People hear empathy and think it means being nice. Warm. Agreeable. The salesperson who smiles a lot and never makes anyone uncomfortable. That is not empathy. That is pleasantness, and buyers see through it in about a minute.
Real empathy is something harder and far more valuable. It is the disciplined skill of understanding another person's situation accurately enough to be useful to them. It is closer to what a good doctor does than to what a good host does. And like any skill, it can be developed, measured, and improved, which means the people who treat it as a personality trait they either have or do not have are leaving an enormous amount of capability on the table.
I am not in sales to make friends. I say that plainly because it gets misread, and the misreading matters. I am in sales to help people get what they need. Sometimes that requires me to be warm. Sometimes it requires me to tell someone something he does not want to hear, or to say that what he is asking for is not what he actually needs, which no friend angling to be liked would ever risk saying.
This is exactly how a good doctor operates. He does not diagnose you in order to be your friend. He diagnoses you in order to help you, and the help sometimes hurts. He asks uncomfortable questions. He tells you the truth you need rather than the comfort you want. A doctor who only told patients what they wanted to hear would be a pleasant man and a dangerous physician.
The best salespeople work the same way, and the foundation of it is listening, the part everyone claims to do and almost nobody actually does. Real listening is not waiting for your turn to talk. It is the active, effortful work of taking in another person's words, and the things underneath their words, accurately enough that you understand their situation better than they have managed to explain it.
When you can articulate someone's problem more clearly than he can, you have demonstrated empathy in the only way that counts: through accuracy.
Here is how you know you are doing it right. You can describe the buyer's situation back to him so precisely that he says, yes, exactly, that is it. Not your product. His situation. And accuracy is what earns trust. The buyer thinks, correctly, that a person who understands my problem this well probably understands the solution too. You have not flattered him. You have understood him, and understanding is rarer and worth more than flattery.
Empathy is not a soft skill sitting off to the side of the sales process. It is the engine underneath all of it. You cannot find a buyer's pain without it. You cannot diagnose before you prescribe without it. You cannot write marketing that makes a stranger feel seen without it. Every principle I believe about selling traces back to this one capacity: the capacity to genuinely understand another person and act on that understanding honestly.
So treat it like the skill it is. In your next conversation, set yourself the goal of understanding the other person's situation so well that you could argue their side better than they can. Notice how often you stop listening and start preparing. Notice when you are being merely pleasant, and ask whether being accurate would serve them better, even if it costs you the easy warmth.
Listen first. Understand accurately. Tell the truth that understanding reveals. The friendship, if it comes, comes after, and it is worth more for having been earned that way.