Empathy and Ego

The aspects to any business role are always changing as technology and circumstances change. A sales role is no different, non-selling sales roles have become more prevalent with the shift to e-commerce growing the role of sales. Some of the key components to effective selling, however, have not changed. There are many key components that make a salesperson effective such as, attentiveness, being able to tap into customer pains or concise communication. Harvard Business Review organizes these components into two basic qualities that are the key aspects of being a successful businessman and salesman: empathy and ego drive.

Empathy, the ability to feel, is the first component expounded upon in the article. As mentioned, understanding your customers pain is a must in all selling situations; it is hard to sell someone something when you can’t give a reason as to why it will produce fruit in their life. The article takes this one step further reading, “Empathy, the important central ability to feel as the other fellow does in order to be able to sell him a product or service, must be possessed in large measure”. One analogy that explains the difference effective empathy can make is old anti-aircraft weapons and new heat seeking ones. A salesman with poor empathy represents the old anti-aircraft missiles, similar to how a plane can use evasive maneuvers, if the client does not react the way the salesman expects them to then the sale will miss. Whereas the heat seeker missiles or empathetic salesmen can adjust course and tactics as they interact with prospective clients. Empathy allows a salesman to connect with his audience and effectively adapt to any type of prospective client.

The second quality is ego drive, “the need to conquer”. The article argues that money is not a sufficient incentive for a salesperson to want to make a sale. The salesperson needs to feel that they have to make the sale for their own personal reasons of enhancing their own ego, in essence a people pleaser. Someone who’s “self-picture improves dramatically by virtue of conquest and diminishes with failure”. The salesperson cannot be too fragile. When the salesperson faces failure, they cannot give up but rather they need to be driven more by their failure as if it were a “trigger”. The article argues that a good mixture of a weakened ego but a strong one that is not intimidated by failure is a key quality to an effective salesperson.

I see the value in both qualities; however, I do not completely agree with the ego portion. I believe that there are multiple ego or personality mixes that can produce good sales results. I do however agree that with a mind that is more geared towards selling and adaptive and attentive empathy, someone can make a great salesperson that might stand out in a crowd.

Source: https://hbr.org/2006/07/what-makes-a-good-salesman