Is Too Much Empathy Killing Sales Performance?

Is there too much empathy in sales team?

There is often a problem with the sales culture in companies. A problem with empathy.

And it's important to spend a few minutes talking about it.

Nobody likes micro-management. Nobody likes having to stand behind sales teams and micro-manage. But there is a culture that has developed empathy to the extreme. Collaborative cultures excel in empathy, but one of the consequences is that they find it hard to hold individuals to account.

Sales managers think they have to be friends with their teams. This is one of the limiting thoughts that do them a disservice. There's too much empathy, not enough excellence we find sometimes. We don't know how to communicate in a round but firm way - better communication is one of the pillars of Curiosity with the implementation of a simple framework based on transactional analysis, particularly useful for team coaching. And so there's a fear of pushing sales people, a fear of the backlash we might get if we make a comment that isn't totally empathetic, benevolent.

On the surface, all this empathy and even benevolence may be seen as positive. But at the risk of being contrarian, it is not productive either for the organisation or for the development of the individuals involved. If individuals cannot be responsible and accountable, they cannot be an effective force in the organisation. Without responsibility and accountability, there can be no development:

Accountability is essential to personal growth, as well as team growth. How can you improve if you're never wrong? If you don't admit a mistake and take responsibility for it, you're bound to make the same one again.

Pat Summitt, basketball head coach, 1,098 career wins, the all-time record in the history of college basketball.

No errors. No learning. But not learning isn't an option

That said, the question that remains to be resolved is how to bring the real empathy that helps people grow and more accountable. What I explain to the teams I work with is that there are 4 possible outputs from a conversation with a prospect. A yes, a no, a clear future or a reference. And if it's a no that could have been a yes, there must, sorry, THERE MUST be a lesson.

Not learning from our mistakes is unacceptable. And not having the systems, the DNA that allows us to resolve these mistakes is dragging the sales organisation down. I've talked about a framework for managing "Monday" sales meetings. This is an opportunity to implement the "win or learn" principle. No sales person wins all the time. So when a deal is lost, the key is to learn. Selling is a sport and losing is part of that sport.

That's why selling is a unique function in an organisation and recruiting a salesperson in the same way as recruiting any other function is a cardinal error. So if it's normal to lose, it's not normal not to learn from it. And even less so to lose in the same way again and again. It's not an inability to learn. It's a mindset of refusing to improve. The famous growth mindset.

Four steps to be less empathetic and more accountable

So, during a sales meeting, one of the steps is the analysis of a lost deal which can follow the approach based on the following 4 questions, in this order. Remember, the aim is to coach, not criticise:

• What did we (or the sales person) think was going to happen? There was a plan to win the deal, there was a strategy in place. What was this plan, this strategy? Why did we (or the sales rep) think it would work? It's essential to have this insight, because it contains an assumption that didn't work out, and we need to bring that assumption to the surface so that we can learn to perform better next time.

  
  

• So what happened? It's extremely important to be non emotional here, to be as objective and data-driven as possible. Just a clear view of how the situation actually unfolded. In the case of a deal managed by a team, this means highlighting a poor performance by a member of the team. And the most effective way of accelerating learning is for the person who did the under-performance to verbalise what went wrong, why it went wrong and its impact, respectfully - as a nurturing parent - but without sugar-coating the situation, i.e. without falling into the empathy mentioned below. We can't learn if we can't see the problems clearly.

  
  

  

  
  

• What have we learned? This is by far the most important question and, sadly, the one that sales managers tend to ignore in their haste to get to the fourth and final question. As Satya Nadella, Microsoft's MD, says: The learn it all will always do better than the know it all. So, just as in the process of discovering a prospect, we need to go deeper. Not to discover a real customer problem, but to discover something we didn't know before, our own problem. To find the root causes. And a good tactic after each point of discovery is to ask yourself why the situation arose. There are the famous five whys theorised by Sakichi Toyoda, and there's a good chance of getting to the root of the problem.

  
  

• What are we going to do differently and what will the sales person do differently? This is, of course, about what we want to put in place. If we tackle this question too early, we won't have learned anything about what we can do to improve. And this is where the role of the sales manager comes in during the sales meeting, which is to get the sales rep or sales team to verbalise not only why repeating this mistake would be damaging for both the organisation and the team, but also to get the individual(s) to commit to doing things differently and to bringing demonstrable elements to future meetings. Not to control the sales person or the team, but to help them develop in their current role and to enable them to acquire new skills that will be useful in the rest of their working lives.

The mindset is therefore, a little like judo, to use the opponent's strength, in this case defeat, and replace it with learning, and to use a structured exploration of that defeat to draw out lessons that can improve results. Once again, no 'critical parenting', no 'emotions' which would be too counter-productive. It's about learning and developing a commitment to activities that will avoid repeating the same situation.