerged. When observing the actual functions of the CEO’s first jobs, business development and sales were the two most common early career paths. Each requires a potent combination of sales strategy and communication skills, critical to the CEO role.

There are many examples of well-known, highly successful, and very famous CEOs who started as salespeople. When he was a young, ambitious man, Warren Buffet, as a paperboy, started selling newspapers before selling securities for his dad at Buffett-Falk & Company. Sam Palmisano began his career at IBM as a sales rep before working his way up the ladder to become IBM’s CEO. Howard Schultz, the famous CEO of Starbucks, began his career as an appliance salesman at Hammarplast, later selling copiers for Xerox. Mark Cuban sold software before starting his incredible career as one of the youngest, famously successful CEOs. In my last example, William Welden began as a pharmaceutical rep at Johnson & Johnson before becoming their CEO. There are many more similar examples.

The facts are obvious: Many of the traits that make someone a superior sales professional are the same traits that make great leaders, managers, and ultimately, CEOs. My primary focus is to explain how and why empathy is essential to a sales professional. While primarily focused on the salesperson, the same skills are critical to the performance of management professionals, our business leaders. Understanding the concepts covered in this book will help anyone throughout their lives, whether in their careers or interpersonal relationships.

Learning to interact more effectively with people in all areas of your life, both personal and professional, will make you more prosperous and help you live a happy life. As Albert Schweitzer so succinctly put it, “Success is not the key to happiness; happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”1

Preamble:
How did I learn about becoming an Empathetic Sales Professional?

For more than twenty years, I consistently exceeded my quotas while successfully selling a wide variety of technical products, technical and non-technical services. I’ve sold clinical laboratory services to physicians and their staff in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where I finished in the top 5% of producers eight years in a row. I then moved on to selling Clinical and Biological Information Management software to PhDs, small-molecule drug discovery organic chemists, throughout Big Pharma. For my efforts with PhDs, I was awarded Vendor of the Year honors by one of the world’s largest, most successful, and very famous pharmaceutical companies, the first software supplier ever afforded the honor. Continuing with my career, I now sell Predictive Analytics, Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, AI, and Big Data Management software platforms to world-class companies across most industries and to all sizes of corporations.

I have taken multiple sales training classes, read numerous books on how to sell, observed, and questioned top performers in each company where I worked, and sought counsel from speakers and authors at all the conventions, conferences, and symposiums that I have attended. I have listened with an open mind to my customers. To my knowledge, I have never passed up an opportunity to learn something new. My skills building has come from many sources and many experiences. Most of all, I’ve learned from the many mistakes that I’ve made along the way. In all that I do, I try to admit when I have made a mistake and try to learn from and not repeat it.

Over the years, some have argued that to be as successful as I have been in highly technical customer environments requires a person to be schooled in one or more STEM disciplines. Contrary to this argument, the sum of my scientific, technology, engineering, and mathematics education was a couple of math classes, one year of chemistry, and a year of biology at Queen of Peace High School in New Jersey. At college, I earned my BA in Economics and secured an MBA in Finance and Marketing, all from Rutgers University.

While selling technology, I firmly believe my role is not to be a technician. Instead, I take a different approach. My education and experience compelled me to develop a different skill set. And I did so successfully. Beginning with my first sales job, I began to follow the route I now refer to as empathetic selling.

I dubbed the sales professional that I perceived myself becoming as the Empathetic Sales Professional. This book attempts to define and refine the sales professional’s values and practices that will make them worthy of the Empathetic Sales Professional designation. From this point on in the book, I may use Sales Professional or Empathetic Sales Professional as interchangeable terms. Whatever term that I happen to use, you can bet that my reference is to the Empathetic Sales Professional.

The kick-starter toward empathy for me

Early in my career, I received the best sales advice that I have learned in my twenty-plus years of selling. The information came from an unlikely source, my mother, a woman who had never sold a day in her life but is sage and full of common sense.

My mom was an office manager for physicians for more than thirty years. At her suggestion, I had just started selling clinical laboratory testing services for one of the country’s leading clinical labs. My company would pick up biological specimens from doctors’ offices, do blood tests, pap smears, biopsies, and other types of testing and deliver the results to the physicians when completed, often within twenty-four hours, depending on the test.

Since I would be selling to physicians, my mother sat me down, took my hand, and said, “Let me explain how things work in a doctor’s office. You need to understand things from the office’s perspective. The number one priority is not speaking to sales reps. The people working in the office are first and foremost concerned with seeing patients, doing their day-to-day tasks, and doing the tasks needed to run the doctor’s office. As a sales rep, you are an intrusion to their workload, an unwelcome consumer of their time. You must understand that and be considerate and appreciative whenever they do give you a few minutes of their time.”

My Aha Moment came when I realized that to be successful in selling, I must consider the client’s perspective. Even though I knew that I could significantly help them by saving their time, effort, and ultimately, money, I had to remember that they don’t know this yet. Whenever you work with your customers and potential customers, realize that many don’t understand how you can help them until they give you a chance to explain. That’s the challenge reps face. I have to provide my potential customer with a reason for giving me a few minutes of their time. Until then, they are granting me a favor when they give any of their time. This insight, provided by my caring mom, is the initiative that pushed me into becoming an Empathetic Sales Professional.

It is equally important that you treat each office staff member with the same respect that you would show to the physicians themselves. Whenever I approached a physician’s office, I addressed the doorman (my territory was Manhattan’s Upper Eastside, the most competitive and potentially lucrative region in the country) with as much respect and consideration as the receptionist, the nurses, the office...