We stopped trying to convince customers and got triple the results

One small thing changed my B2B marketing work in a big way.

About five years ago, someone sent me a video on a Tulsa, Oklahoma business that changed the entire way I approach sales and marketing.

The first thing that caught my attention was that Mother Teresa had publicly endorsed the business. “Wait,” I thought. “Mother Teresa endorses businesses?”

The second was that the CEO got nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

This amazingly compassionate company?

A collections agency.

Yes, you read that right.

I was shocked.

How helping drives better results

The CEO of the company, CFS2, had decided to rethink the collections agency, business model.

Instead of browbeating debtors, they decided to offer free services to help their customers pay their bills by renegotiating their debt, helping them find jobs, and getting them back on their feet.

It was revolutionary and straightforward.

You can’t get money from a customer who has none, so how might we help them do better financially?

Here’s the 3-minute video from CBS News:

Yes, it’s a great feel-good story.

But you may be asking yourself: what was the bottom line impact of giving away all these free services?

CFS2 was 200% more profitable than any of its competitors.

They’re making double the profit by doing good.

The CBS news anchor closed by saying CFS2’s strategy was kindness, but I thought they had it wrong.

I saw CFS2’s strategy was built from empathy.

Here’s what I mean:

They were putting themselves in their customer shoes, and this changed their business model.

After watching the video, I knew in my gut that I wanted to try something different.

My “Jerry Maguire” moment for empathy

I love the Jerry Maguire vision scene. This is the one that keeps him up at night… and he has the moment of clarity that sparks THE Mission Statement.

Many of us have had Jerry Maguire moments, where the difference between what we know is right and what we are actually doing becomes clear to us.

I thought if a collection agency can do this in an industry with terrible customer experience, what would happen if tried something like this in B2B?

What if we just focused on helping customers – no strings attached?

The next day in our Monday morning I talked with our CEO and then my sales team.

We watched the video together as a team.

I always felt like the best marketing and selling feels like helping (because it is)

Now, I wanted to really do something.

I asked, “what do you think about us focusing on helping instead of converting people into leads?”

I waited.

Crickets.

Eventually, someone asked, “If we do this, how will we get leads and sales?”

This started a bigger conversation.

Getting better at helping customers

What’s the reason people fill out a form for your content or to register to access a webinar or other resources?

Are people excited to hear from us?

No. They’re crazy busy.

Who wants yet another business development rep calling them, right?

People are looking for answers to questions. They have jobs that need to get done.

So what if we helped them do just that?

Understanding motivation with empathy

So we focused on doing this:

Getting a better understanding of what motivated people to access our content in the first place so we could get them what they wanted.

How could we help them and give them clarity?

Empathy map sketch: Get the empathy mapping checklist here: https://www.markempa.com/blog/

Inspiration from hotel concierges

As we talked about our approach, and what we could do differently, I thought of hotel concierges.

What’s a hotel concierge’s goal?

To help meet the needs of guests and perform various tasks including making recommendations.

Do concierges give the same advice to all hotel guests?

Of course not. It’s based on what the guest wants to know.

Concierges focus on the task the guests wants to get done and helps them do it.

With that in mind, we started to test this strategy:

First, we needed to know our potential customer’s motivation for engaging our content (i.e., The WHY). And then help them get what they wanted with no strings attached.

Next, I asked my team to throw out scripts, and our qualifying approach, and we considered how we might change our approach to model hotel concierges.

To get the process going, we started asking:

What are the most common questions they’re trying to get answered with our content?
What frustrations could we remove for potential customers and improve their experience?
What content and resource roadblocks could we remove?
What wins could we help them achieve?
How could we be a plus to their day, so they feel good about talking with us?

Why customer empathy matters

I’m fascinated by the neuroscience behind the way people think. Mainly the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who discovered how critical feelings are to our ability to make even the most straightforward decisions.

People, as Damasio says, are “feeling machines that think.” Getting to the root of what a person is feeling is key to connecting with them. So, of course, connecting with your customers is the key to marketing.

When your customers find your content, they’re looking to solve a problem.

I alway felt like the best selling feels like helping (because it is).

Instead of viewing your customers as objects to be converted –checkpoints along the funnel of your sales process –what if you focused on helping them solve a problem?

Emotional resonance is about connecting with emotions and helping negative states move to more positive feelings

We also considered our approach by being the customer and answering:

If I were on the receiving end, why would I want this?
What’s in it for me? So what?
Why is this helpful to me? Why would I want to talk to someone about this?

Positive emotions that drive buying decisions

A new approach

I hypothesized that we’d get sales opportunities leads simply by helping people get what they were looking for and not focusing on converting them.

But this meant the entire system for our team needed to change because everything was built around converting people to leads.

Commissions were on the line. And we made sure the reps wouldn’t make less money testing this new approach.

But first, needed to unlearn the habits of qualifying people.

It was wasn’t easy.

It required getting lots of buy-in from my team, hours of additional coaching, changing our whole approach, and restructuring commissions.

We took the pressure off of leads, opportunities, and focused on being “customer concierges” to help people have super helpful experience.

We honestly didn’t know how hard it was going to be.

But in the end, it was worth it.

After six months of focusing on helping people rather than trying to generate leads them, we got 303% percent more sales opportunities!

In sum, when we stopped trying to convert leads and focused on helping customers get what they wanted, we got triple the results.

Applying empathy

B2B complex sales are way more emotional because the stakes are high.

That’s why the strategy of empathy especially powerful for B2B complex sales.

Trust matters a lot, but to build trust, you need to connect with people emotionally first.

Sales conversion is the result of building a trusted connection.

I use the analogy that when your customers are trying to make a change in their organization, it’s like a group of people trying to climb the mountain.

Being a buyer sherpa

Stop pulling and pushing people into funnels.

Change your sales analogy from the funnel to helping customers climbing a mountain. The customer is the climber, and you’re the Sherpa.

Consider this:

Some people don’t want to climb it all.

Others might want to go to different paths or different mountains.

When they have a larger team making a decision, it gets even more complicated.

The best way to help in this case is to become a buyer sherpa.

Here’s a video about becoming a buyer sherpa.

As a Sherpa, you can’t do the climbing for the customer. The climber still has to climb, but you can help carry the load, you can provide resources, you can offer guidance and share stories of how other organizations solved similar problems.

Help them.

The emotional buying journey: people often start with hope and quickly to despair when they realize how hard it is to get others to buy-in. Help them.

Emotions influence the buying journey.

Today, technology is making it easier than ever to connect with masses of customers in a way that feels personal.

Data can help us make empathetic decisions, and artificial intelligence and chatbots can move us toward the promise of real one-to-one marketing.

However, without empathy, all that technology ends up feeling inauthentic.

You still need to connect with the human on the other end of the database, to have honest conversations to discover their problems, and focus on how you can help.

After all, your customers are already looking for help — and they’re going to find it somewhere. Why shouldn’t it be with you?

Lead Generation