I didn't know I was a salesperson. I just knew my clients kept coming back, my schedule stayed full, and referrals arrived without me asking. It wasn't until years later that I understood why — and the answer came down to one single, deeply misunderstood skill.
The Accidental Sales Career
My professional life started as a personal trainer at a high-end fitness center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I was young, enthusiastic, and had no idea what a sales funnel was. I didn't track conversion rates. I didn't give referral fees. I sparsely advertised and never once lowered my rates.
And yet, I quickly became the trainer who led the team in new clients booked.
What I had was a history most of my prospects didn't know about. I had once been overweight and out of shape. I knew the shame of avoiding mirrors. I knew the voices in your head that say things like: "You're always going to be fat, just accept it." And: "You're too far gone — it's going to be too hard." And the classic: "It's fine, you can start Monday."
I also knew what it felt like to have no idea where to start. There was no Google or YouTube at that time. The only resources were muscle magazines filled with images of seemingly unattainable athletes who looked like a different species. I knew that specific kind of despair — the hopelessness of wanting to change but not knowing how, and not trusting anyone who claimed to have the answer.
So when a new prospect sat down across from me for their complimentary consultation, something happened naturally. Before I said a word about what they needed to do or how I could help, I spoke to them from the place I had been. I didn't pitch. I didn't close. I connected.
And they bought. Reliably.
The One Word That Changed Everything
Looking back now, with years of experience studying how people communicate, build trust, and make decisions, the answer to why my business grew when my competitors were grinding is one word: empathy.
Not sympathy. Not pity. Not performing concern because a training manual told you to mirror body language and repeat the last thing the buyer said back to them in a slightly different order.
Real empathy. Hard-earned empathy. The kind that comes from actually knowing what it feels like to stand where your prospect is standing, to carry what they are carrying, and to want what they want — even before they have found the words for it.
In sales, empathy is the most frequently cited and least practiced skill in the profession. Leaders nod at it in kickoffs. It shows up on values posters in conference rooms. And it disappears the moment a rep gets into a discovery meeting and starts running their standard deck.
Why Empathy Gets Misunderstood in Sales
Most salespeople have heard some version of "put yourself in the customer's shoes." The problem is the execution. For many sellers, empathy becomes a set of tactical moves: lean forward, maintain eye contact, nod at the right moments, and reflect back what the buyer said so they feel heard. These things aren't wrong. But they are technique, not empathy.
Empathy is not a method. It's a state of mind you bring into the room before the conversation starts. It's the result of genuinely asking — and genuinely caring about the answer — what it must feel like to be this person, sitting in this chair, carrying these pressures, with these goals and these obstacles and this history of trying to solve them.
When empathy is performed rather than practiced, buyers feel it immediately. The limbic brain — the emotional center that processes trust signals continuously — registers inauthenticity long before the prefrontal cortex forms a conscious opinion. The buyer's guard goes up. The conversation narrows to features and pricing. And the sale either doesn't happen or only happens at a discount, because price becomes the last lever when trust hasn't been established.
The irony is that sellers who skip empathy in favor of efficiency are not actually more efficient. They are slower. Every call takes longer when the buyer is guarded. Every proposal requires more follow-up. Every deal gets more scrutiny at the end. The sellers who invest in empathy upfront compress all of that friction. The conversation moves faster because the buyer is actually in it.
What Empathy Looks Like Before a Conversation
The fitness center where I trained didn't have LinkedIn or Google. I couldn't look up a prospect's professional background before they walked in the door. What I had was my own experience, and I used it deliberately before every consultation.
In a sales context, the preparation is more accessible — and it's where empathy begins. Not in the meeting. Before it.
Before your next conversation, take a few minutes to genuinely ask yourself three questions. First: what is it like to be this person right now? Not just their job title or their company's revenue — the texture of their day, the weight of their priorities, the decisions they are accountable for. Second: what are their goals, and what would it actually mean — professionally and personally — to achieve them? Third: what obstacles are in their way, and what does it feel like to keep running into them?
Write the answers down. Not because you will read them in the meeting, but because the act of writing makes the perspective real. It shifts your orientation from "what am I going to say" to "what does this person need me to understand." That shift changes how you listen. And how you listen changes everything about how the buyer experiences you.
The Neuroscience of Feeling Safe
There's a reason the personal trainer story works as a sales metaphor. When my prospects sat down across from me, they weren't only evaluating a training program. They were deciding whether it was safe to be vulnerable — to admit their failures, their fears, their track record of starting and stopping, their doubt that this time would be any different.
That evaluation doesn't happen consciously. It happens in the limbic system, which processes emotional signals against a single question: can I trust this person?
When the answer is yes, the rest of the brain opens up. The prefrontal cortex — where rational decision-making lives — engages honestly. Buyers stop managing the conversation and start actually participating in it. They share the real challenges, not the polished version. They stop evaluating you as a vendor and start considering what a longer-term relationship might look like.
That shift is not accidental. It's neurologically predictable. And the primary input to that evaluation is whether the buyer feels seen and understood before you try to help them. Empathy triggers safety. Safety enables honest conversation. Honest conversation creates the conditions where real trust — and real decisions — can happen.
This is why the voice of the seller matters so much in the first five minutes of a meeting. Not what they pitch. How they show up. Whether the buyer can feel that the seller has thought about them, specifically, before walking in the door.
Vendor or Trusted Advisor: Choose One
There is a meaningful difference between being a vendor and being a trusted advisor. That difference has almost nothing to do with the quality of your product or the strength of your methodology.
Vendors are evaluated. They're compared in spreadsheets. They're managed by procurement. They're asked to justify their price on every renewal cycle. They occupy the part of the buyer's mind that is always looking for a better deal, a cheaper alternative, a reason to consolidate the contract. They are interchangeable, even when they are genuinely good at what they do.
Trusted advisors operate differently. They're consulted early, before the RFP hits the street. They're called when something goes wrong. They're brought into conversations about the future because the buyer trusts their judgment, not just their deliverables. They earn referrals without asking. They hold a different position in the buyer's mind entirely — one that has less to do with what they sell and everything to do with how they show up.
Empathy is the dividing line. Vendors are often skilled and knowledgeable. What they lack is the genuine capacity to enter the buyer's reality and communicate from that place first. Trusted advisors do this consistently. They've either developed it deliberately or they've lived it — and buyers can feel the difference within the first few minutes of a conversation.
Ask yourself honestly: in your last five client conversations, did you spend more time thinking about the buyer's reality or your own agenda? The answer to that question tells you which side of the line you're on.
Practicing Empathy: Where to Start
If empathy doesn't come naturally in your sales conversations, the good news is that it is a skill, not a fixed personality trait. It can be developed, practiced, and refined over time. Here's where to start.
Before your next meeting, spend five intentional minutes placing yourself in your prospect's position. Not a surface-level exercise — a genuine attempt to understand the specific pressures they face in their role, the history they carry from previous attempts to solve this problem, and what it would mean to them — their career, their team, their standing in the organization — to finally get it right.
In the meeting itself, let that preparation drive your questions rather than your slides. Curiosity is empathy in action. A seller who asks "what's the biggest obstacle you're running into right now?" and then actually listens to the full answer — without using the pause to mentally queue up the next slide — is demonstrating more empathy than any technique-based training can manufacture.
Notice when the buyer leans forward versus when they lean back. Notice when they start giving shorter answers. Those signals tell you whether they feel understood or whether they've gone into evaluation mode. A seller with strong empathy reads those signals in real time and adjusts — not to close faster, but to reconnect.
The conversations that lead to long-term relationships are almost always the ones where the buyer walked away feeling seen before they felt sold to. That feeling doesn't happen by accident. It happens when a seller has taken the time to genuinely imagine what it's like to walk a mile in the buyer's shoes — and then lets that understanding shape everything about how they show up.
If building that kind of empathy-first approach across your sales team is where you want to go, start a conversation with Braintrust. Our NeuroSelling methodology is built around the neuroscience of trust and buyer decision-making — and empathy is the foundation everything else is built on.
