Visual Empathy in Online Sales
With the automation of marketing strategies, cold calling, and cold emailing, moving down the sales funnel has never been more difficult. In our previous article, we talked about how looks sell, but what is the science behind it? In this article, we will talk about the importance of visual empathy.
I’ve moved through the sales funnel through my little years of working in corporate jobs: At 16, I got my first job as a cold caller. My fragile ego as a young adult was completely bruised and I left within 3 months after contracting bronchitis.
At 19 I had a gap year where I worked as a coordinator for salespeople; I created collateral and blasted emails every day for a year. That was where I started learning about marketing strategies and customer support.
At 24 I worked as a freelance social media marketing director and managed the sales of a B2C cosmetic brand. I tracked SEOs and wrote replies to social media DMs every single day.
And yet, I have not found anything more appealing than putting an image to your sales intent. Visual empathy consists of three general ideas:
cognitive, emotional, and compassion.
By providing your customers with a visual tool they can relate to, positive feelings such as trust, understanding, and better awareness of the product increase.
Think of the term “I see what you mean”, or “seeing is believing”. The importance of visual appeal and connection is vital in creating an empathetic and human experience for your buyers.
What has Visual Empathy got to do with sales?
Sure enough, many people would understand the importance of visual impact during the marketing process. Similarly, allowing customers to speak to a real human during customer support would also increase feelings of trust.
However, how does it affect your sales proposal closing?
Although every step of the sales funnel is important, a sales proposal is the ultimate end goal most salespeople would want to achieve. However, as internal meetings and discussions are held, the specifics of a proposal can get lost in translation. Not only so, the product could be reduced to nothing but a set of numbers.
Visual empathy allows the elusive online sales environment today to be more trustworthy. A word-doc proposal can deliver all the objectives and specific agendas, but it would never be able to deliver compassion and human-to-human connection.
So how do we go about increasing visual empathy in your sales proposal?
Create your sales proposal with the intent of increasing brand awareness.
It is known in consumer psychology that colors can affect the way people view a brand’s personality. Creating proposals that bring out the flavor and image of your brand, drives up feelings of authenticity and genuineness for your client.
Images and Videos
It sounds like a lot of hard work creating a video; but what is better than having a filmed video explaining the details of your proposal? Although well-written texts can highlight the intent of your services, a video reveals the tone, pitch, verbal nuances, and feelings that can boost understanding for the viewers.
Live Demo
I’ve been sitting through multiple live and recorded demos to see how things work.
Recorded Demo: feels more like an advertisement, but provides clear examples and expectations.
Live Demo: Feels more tailored to my needs and representatives would direct me quickly to whatever fits my requirements, even before asking for additional personal information.
Regardless of what sales process you are working on, visual empathy could potentially make a huge difference in your sales. Like they say,
No man is an island
What The Sales are created to provide a more visually empathetic proposal experience for both the salesperson and client. Salespeople are able to boost their brand identity without any prior designing experience and create videos that can explain your services with utmost clarity.
