Empathy map: how to apply it in sales

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The empathy map is a tool that helps you draw a profile of your ideal customer based on their feelings. It is a tool used to get to know your customer better. Using it, you can detail the customer's personality and understand them better.

Empathy refers to the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, understanding the other person's feelings or reactions, and imagining yourself in the same circumstances and/or context. Exercising empathy can improve relationships, as you have a greater understanding of the other person and reduce conflicts. In addition, it allows for fairer and more comprehensive discussions.

In a business context, imagine truly understanding what is going on in your customer's head, understanding what problems they face and what they need to be successful. This is a tool that enables this knowledge, putting the issuer, brand, advertising agency or whoever wants to know about the target audience in the customer's shoes.

Do you want to know how to apply this map in sales to achieve better results? Keep reading!


Firstly, it was developed by the international design thinking Hong Kong telegram data consultancy Xplane. The Empathy Map is a visual and visual management tool that allows you to get to know a business's customer in depth through a diagram that establishes questions and topics about different areas of a persona's life. Therefore, it is recommended that it be drawn only after the persona has been developed, as this will determine some of the basic characteristics for understanding the positions determined on the map.

The idea is to use visual resources (such as paper, cardboard, chalkboard, board and even a digital screen) to reproduce the dynamics of the diagram and fill it in according to hypotheses about the behavior of the target audience in the situation drawn there. It is enriched as questions about the customer are answered, such as who they are, what they see, what they hear, what they say and do, what they think and feel and what their pains and needs are. Therefore, the goal is to obtain a deeper level of understanding of a persona in a given context, such as a purchasing decision or an experience using a product or service.

The most interesting thing is that the customer empathy map can be useful for the entire sales force, from marketing to customer success, and can be aimed at an external persona (such as a customer, supplier or stakeholder) or an internal persona (such as a company's employees). Furthermore, the initial questions follow a pre-established script. But of course, to find a more in-depth version of the persona (and, consequently, create even more personalized marketing actions), it is possible to add new aspects and questions to be analyzed.



Within the Empathy Map it is necessary to answer the following questions:

Identify your persona
The first step in creating a complete empathy map is to identify the persona. Therefore, create a context to situate the persona and don't forget to give it a name. Let's take an example: our persona will be Pedro, 35 years old, sales manager at a telephone company. Pedro has held the position for 9 months and is always willing to learn different ways of performing his tasks. Outside of work, he likes to keep his life dynamic: he combines a language course with the gym and doesn't give up having one day a week to take free courses and online updates to always improve his professional performance.

Define what she sees
In the second step, we talk about the visual stimuli that the persona receives. These may be related to their personal or professional life and may impact the way they consider their purchasing decisions. Returning to the example above, Pedro sees: coworkers absorbed by the pressure to meet targets; the need to update themselves and stay focused to carry out their work in a productive but healthy way.