Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach?

Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, empathy may be the one word that matters most to sales and marketing success.

It is tough to buy.

B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information, too many choices, too many internal stakeholders, and too much risk. They are trying to get their colleagues to agree. They are second-guessing. They are worrying about what happens if they make the wrong decision.

This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

In this conversation, Brent explains how empathy helps sellers and marketers understand the customer’s world, map how customers think, reduce buying friction, and help customers solve the real problem: buying.

Writer’s note: This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson. You can view part one here: New research: Boost organic growth from current customers.

Brent Adamson is a Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner. He works with sales, service, marketing, and communications leaders to understand what world-class B2B selling and marketing looks like.

Brent is also the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

00:00 Introduction to customer empathy in B2B

Empathy helps sales and marketing teams understand what buying feels like from the customer’s perspective.

That means understanding not only the customer’s business, but how the customer thinks about their business, what internal risks they face, what questions they cannot answer, and what friction makes buying feel difficult.

When sellers and marketers understand that, they can stop solving only for selling and start solving for buying.

“Empathy is, at a very basic level, your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.” — Brent Adamson

“If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you have to understand is how they think about their business.” — Brent Adamson

“Think about what it feels like to buy one of your solutions, and it rarely feels good.” — Brent Adamson

“What we have here is not a selling problem at all. What we have is a buying problem.” — Brent Adamson

“You can effectively become the coach to your customer, not on what to buy, but on how to buy.” — Brent Adamson

“The best marketing and selling feels like helping because it really is.” — Brian Carroll

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Brian: I think you just provided a super helpful distinction for people, and even for me, to know the difference.

This company, they’re a SaaS company, so of course they were talking about it in terms of that backward-looking concept.

So how can people see things from the customer’s point of view?

In your book The Challenger Customer, you talked about the most powerful principle sitting at the core of the book is empathy. I wanted to ask you about that because we spent some time talking together a few months ago.

Why is that? Why is empathy the most important principle sitting at the core?

Brent: The idea that empathy is the core principle of the entire book The Challenger Customer, I admit, is more of a personal opinion than based on all of our research.

You’ll notice, I think I told you this, Brian, the word doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the proper book. It’s only in the acknowledgments where I made just a little blurb at the very back, a little note to my daughters, and I used the word empathy there.

But in fact, in many ways for me personally, that one word captures everything that the book is about.

I know this is a topic not only near and dear to your heart, but something your expertise is far deeper than mine.

When I think of empathy, I think of two components to it. It would be interesting, Brian, to get your thoughts on this. It’s almost a right-brain, left-brain, or the rational versus the emotional. I don’t know what the right way to think about it is.

But empathy, from my perspective, is at a very basic level your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.

That might be logically how they view the world from their perspective, or it might be emotionally what the world feels like from their perspective.

I find both of those attributes of empathy to be potentially hugely powerful for anyone in sales or marketing.

Just to give you a couple of examples, whenever we’re talking about customer improvement or even the broader work in Challenger, in fact I wrote a whole chapter in The Challenger Customer on this idea, is this idea of mental modeling.

The whole idea being, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand more than anything else?

How would you answer that, Brian?

Brian: If I were to do that, I’d need to understand what their experience is and how they see things.

Brent: You got it.

This is where I have fun talking to you because you get this stuff.

I say this with great, hopefully, empathy and respect for anyone out there. What I find when I ask most leaders, sales leaders and commercial marketing leaders, that question — “If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand?” — virtually everyone will say, “Their business.”

So then they start reading 10-Ks and the annual reports and the financials and all that kind of stuff.

What we found in our research is actually closer to where you are, which is, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you have to understand is how they think about their business.

Because that’s the thing you’ve got to change.

To get there, we find it can be very productive to draw a map, if you will, on a piece of paper. A map to their thinking. We call this a mental model. Mental mapping is another term for this idea.

The idea is that you can simply draw, in a couple of boxes and some connecting lines, what their goals are, what their objectives are as an organization, what they believe to be the primary challenges or primary drivers of achieving that goal, and what the secondary challenges or secondary drivers are for each of those.

You can map it out. You can actually draw it on a piece of paper.

We do this in all of our research here. We build mental models for heads of sales and mental models for heads of marketing all the time. It’s actually how we do our research.

But there’s nothing to say that heads of marketing, marketing teams, or sales teams couldn’t do the same thing for their customers, which is to put on paper a very simple diagram.

Don’t overcomplicate it. A few boxes, a couple lines: here are their core objectives as an organization, what they’re trying to achieve, how they think they’re going to get there, the challenges they think are going to get in the way, or the levers they need to pull to make that happen, whichever perspective you want.

Once you’ve got that mental model, you can put it in front of a customer and say, “Did I get it right? What would you add? What would you take away? If I gave you 100 pennies to distribute across these 10 boxes according to priority, how would you distribute them?”

When you’re all done, what you have on that piece of paper is a picture of how the customer thinks about their business.

Now, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you need to understand is how they think about their business. Now you’ve got it on a piece of paper.

What you can do is step back and look at it and say, what did they miss? Which box should be bigger? Which one should be smaller? Which one’s not here at all but needs to be? Which connective arrow needs to go from this box to that one instead of this one to only that one?

You can begin to look for opportunities to challenge their thinking, to help them improve their thinking, to make them smarter about what they’re doing.

But that only works by having that mental model to begin with, which I would argue, at least from a logical perspective, is at least a form of empathy.

Because that’s what that model is. It’s a picture of the world from their perspective. It’s seeing the world from your customer’s perspective.

That doesn’t have the emotional component that some aspects of empathy have, which we should be talking about as well.

Let me just stop and ask you, Brian, does that count as empathy from your perspective, or is that outside the bounds of how you define the term?

Brian: Oh, it does.

I think it’s the two levels you just touched on. It’s the perspective-taking, so understanding how they see their business, and then the second thing is the emotional side.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio said, “We aren’t thinking machines that feel, we’re feeling machines that think.”

What he argued is we make emotional decisions rationally, so we need to take both perspectives to understand.

Brent: What’s really interesting too is that you can build in the emotional side of this in all sorts of interesting ways.

People ask us all the time about this mental model: do I need one for each of the many different stakeholders involved in a purchase? Do I have one per company, one per person? How does that work?

Practically speaking, just to make this a little bit easier to do, you can have just one mental model for a company.

What you’re going to find over time is that these mental models are highly scalable. In fact, one mental model can apply to an entire industry vertical, sometimes an entire customer base, depending on how you go to market and where you do that.

But nonetheless, what you will find is that different customer stakeholders inside a customer organization are going to prioritize different boxes on the mental model in different ways.

Some of them are going to think, if you give them 100 pennies and ask them to distribute them according to priority, they’re going to potentially distribute them in different ways.

Now imagine a world where you are talking to one of those stakeholders, and this individual has to get consensus across the other four or five to make that deal happen.

This is all implicit. It’s not explicit.

In their mind, they kind of have that mental model in their map. “Well, I care about this box. He cares about that box.” They may not be thinking about boxes per se, but it’s all sort of there.

One of the things we know from our research, and what we also know to be true as individual professionals, is going down the hall and convincing your colleagues to do anything differently is kind of a pain.

Sometimes it’s a real pain. Sometimes it’s kind of scary. Sometimes it’s a little intimidating.

What we find is that the larger the buying group, the more individual stakeholders feel not only that their credibility, but in fact their actual job, could be on the line in going and advocating for a particular supplier.

That gets into the emotional side of empathy.

Think about it from a supplier’s perspective. “Well, why can’t they all just get on board? It’s like herding cats. I can’t get these people to align.”

Well, you can’t get them to align because think about what it feels like.

Think about that person sitting at their desk. I call this the Thursday Morning 9:00 Test.

It’s Thursday morning, 9:00, and you’ve got to do what? What are you going to do? How are you going to do it? How is that going to feel?

Now I’m thinking about buying your cool CRM solution, and it’s Thursday morning, 9:00. I’m thinking, “In order to get my company to buy that solution, which I really want, I’ve got to go talk to someone in IT. I’ve got to go talk to someone in procurement. I’ve got to go talk to my CEO.”

You know what? I feel kind of sick to my stomach. I don’t want to do that. That’s a pain in my neck.

All of a sudden, what seems to be a slam dunk because this person I talked to loves it is completely in danger because that person doesn’t feel like going to talk to his other people.

So that becomes a hugely important part of empathy too.

What am I asking this senior decision maker, my contact person, to go do inside their own company?

What does that feel like?

Chances are pretty good it doesn’t feel very good.

It’s hard work. It’s credibility. It’s business case building. They’re going to ask me questions.

All those questions your sales reps have all the time: what if they ask me questions I can’t answer? What if they ask for data that I don’t know how to provide?

You know what? Your stakeholders you’re selling to have the exact same questions when they think about their own colleagues.

What if my head of IT wants to have a business case? I don’t know where I’m going to get that. Then he’s going to ask me a bunch of questions I don’t know the answer to.

Look, I just want this bleeping CRM system, but this is too hard. Never mind.

Being able to place yourself in the shoes of that stakeholder and understand what it feels like for them matters.

We always think about what it feels like to sell our solutions, but think about what it feels like to buy one of your solutions.

It rarely feels good.

Brian: I really appreciate you just sharing your perspective because this is really hard work even for us as sellers to look at.

We spend so much time focused on, “How are we going to get the deal done?” instead of understanding from our customers, how do we help them get the deal done and navigate all the things they need to do to mobilize the support to make it happen?

Brent: We have an article in Harvard Business Review in the March issue of 2017. It’s called “The New Sales Imperative.”

The idea behind it is exactly what you’re talking about. By the way, it’s called “The New Sales Imperative” because they find if they put the word sales in the title, it sells more issues, so they like that.

But it could be called “The New Marketing Imperative” as well. That was somewhat tongue in cheek, but it’s actually true.

As a supplier, what we find is that the single hardest thing about solutions is not selling them. It is, in fact, buying them.

If you go out and you talk to people, and I talk to literally thousands at the retreats and meetings and conferences we do, I did this with 1,200 people at our Vegas conference last year.

I simply asked them to take their selling hat off and put their buying hat on and think about their own organization.

Think about a recent big complex solution that you purchased with your colleagues at your company in the last 18 months, whether it’s a CRM system or some sort of lead management system or IT system or a consulting engagement, whatever it is.

Think of all the people involved, all the decisions you had to make, all the hoops you had to jump through.

Now if you had to pick one word, one adjective to describe that entire buying journey, what would that be?

Like I said, I’ve done this with thousands of people around the world, and inevitably, what do you think the words are, Brian? Take a guess.

Brian: I’m just thinking about what the words would be. I’m not even sure.

Brent: It would be things like long, hard, awful, frustrating.

Actually, it’s really interesting. When you ask people to place themselves in their own purchase journey and just ask them to share one word, they get kind of angry.

You can see their tension. The cuss words start coming out in ways that are not really appropriate for meetings that I was conducting.

I’ll never forget, someone in Chicago, the head of marketing, said, “I never want to do that again.” It was one word because I asked for one word: “Ineverwanttodothatagain.”

Someone in DC said “landmine.” And I said, “That’s not an adjective.” And he said, “landmine-ish,” which became my word for the year.

The point of all this being, if you put yourself in the shoes of your customers and ask them what it feels like to buy a solution, I literally have heard, out of the thousands of people I’ve asked, three positive words out of thousands and thousands of people I’ve talked to.

It’s all negative.

Then you ask them a second question, which is really interesting.

You ask them, “All right, so how much of that pain, how much of that time, how much of that frustration was the result of the supplier selling to you? And how much was just a result of your own company getting in its own way?”

Nine times out of 10, 10 times out of 10, people will say, “It had nothing to do with the supplier selling to me. It’s just my own company.”

Because we’re already convinced our own company is the worst company in the world. We either get in our own way, we’re too complicated, we have too many meetings, and on and on.

What’s really interesting is, what we have here is not a selling problem at all. What we have is a buying problem.

Buying is really bleeping hard with all the committees and all the information and all the options, and it all just becomes completely overwhelming.

Again, back to the point about empathy: if you can understand this as a seller, as a marketer, it doesn’t matter which, and you can understand just how hard it is to buy not just your solution but any solution.

To sift through all the information and pick out which information matters most, to sift through all the options and determine which options matter most, to wrangle all the different people and figure out all the different questions they’re going to have — and you can anticipate — this is empathy.

If you know what that feels like and then logically you can anticipate what those problems are going to be and which information is going to matter most, you can effectively become the coach to your customer.

Not on what to buy, but on how to buy.

You can take them by the hand, and you can guide them through that buying journey and become that buying Sherpa. Not solve for selling, but solve for buying.

That’s what a lot of our more recent work has been about, adopting what we’ve come to call a prescriptive approach to selling.

Again, we’ve seen marketing organizations do this really well through content that the customer can self-serve on.

My Google search will take me to a white paper that a company has written, which can take me step by step: “Looking to buy a CRM? Here’s the 10-step process. First do this. Talk to these people. Here’s the information that matters. This question doesn’t matter.”

From a customer’s perspective, the reaction is not, “I see you’re trying to trick me into buying your stuff,” but rather, “Wow, this was really helpful. You just made it so much easier.”

You can only do that, in my mind, effectively as a supplier if you come at this whole idea with empathy, being able to understand what it feels like to buy, because it doesn’t feel very good.

Brian: What you shared is that a lot of us treat the journey, and we’re going to talk a bit about your marketing research in a moment, as this beautiful-looking linear model that moves from left to right.

It’s a nice flow, but it’s really like climbing a mountain to our customer.

Brent: Yeah.

Brian: So I love the word picture of being a Sherpa because Sherpas are there to help people climb and help them along the journey.

That’s really, I think, the whole idea of empathy. It’s applied empathy because our goal is really to help people on their journey.

Brent: I totally agree.

Now let’s not forget that at the end of the day, we’re all in the business of doing one thing, which is selling more stuff.

Brian: Yes.

Brent: So empathy is all well and good, and it’s so powerful that the cynic in someone listening today might say, “Well, this is just empathy for the sake of selling more stuff.”

And to some degree, you know what, that’s true because that’s what we’re solving for in the world of sales and marketing.

But that doesn’t mean it’s any less powerful, any less honorable.

It’s helping customers find ways to generate greater value for their business that they haven’t appreciated on their own, and then helping them navigate themselves to a place where they can actually realize that value.

I think in many ways it’s not only an honorable thing to do for your customer. What we find is it’s a very profitable thing for you to do as a supplier as well.

Brian: I 100% agree.

At the base level, practicing this way, marketing and sales can and should be a force for good.

As you’re talking about this, I wanted to shift to the marketing research because you had such interesting findings around the journey of a customer.

What surprised you about the B2B buyer journey findings, the customer buying journey, and also the most important channels customers are using?

Brent: There’s more to come on this.

In fact, I’m just working on the keynote for our Vegas conference in October, where we bring all of our sales and marketing members together at our CEB, now Gartner, Sales Marketing Summit.

It’s awkward to say CEB now Gartner, but you all get the idea.

One of the things we are studying this year in our marketing practice is simply digital. We get a little more specific than that, but you can imagine, particularly B2B marketing.

Now B2C marketing digital has been a huge part, if not the primary part, of buying for a long time now.

It has become equally important in B2B very rapidly over the last several years.

Not surprisingly, we’re getting questions around the world from the CMOs that we work with, the hundreds of them, around, “How do we move to become a more digitally proficient marketing organization? What does that even mean? What would be the characteristics or hallmarks?”

So we set out to understand at least some of this world of digital buying in the B2B space with more detail this year, so we can provide our members with greater, more actionable advice.

One of the ways we started was just trying to understand what the digital buying journey looks like in B2B.

What we are really trying to understand is what the buying journey looks like in B2B, and then effectively along that buying journey, which parts are most likely to be digital?

Along the way, we found something that was actually really interesting.

What you find with most marketers, and I mean this with deep respect, this is just the result of the way we all came up and the way that digital came into our world, and the way that marketing’s always operated.

We tend to think of digital in marketing as a tool for demand generation, that is largely upper-funnel to maybe mid-funnel capability.

The idea is that we use digital, whether it be websites, online conferences, discussion boards, advertising, SEO, you name it, largely as a way to create or identify opportunities and customers that we then vet through maybe digitally based lead nurturing campaigns.

At some point, we give them that marketing-qualified stamp of approval. We pass them over to sales and say, “All right, go get them, guys.”

At that point forward, it becomes largely an in-person sales rep calling, over the phone or in person, trying to close that deal.

From our perspective in marketing, it’s like, okay, we got them that far. It’s all you guys. Go get them.

What we’ve come to understand from our research this year, and when you research customers what you find, perhaps not surprisingly, is that just because a customer’s in-person buying journey has begun, just because at some point during the purchase journey they will pick up the phone or fire off the email and reach out to an actual sales rep and have in-person communication, doesn’t mean that their digital buying journey has come to an end.

It’s not like digital in the up-funnel and in-person in the down-funnel.

Rather, the two coexist.

The thing that I think is especially interesting and new for us this year is how much buying behavior is still in digital channels even late in a purchase.

Often long after we in the marketing organization have handed it off and said, “Go get them, sales,” our customers are still online learning.

There’s still late-stage digital buying activity, and that’s got a number of really interesting implications from our perspective.

Are we even thinking about that?

From a marketing perspective, is it largely demand gen and then digital is done? Well, if it’s late-stage, what’s actually happening?

As we dug into our research, what we find is, for example, one of the things that your customers are really looking for through digital channels later in the purchase process is reassurance.

I’m talking to Brent the sales rep, and Brent’s making all sorts of promises, and he’s convinced me to buy this multi-million-dollar solution, which is great. I trust him. He’s not a crook, right?

But nonetheless, one way or another, this thing’s big, it’s disruptive, it’s expensive. I’d kind of like to get some reassurance.

I’d like to maybe see what other customers have experienced in buying this solution.

Irrespective of my ongoing in-person conversations with that sales rep, I’m going to go out and corroborate what I’m learning there and maybe add to it through digital channels.

One of the things we found in surveying customers this year is the most likely place for them to go to get that late-stage digital reassurance is the supplier’s own website.

Which I found kind of ironic, like, “I’m not sure if I completely trust the sales rep, so I’ll go to the company’s website to get reassurance.”

But nonetheless, that’s what happens.

Which begs a really interesting question: when they go to your website to get reassurance on what they’re hearing from your rep, are they even going to find that reassurance? And is that reassurance going to be consistent with what the rep has said in person?

Because if they’re not aligned, you are going to raise all sorts of red flags for that customer.

Let me take a breath there. The implications here are fascinating, but I would imagine that rings true so far. Does that make sense?

Brian: It does.

As I was listening to you, something you touched on is marketing. We’ve always had this traditional handoff from a marketing qualified lead to sales.

What you’re saying is we need to actually go beyond handoff and think about the whole journey.

So what can marketers do differently based on your research? Because there is this gap right now, and buyers are going back to the website to get this reassurance. Marketers have this gap that they aren’t filling right now from what your research is showing.

Brent: It’s funny. I tell people the cool thing about doing research is every time you do a large-scale research project, you inevitably find two things.

You find answers, which is great, but you always get more questions, which is actually good because it keeps you in business.

There are all sorts of questions here.

If digital doesn’t work as a handoff but rather as an ongoing effort, to your point, Brian, that raises all sorts of questions.

What should not just marketing do, but sales do and commercial leaders do?

What you have here now, at least what we can really see clearly in our data for the first time, is sort of what we’ve watched happen, certainly in the business-to-consumer world for five or 10 years.

Effectively what you have here is a very clear picture of omnichannel buying.

Your customers are gathering information. They’re engaging the purchase process through multiple channels simultaneously, whether it’s digital, website, SEO, in person through sales reps.

All that’s happening simultaneously.

So it isn’t just early on digital, later on person, but rather all the time always-on digital, person, and lots of other different channels.

What it means is we’ve got to coordinate across these channels in a much more effective manner than we have in the past.

Omnichannel in B2C is interesting enough, right?

How do I get all of my digital teams in marketing to collaborate more effectively? I’ve got social. I’ve got search. I’ve got TV advertising. That would be the consumer world.

I’ve got to get my TV team and my agency partner, my online people, my social team, my Facebook team, they all have to coordinate.

What’s interesting is once you move omnichannel buying from the B2C world to the B2B world, it gets 1,000 times more complicated.

Because now omnichannel means that we don’t just have to span teams within the marketing function, but rather we have to span functions altogether.

The alignment isn’t just this team and this team in marketing, but it’s actually the entire marketing function has to be aligned with the sales function in some way that frankly we just never really fully appreciated before.

Because we were always solving for marketing or selling as opposed to solving for buying.

Some of the questions this raises for us would be things like, how does one just do this? How do you overcome decades of institutional inertia?

We’ve all been complaining about the lack of sales and marketing integration for years. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and one of the first things I heard on my first day of work when I joined CEB many years ago was, “Why can’t sales and marketing just figure out how to collaborate?”

Now when you solve for buying, you find the urgency has gone up dramatically.

If I’m hearing one thing from my sales rep and I’m finding a different thing on your website, that’s going to at the very least raise questions in a world where you’re trying to get me to change behavior, which as you remember is risky.

If I see anything that makes me a little bit more nervous, at the very least it’s going to slow me down, if not shut me down.

So now you’ve got to get all of these different pieces inside a marketing and sales organization aligned so that you’ve got one message to the customer, and it’s always consistent.

Your customer can go on whatever buying journey they want, whether it’s digital and different kinds of digital, whether it’s in person, and no matter which path I choose, I’m going to get a consistent message.

Because if they’re not aligned, it’s going to slow things down, and that to me is really fascinating.

We’re trying to figure out right now, practically and tactically, what does that mean? What has to be aligned? How do I do that?

I think the answer here for us is TBD. That’s what we’re on right now. We need to figure this kind of stuff out.

It raises all sorts of interesting questions even structurally.

Would it be better if sales and marketing reported into a single person?

I think what we’re finding already, even very anecdotally, is that those organizations where sales and marketing report up to a single person are just more likely to succeed in this environment for all the reasons I’ve just mentioned.

Brian: I’d like to try something out on you.

I’m actually writing a post about this. I’ve thought about this idea of empathy and how do we support the journey.

I think it’s really moving from this campaign mindset to from campaigns to conversations.

Since we’re thinking about this, how can we have a more congruent conversation with our customer as they go through their journey?

In effect, we’re helping them.

I think the best marketing and selling feels like helping because it really is.

I like this idea. You talked about one message. It’s a conversation that’s bi-directional.

What I’m saying is when we’re more congruent, it changes the conversation, so it can be more reciprocal with our potential customer.

Brent: More reciprocal and also more efficient.

One of the things we find about sales cycle times is, of course, they’ve gone up dramatically. It just takes longer to sell, partly because it takes longer for customers to buy.

Again, to your point, if they’re finding incongruent signals across the different channels from which they are gathering information, that’s going to slow things down that much more.

The challenge here is, again we’re still trying to figure this out, but the word you use I like, Brian, is the word conversation.

But in this context, you have to look at it not literally but metaphorically.

Because a conversation is human interaction. It’s people talking to people and conversing with one another.

That takes us right back to 10 years ago where I’ve got to have a sales rep involved. I’ve got to train my sales reps to have better conversations.

That is absolutely true, but this is more conversation in a metaphorical sense, which is not only an actual real conversation between these two human beings, but it’s also a “conversation” between our company’s website and that customer, or through the third-party influencers and our customer.

That broader view of the overall conversation and managing that becomes the bogey we’ve got to focus on, as opposed to just this actual literal conversation, which is only going to be a small part of it.

But nonetheless, if you ask any head of sales, they’ll tell you that’s it, it’s all that, we have to solve for that. That’s not the case anymore. It’s a way too limited perspective, I think.

Brian: Yeah.

As I was thinking and listening to you, our customers see our websites personified. They put a human context to the brand, to the company, even the language that’s being used.

I think the metaphor, that’s really what I’m talking about, and I’m glad you articulated it that way.

It is this metaphor of a conversation instead of the traditional campaign, which is more monologue, and what I’m saying is be more bi-directional.

Brent: I think that’s right.

By the way, going back to our empathy point, now you can start asking really interesting questions with the metaphor of the conversation.

Imagine you go to a party and you’re involved in a conversation. What makes for a good conversation? What makes for a bad conversation?

How does it feel to be involved in a bad conversation?

You go to a party and you’re in a bad conversation for whatever reason, and you just feel awkward. You just want to go crawl under a rock or you want to go away.

Honestly, you just want it to end.

That’s what it feels like from a customer’s perspective when they’re engaged with a conversation with your company that isn’t going according to expectations or is sending mixed messages.

Ask yourself: are we doing that to our customer?

How do we make our customers feel as a conversation partner?

It would be a really interesting thing to explore.

Brian: Research on how to improve being a good conversationalist says instead of trying to be interesting, be interested in the person you’re talking with.

That in and of itself is so much of what we do as marketers and sellers. It’s all about us, and we need to spend more time where it’s really all about them.

Brent: The best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten about conversation was, “Keep the other person talking about themselves.”

Brian: Totally.

Brent: That’s way too simplistic, but it is in the ballpark of what you’re talking about, which is so much better articulated.

I think that’s actually right.

This stuff is so interesting when you start solving for buying problems as opposed to selling or marketing problems.

Again, I think that’s where this idea of empathy at a very high level comes in.

Take your selling hat off, take your marketing hat off, and just ask yourself: what does it feel like to buy? How hard is it? What’s hard about it?

Why would I not do it? Why would I choose to opt out of it? What would have to happen for me to think it was easier? What would have to happen for me to feel more urgency or more excitement around it?

Solve for buying as opposed to solve for selling or marketing, and I think you’re going to be significantly better off relative to your competition.

Brian: Brent, I think that’s a perfect wrap to our conversation today.

As I was just thinking about what we can do, I think you just gave us the questions on what we can do to improve our focus and our efforts.

I’m excited for your next round of research, and I can’t wait to read about it and hear about it coming up in October.

What’s the best way for readers or listeners to get in touch with you and keep up with your research?

Brent: There are a couple different channels.

We post some of our videos and things on YouTube. Sometimes just searching my name, Brent Adamson, will come up with a couple there.

Most importantly, where we’d love to have anyone interested in our work, there are a couple different ways you can find us.

Probably the most logical place to go would be cebglobal.com. That’s our main website. It will take you into not just the CEB world but now the Gartner world too, which is very cool, and lots of new capabilities.

So cebglobal.com.

We have a website for each book, and that will tell you more about the research behind the book, tell you where to find it, and also channel you back to us.

There’s challengersale.com and challengercustomer.com, or if you like thechallengersale.com and thechallengercustomer.com. Either one will work.

There are a couple of ways to find us.

Me personally, I’m on LinkedIn, and we all have our phones tattooed onto our arms or wherever that is.

You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty responsive because I sleep with my phone under my pillow. I’m that guy.

We’re always happy to talk to commercial leaders because we all learn together.

I think that’s the honest-to-goodness truth of what’s kept me doing this at this company for so many years, Brian, is that it is truly a collaborative learning exercise, a learning journey that we’re all going on where we get smarter together.

I think that’s pretty cool.

Brian: Well, I feel the same about our conversation. I’m sure listeners will as well.

Thanks for joining us today, Brent. I really appreciate you coming on.

Brent: Absolutely, Brian. Cheers, and let’s do it again soon.

Brian: Thank you.