Commercial Empathy: Mining hard value from a soft skill

Soft skills. You know. Squishy stuff like teamwork and empathy. No match for the rock-hard measures of success like KPIs, ROI, and TCO.

So, would you be surprised to learn that “soft skills” originated with the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War? Some pretty tough leaders realized that soldiers needed people training as much as weapon training. 

Empathy is now accepted by even the most grizzled Milton Friedman acolytes in business today. It is a foundational layer to leading a modern enterprise. Much of the empathy focus ostensibly is internal within the company - how can I be a more empathetic leader to my team? 

Can we extend our empathy beyond the four walls of the enterprise and actually have it be part of the way we do business with others? 

Perhaps now more than ever given the macroeconomic headwinds our customers are facing the concept of “commercial empathy” is needed. 

Commercial empathy is the space where suppliers succeed through better understanding of the customer's desired outcomes, and the customer fully grasps the supplier's experience and capabilities on tap to advance their goals and initiatives. 

In empathetic collaboration, each intuits the other's challenges and critical benchmarks. The result: A uniquely crafted, shared view of partnership success. 

Most customer/supplier relationships are like petri dishes of polarized innovation. Each party operates with their own separate laboratory of incubated ideas- you have your innovation roadmap and we have ours. 

HP sought to change this paradigm with a shared digital value experience with their customers. Both parties enter a robust collaborative environment to truly understand each other's capabilities and resources and co-create value together. The result is one integrated innovation roadmap with accompanying partnership success metrics to track ongoing. What transpired from these digital value experiences at scale was unanticipated. 

Quarterly customer business reviews once met with a chorus of indifference became highly engaged and deeply personal experiences. 

HP customers associated this work with HP as an extension of their own personal identity and value within their company. 

As Grad Rosenbaum, Head of Global Customer Success & General Manager, HP, told me, “We love it when our key contacts at our clients get promoted, when they win awards, when they leave and go to another company and call us up and say, ‘Could you come do that thing for us here, now, as well?’” 

Grad offered this comment when we discussed how these digital experiences - powered by Ecosystems collaborative value platform - have helped build commercial empathy with their customers. 

The hard value to this seemingly soft skill has lead to an industry leading close rate of 70% and a 30% increase in expansion. There’s nothing squishy about that.

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