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If you're trying to work yourself through a time of grief, who’s going to get your attention?
The doctor who says, “There’s nothing medically wrong with you. You just need to keep yourself busy, and your mind on other things”.
Or the friend who puts their arm round you and tells you, “I know exactly how you feel. The same thing happened to me last year. Why don’t we have dinner tonight. I know how important talking about things was for me”.
Step aside doc. Black belt third dan in empathy coming through.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share somebody else’s feeling.
And trust me, if you can persuade someone that you genuinely understand what’s keeping them awake at night, then they will queue round the block to talk to you, leaving all those marketers who think product is the solution, scratching their heads waiting for the phone to ring.
The Million Pound Story makes a start on this. In part 1 we work on understanding what’s going on in our prospect’s heads (we called it psychographics), but it’s not a deep dive.
Taking a deeper dive and building a more detailed picture of how someone is feeling and thinking, is like building a super power.
If our prospect looks at our messaging and thinks to herself. “Jesus Christ, that’s me, they’ve just described me”, then who do you think they’re going to turn to for help?
You’ve got it!
To paint a more detailed picture, we use an Empathy Map, and in this Quick Win I’m going to explain exactly how these work.
So here’s your mission if you choose to accept it.
First Watch the video that comes next, then in the third part read about how you put this into action. And if you’re feeling curious, for more background around the whole topic of understanding how our prospects think and feel, there is some additional reading at the end.
Time to roll our sleeves up and do this thing. Now you know the basics of what an Empathy Map is for, let's dive a bit deeper and see how you create one. While we're on that dive, let's discuss a few tips for organising and running a session that gets results. It's all in the video.
First select your team. Then the most important thing you can do is to get a date in the diary, before you do anything else. If it's in the diary, then it'll happen. Otherwise it will remain an idea that never got actioned. Choose a date, invite your team and hound them like a wasp at a picnic until they've accepted it.
After that, get your logistics on. Book a room, gather the data, find a flip chart and raid the stationery cupboard for Post it Notes.
Finally, send out the data to everyone, and draw up your Empathy Mapping flipchart / white board.
You're ready to go. And breathe!
Run your session. Everything you need is in the video.
Once you've finished your session, and you've processed the result, before anyone leaves the room, complete the answer to these questions:
Either:
As result of our Empathy Mapping session we're going to change our messaging approach to this avatar by: ................................................................................................
Or:
As result of our Empathy Mapping session, we have decided that our messaging approach is correct and we don't need to make any changes.
Make sure everyone is in agreement.
Conclusion:
The emphasis in this Quick Win is on action. Getting a date in the diary, gathering and distributing data, running a session, processing the result, and agreeing what changes we'll make to our messaging.
To be most successful in your Empathy Mapping, focus on action. In the words of Nelson Mandela: "Vision without action is just a dream."
Or to completely misquote Samuel Johnson: "The road to hell is paved with good intention"
Take your pick, but take your action.
Good luck!
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