Urgency and Empathy

Imagine this. Someone shows up at your door. They’re selling a pest service. They explain (in simple terms, with brevity) why your neighbors use their subscription service, why it’s better to be proactive than wait for there to be a problem, exactly what they do and how, what it’ll cost, and what happens in the (very unlikely) event that somehow you have a breakthrough pest even with their service.

Alternatively, imagine that you need an exterminator. Right now. Your house is infested with unwelcome guests. No one is calling you back. And when they do, they take forever to show up. They move slowly. They aren’t super clear about what happens next. Except that it’ll take a series of complicated steps over a longer period of time than you’d like. And they tell you they’ll call you to schedule the next appointment. And then they don’t call. For days.

One of these is a customer experience built on urgency and empathy. The other is built without either.

While it’s painfully evident here, urgency and empathy are needed everywhere. Whether you’re in service or software, you’re built to solve a problem for people who will pay to solve it and have chosen to pay you.

Your sense of urgency communicates to those people: solving this problem is important to me, too.

Empathy communicates both: 1) I understand what you’re feeling (emotional empathy), and 2) I understand what experiences and worldviews are feeding into what you’re feeling (cognitive empathy).

The buyer has to be at the center of the business. Not the other way around.

When you focus on the product, the process, but not the people buying what you’re selling, you might launch. You might even grow. But you’ll build without urgency or empathy. So you’ll hit a growth ceiling. Or crumble.

You’ll start seeing symptoms like: it’s harder to get sales meetings, fewer sales meetings are turning into new customers, fewer customers are renewing (let alone expanding), or engagement is down (people are using the product less, are slower to adopt new features, or aren’t even bothering to engage with our content). 

Buyer-centric businesses have a linchpin.

Putting the buyer at the center of everything -- product, marketing, sales, customer success -- takes a marketing leader who can develop actionable buyer profiles, write a purpose-driven brand strategy, and be the linchpin for the teams.

This is what’s spurred the trend of CMOs becoming CXOs. The need to unify disconnected teams and every part of the customer experience. And to design that experience with both urgency and empathy. Great marketers kind of seem to be born with both. 

To break the growth ceiling, you have to pull in a pro to rally the teams around the people you’re here to help. And to write the story they need to hear. To clearly define what you do, how you do it, who it’s for, who you are, and why you’re believable. And to enroll everyone on every team in bringing that story to life, with urgency and empathy. For every customer. Every day.