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About Richard “RJ” Kedziora
Richard “RJ” Kedziora is a seasoned leader with over three decades of experience, having embarked on his journey in computer science. A graduate of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Richard earned his degree in computer science while actively leading the university’s chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery. His innate drive to improve and innovate began in these early years, as he consistently sought ways to effect positive change whenever he encountered unmet needs or challenges. This proactive approach laid the foundation for Richard’s enduring career, which was marked by a commitment to leadership and making a meaningful difference in the world.
Empathy-Driven B2B Strategies: How Understanding Customer Journeys Drives Revenue Growth
Companies face a growing trust deficit in today’s competitive B2B landscape. Only 3% of buyers trust sales pitches upon first contact, and more than half prefer independent research over engaging with sales representatives. This challenge is particularly pronounced in specialized industries like healthcare, where regulatory compliance and patient outcomes hang in the balance.
So, how do successful B2B companies bridge this gap? The answer may be more straightforward than you think: empathy.
According to recent research, 80% of CEOs now recognize empathy as a key driver of success, and B2B marketers increasingly believe that human-centric marketing approaches provide a competitive edge. However, implementing empathy-driven B2B strategies requires more than a surface-level understanding.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how empathy-driven B2B strategies can transform your business relationships and drive revenue growth, with insights from Richard “RJ” Kedziora, co-founder of healthcare software solutions company Estenda.
Table of Contents
- Understanding the B2B Trust Deficit
- What Are Empathy-Driven B2B Strategies?
- The Business Case for Empathy
- Implementing Empathy in Product Development
- Building Empathy Into Your Sales Process
- Cultivating an Empathy-Driven Company Culture
- Measuring the Impact of Empathy
- Empathy and Long-Term Client Relationships
- Conclusion
Understanding the B2B Trust Deficit
The B2B trust deficit has reached a critical point. According to research mentioned in our conversation with Richard Kedziora, only 3% of B2B buyers trust sales pitches upon first contact, and more than half prefer to research solutions independently rather than engage with sales representatives.
What’s causing this deficit? Several factors contribute:
- Information asymmetry – Buyers have more access to information than ever before
- Previous negative experiences with sales processes
- Rising complexity in B2B solutions and purchasing decisions
- Industry-specific concerns like regulatory compliance in healthcare
“Healthcare is unique,” says Kedziora. “The person or group that’s paying for it is often not the one using it. So you have that challenge. If I work with a company and we develop a digital health app for the treatment of depression, who is going to pay for that application?”
This complex stakeholder landscape creates additional trust hurdles that must be overcome through empathetic approaches.
What Are Empathy-Driven B2B Strategies?
Empathy-driven B2B strategies center all business activities on understanding the customer’s journey, challenges, and needs. This approach goes beyond traditional customer-centricity by incorporating deep emotional intelligence and genuine concern for solving customer problems.
Richard Kedziora describes it this way:
“While technology is important, it’s much more about that personal journey, that person that’s using it, the people involved. And that’s where that idea of empathy comes into it. You really need to understand, if you’re a person with diabetes or multiple sclerosis, what is that journey like for you? What is it like for the provider that’s caring for you?”
Empathy-driven strategies include:
- Deep customer research that goes beyond demographics to understand emotional drivers
- Solution co-creation with clients rather than for them
- Transparent communication throughout the relationship
- Ongoing learning about client needs, even after the sale
- Cross-functional empathy where every department understands the customer
In companies like Estenda, this approach extends to providing medical training to new employees, depending on the project they’re working on. “We are going to provide you with some medical training,” Kedziora explains. That’s either through somebody who’s part of the project, like we’re working with a doctor or a PhD, or just so much information available on YouTube out there on the Internet, Harvard, Stanford, Mayo Clinic.”
The Business Case for Empathy
Implementing empathy-driven approaches isn’t just good ethics—it’s good business. According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, companies that excel at empathy outperform less empathetic competitors by 50% in earnings growth.
For Estenda, empathy has translated directly into business success:
- 20+ year client relationships – “We have a couple of customers that we’ve been working with for all twenty-two years and have gone through multiple iterations of leadership,” notes Kedziora.
- Enhanced intellectual property recognition – “Some of our customers have put our names on patents. The customer always owns the intellectual property. They own the software that we’re creating. But it just demonstrates that we’ve been so much part of the solution.”
- Stronger referral networks – “A lot of our customers and clients over the years and today come through word-of-mouth and referrals.”
- Scientific publication inclusion – “We just had a paper published in JAMA ophthalmology around some machine learning work we did. And one of our developers has their name on that paper.”
These outcomes demonstrate how empathy transforms from a soft skill into hard business results.
Implementing Empathy in Product Development
Empathy must be woven into the entire product development lifecycle, not just added as an afterthought. In the healthcare software space where Estenda operates, this is particularly critical given the life-changing impact of its solutions.
The Skateboard Approach
Kedziora uses an illuminating analogy for empathy-driven product development:
“The analogy I use quite often is you have a challenge. You live on one side of town and your work is on the other side of town and you need to get there. And okay. So you can walk, but that takes a while. I wanna create something so I can get to work faster. Okay. I can build a car. That’s gonna take a long time. I don’t know how to build a car. There’s a lot of things I don’t know, and I don’t even know what to ask just yet. But I know how to build a skateboard.”
He continues:
“So let’s start with the skateboard. Easy to build, less cost, faster, and I’m creating value. So now very quickly I’m getting across town faster. I’ve noticed a problem. It’s a little unstable. Let me add, like, a handle to it so I can stand up, so it’s more like a scooter. Okay. Now let me add an engine to it kind of thing. So now it goes a little faster. Now it’s raining out, and I get wet. Okay. Let’s build it into the motorcycle.”
This iterative approach allows for:
- Faster value creation – Getting something useful in customers’ hands quickly
- Earlier feedback collection – Learning what works and what doesn’t
- Reduced risk – Not investing heavily in untested concepts
- Progressive learning – Discovering unknown requirements as you go
Prototyping With Empathy
Kedziora emphasizes starting with basic black-and-white prototypes:
“I always start in just black-and-white because I’m also afraid of pushing customers and users giving us feedback too far in one direction. I want to try and remain as agnostic as possible about what that solution is in the early stages and not influence too much.”
This approach prevents leading the customer toward a predetermined solution, allowing their genuine needs to emerge and be addressed.
Finding the “Unknown Unknowns”
One of the most powerful aspects of empathy-driven product development is how it uncovers what Kedziora calls the “unknown unknowns”—problems and needs that neither you nor the customer initially realize exist.
Techniques for uncovering these include:
- The Five Whys approach – “There’s a concept of five whys… I love the five whys, but I also like really what’s next? Okay. What’s next?”
- Continuous user interviews – “Can I start basic user interviews, having those conversations about the individual experience, what information exists?”
- Rapid prototyping – “Now we’re using the online tools, the balsamics, the Figma.”
- Patient immersion – “What is it to be a person with mental health, with depression… tons of videos and information about that.”
By continuously seeking a deeper understanding, companies can discover opportunities for innovation and differentiation that competitors might miss.
Building Empathy Into Your Sales Process
The traditional B2B sales approach often focuses on product features and corporate capabilities. An empathy-driven sales process, by contrast, centers on understanding and addressing the customer’s underlying needs and challenges.
The Complex B2B Healthcare Sales Environment
Kedziora highlights the unique challenges in healthcare sales:
“In health care, the person or group that’s paying for it is often not the one using it. If I work with a company and we develop a digital health app for the treatment of depression, who is going to pay for that application? In some cases, you can target the patient directly themselves. Patients, individuals, don’t typically wanna pay a lot for a mobile health app. That’s slowly changing and shifting, but you’re not going to have a patient paying a hundred dollars a month for use of a digital health app.”
He continues:
“Is the doctor going to pay for that? No. The doctor is not incentivized to pay for that. It’s probably the insurance company. So now when you think about your sales cycle in your business process, okay. I need to convince the insurance company that’s gonna pay for this that it’s a good idea. I need to convince the doctors to recommend this to the patients and then the patients to actually pick this up and use it and engage it.”
This complex stakeholder environment requires deep empathy for multiple parties and their unique concerns.
Transforming the Sales Conversation
For Astenda, successful B2B sales conversations focus on collaborative problem-solving:
“Most of our customers come to us with an idea that’s general, generic. I wanna make an impact in diabetes or I have this new data or, hey, I just exited my first company. My mother has multiple sclerosis. I wanna do something to help people, or I had mental health challenges and experienced burnout. Let’s develop a solution to help address that in the market. And then through an exploratory process, together, we come up with what that solution should be and look like.”
Rather than presenting predetermined solutions, this approach:
- Starts with the customer’s vision and pain points
- Collaborates on defining the problem more precisely
- Co-creates potential approaches
- Builds trust through the shared journey of discovery
From Initial Contact to Long-Term Partnership
By approaching sales with empathy, B2B companies can transform transactional relationships into long-term partnerships:
“A lot of our customers and clients over the years and today come through word-of-mouth and referrals for that very reason. And as we’re working with a particular doctor or a PhD at one institution and they move on to the next place in their career path, then they’ll call us back up and say, hey. Let’s keep working together.”
This reputation-based growth model reduces marketing costs while increasing customer lifetime value.
Cultivating an Empathy-Driven Company Culture
Empathy must become woven into the fabric of organizational culture to be truly effective as a B2B strategy. For companies looking to make this transition, several key elements are essential.
Hiring for Empathy
Kedziora emphasizes finding people with empathetic tendencies: “How do we bring in those right people with the same mindset? It’s one thing to train and educate, but another if we can bring people in that have that mindset day to day.”
During interviews, look for candidates who:
- Ask thoughtful questions about your customers
- Share examples of understanding others’ perspectives
- Show genuine interest in solving real problems
- Can articulate how their work impacts end users
Training for Domain Knowledge
Beyond general empathy, Astenda provides specific medical training to help employees better understand the contexts they’re working in:
“When we onboard new employees now, depending on the project that you’re on, we are going to provide you with some medical training. That’s either through somebody that’s part of the project, like we’re working with a doctor or a PhD, or just so much information available on YouTube out there in the Internet, Harvard, Stanford, Mayo Clinic.”
This investment in domain knowledge strengthens employees’ ability to understand customer challenges and develop appropriate solutions truly.
Rewarding Empathetic Behaviors
Kedziora describes how they build empathy into their evaluation processes:
“We promote that within the organization, within our processes, our feedback processes, our review processes. We ask those questions. How have you helped the next person? What have you done to provide knowledge transfer within the team? But even at the software development level, when you’re writing code, how are you helping yourself six months from now when you have to come back and look at this code?”
By making empathy part of performance evaluation, companies signal its importance to overall business success.
Measuring the Impact of Empathy
While empathy is often considered an intangible quality, measuring its business impact is essential for continuous improvement and justifying its importance to stakeholders.
The Challenge of Metrics
Kedziora acknowledges the difficulty in measuring empathy:
“I love the idea of metrics. And if you can measure something, then you can start making changes around that. I also find metrics are very challenging, particularly in software development, because once you know what the metric is, you can start gaming the system.”
Instead of focusing solely on traditional metrics, companies implementing empathy-driven strategies should consider:
- Customer retention rates – Astenda has clients who’ve stayed with them for over 20 years
- Depth of partnership – Such as being included on patents or scientific publications
- Referral strength – How many new clients come through word-of-mouth
- Solution adoption – How quickly and thoroughly customers embrace new offerings
- Problem resolution speed – How efficiently issues are identified and addressed
Self-Reflection as a Measurement Tool
Interestingly, Kedziora suggests that self-reflection can be a powerful measurement approach:
“It’s not on me as a manager or owner of the company to be always providing that feedback. I want you as an individual reflecting on that. And we built that in into our process as well, that self reflection. Like, how are you as an individual doing today? What are your challenges? Because the more aware you are of those things, then you can make those changes and improve over time.”
By encouraging team members to assess their empathy and its impact on their work honestly, companies can foster continuous improvement from within.
Empathy and Long-Term Client Relationships
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for empathy-driven B2B strategies comes from their impact on client relationships over time.
The Value of Trust-Based Partnerships
“We have a couple of customers that we’ve been working with for all twenty-two years and have gone through multiple iterations of leadership that they just they keep continuing. Others, ten, fifteen year long customers that we’ve been working with is a testament to our abilities,”
says Kedziora.
In B2B relationships, particularly for complex solutions like healthcare software, this longevity translates to:
- Reduced acquisition costs – Finding new customers is typically 5-25x more expensive than retaining existing ones
- Deeper institutional knowledge – Understanding client needs at a profound level
- More efficient collaboration – Less time spent establishing processes and relationships
- Higher-value engagements – Moving beyond basic offerings to strategic partnership
From Service Provider to Strategic Partner
The highest form of B2B relationship occurs when companies move from being vendors to becoming essential strategic partners. Astenda has achieved this status with many clients:
“Some of our customers have put our names on patents. The customer always owns the intellectual property. They own the software that we’re creating. But it just demonstrates that we’ve been so much part of the solution that was created that they’re like, okay. It’s worth putting someone from Ascenda’s name on that actual patent.”
This level of integration occurs when empathy fundamentally changes how companies relate to their clients—not as transaction partners but as collaborative problem-solvers with shared goals.
The Future of Empathy-Driven B2B Strategies
Looking ahead, Kedziora sees several trends that will make empathy even more central to B2B success:
Personalized Health Technology
“We have a sick-based system here. You get sick, you go to the doctor. But so much of your health and wellness is controlled by what you do outside of that office environment. So the idea of the wearables, the data, the feedback that we’re starting to get and can get, I think, is starting to change that picture.”
As B2B healthcare companies help consumers manage more of their health, empathy for the end user becomes even more critical to product success.
Aging-in-Place Solutions
“As the population is getting older and older, my parents are entering their eighties, and they’re doing pretty good, fortunate, from that perspective. They they live at home kinda thing. When their health does decline, they wanna stay at home. They don’t wanna move into a care facility or anything like that… So how can we use technology to enable them to stay at home longer? So I think that’s gonna be a huge impact in health care as we move forward.”
Developing technology that supports aging in familiar surroundings requires profound empathy for the elderly and their caregivers.
AI-Enhanced Empathy
“The Gen AI technology can help people at their health literacy level, their just reading ability kind of thing, the ability to comprehend the vast amounts of information out there.”
As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, it can help scale empathetic interactions by personalizing information delivery based on individual needs and comprehension levels.
Conclusion: Empathy as a Strategic Imperative
Empathy-driven strategies offer a path to meaningful differentiation and sustainable growth in a B2B landscape where trust is scarce and relationships are complex. As Richard Kedziora of Estenda demonstrates, this approach is compelling in specialized fields like healthcare technology, where understanding the human impact of solutions is paramount.
“Understanding your user and their journey is what’s gonna make your software successful,” Kedziora emphasizes. “I wish I didn’t have to say that. And there are a lot of really good people out there making a lot of really good software and impacts in the world and everything like that. But then equally, likewise, there’s a bunch of people that just don’t get it, and they’re sitting there behind their computer developing for themselves, and that’s not how you’re gonna be successful.”
By focusing on empathy in product development, sales processes, company culture, and client relationships, B2B companies can transcend the trust deficit and build lasting partnerships that drive mutual success.
The question isn’t whether your business can afford to invest in empathy-driven strategies—it’s whether you can afford not to.
Some areas we explore in this episode include:
Listen to the episode.
Related links and resources
- Check out Estenda
- Learn from Alex Natskovich – How Cross-Functional Collaboration in Software Development Accelerates B2B Revenue Growth
- Learn from Matt Swalley – How to Use AI In B2B Sales For Ad Campaigns That Drive Revenue Growth
- Learn from Jarie Bolander – How to Win With Storytelling in B2B Marketing And Drive Growth
- Learn from Karl Becker – Iceberg Sales Approach: How to Drive Growth Through Empathy
- Learn from Elliott Kallen – How Strategic Optimism & Trust Fuel $1B Success—Elliot Kallen Shares His Secrets (Insights From a Serial Entrepreneur And Bestselling Author of Driven)
- Check out the article – B2B Sales Process: Key Stages and Good Practices
Connect with “RJ” Kedziora
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