Empathy, Authenticity, Meaning As Competitive Advantage?

In our GTM strategies, in our engagement strategies, we constantly look for differentiators and competitive advantage.

Most of the time we are focused on our solutions. “We have more features functions… We have prestigious customers, you can be one too…. We have great customer service…. We are cheaper, if you decide by the end of the month…. Our products beat the pants off our competitors!”

And sometimes these things work. We can actually show differentiation based on our solutions. But these are short-lived, as our competitors copy them and try to one-up us.

Sometimes, we try to create competitive advantage in the buying process. We focus on a couple of specific needs, we tailor our demos to demonstrate how well our solutions handle those needs. We can tailor our content to support and reinforce those things.

But too often, we never take the time to understand these, instead applying the same standard prospecting, qualifying, objection handling, discovery, proposal, closing approaches for everyone. So we adopt these new approaches in our engagement strategies, often looking like, “We help companies like [Insert Company Name Here] address these [insert your favorite problem]. We’d love to meet with [Insert Company Name (or maybe an individual)] to demo address how we help you do this.

Our playbooks, our scripts carefully structure everything that we do, maximizing our efficiency in achieving our goals, perhaps in the process helping our customers..

And, not surprisingly, our competition is doing exactly the same thing!

But maximizing our efficiency isn’t a differentiator or competitive advantage with our customers. We may be able to shove more stuff through our process than our competitors do, but our efficiency is meaningless to our customers. Our efficiency is important to us, but not a competitive differentiator when viewed by the customer!

And now we have AI. It is doing so much of this work for us. It is so much more efficient, it can perhaps provide some deeper insights, or at least tailor some of the engagement for us. It can actually be the first interface to the customer, whether through AI generated emails, social or other outreach; or AI Agents actually talking to our customers.

I won’t debate the pros and cons of this, let’s just accept them. But as everyone is using the same tools in the same way, how do we create competitive advantage? ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini are just as smart for our competitors as they are for us.

And, we eventually get back to our customers. Is this important to them? Is this where they struggle, where we can differentiate ourselves, our solutions, our engagement process?

What if we looked at what’s missing in the customer experience? What if we understood those things and started focusing our engagement strategies on these? Could this differentiated experience create a competitive advantage?

What are we not providing today, with or without AI, that can create both a competitive advantage, but also enable us to create greater value with our customers?

It’s easy to pick this out, we already have mountains of data, research, tremendous books that help us understand where we are currently failing, and what our customers most value. (The best most recent books are The Jolt Effect, The Activator Advantage and the upcoming Framemaking Sale

So how do we differentiate ourselves, creating greater competitive advantage. Clearly, it’s less in what AI (or anything else we are all doing) does, but it’s in those gaps, the things our customers need and value, that these tools and current approaches don’t do.

We often talk about the human in the loop with AI, but over the past 5-7 years we’ve proactively designed out the human in the loop in our GTM strategies—independently of AI.

What do we need to put back into our GTM and engagement strategies?

For starters, things that are uniquely human–important to each of us as individuals, no less important to our customers. These are our ability to engage with empathy, authenticity, and meaning.

How do we do this? How do we develop our skills in this? Can we train empathy, authenticity and meaning? Well, yes and no. We can improve our abilities for doing this. I’ve ranted about customer, problem, business acumen. If we don’t truly understand our customers, their businesses, and problems, we have no way of connecting with them in meaningful ways. This is a starting point.

We can develop, train, and improve skills which help in our empathy, authenticity, and meaning. Things like curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative conversations. These are foundational to empathy, authenticity, and meaning.

Trust is another foundational element, and through Charlie Green’s and other’s great work we understand what it takes to build trust and how we do this.

As leaders, are we role modeling these behaviors with our own people? Perhaps the best way to get our people to engage customers differently, creating competitive advantage, is to model these behaviors with them–demonstrate true empathy, authenticity and meaning (not to mention the competitive advantage it creates in recruiting and retaining talent). As they see how we engage them, they will start doing the same with their customers.

What am I missing?

My new “friend,” Joshua Bellin, and I have been exchanging ideas on this. He is looking at the “three C’s,” Context (nuance and alignment), Constraints (guardrails), and Consequences (accountability and feedback). I think are important complements to empathy, authenticity, and meaning. We need to be differentiating and creating competitive advantage across all these areas.

We know the ways we have traditionally differentiated ourselves are no longer working. That we are failing to create competitive advantage. What if we look at what truly sets us apart in each and every interaction with our prospects and customers, leveraging those to create sustainable differentiation and competitive advantage? Imagine how that might impact performance?

So where do we start? There are a number of things, but here’s a starter kit, you can adapt.

1. Before every customer interaction, identify what might be important to them, what’s missing in their experience, and build a plan to engage and explore these things with them. It’s never about what we sell.
2. In every meeting, consciously focus on genuine caring and curiosity. Seek to understand their challenges deeply, bring your personal experience into engaging them in these discussions. Understand why the work matters to them.
3. Build a deliberate practice around empathy, authenticity, and meaning. Develop your business acumen skills, build your skills in curiosity, critical thinking, and collaborative conversations.

For managers:

1. Model these behaviors in every interaction you have with your people.  In 1:1’s, team meetings, even water-cooler conversations.  Let your people experience these themselves, driving them to do the same things with their customers.
2. Find ways to celebrate these moments with your team.  When they are connecting more impactfully with their customers, celebrate these and challenge others to do similar things.

 

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  Enjoy!