Empathy in sales: How to easily influence and build trust to drive growth artwork
Predictable B2B Success

Empathy in sales: How to easily influence and build trust to drive growth

  • E251
  • 48:54
  • May 11th 2022

Mandi Graziano is Vice President of Global Accounts for HPN Global where she finds hotels and venues; negotiates pricing/contracts for her client’s conferences all over the world. Here she has earned the awards of Chairman’s Club, President’s Club, and Top Producer.

While on the hotel side Mandi worked in leadership roles in sales, marketing, and operations for Marriott, Starwood, Hard Rock Hotels, and Caesars Entertainment. While working for hotels she has been awarded Top Producer, Salesperson of the Year, Best Site Inspection of the Year, and Sales Strategist Award in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2008. Mandi is currently an instructor at San Diego State University Hospitality; Tourism Management program teaching Site Inspection; Contract Negotiation classes.

Mandi is also the author of a relatable and remarkably funny book Sales Tales: The Hustle, Humor, and Lessons Learned from a Life In Sales, an Amazon best-seller in 5 categories and ranked #1 by Selling Power Magazine. 

In this episode, she shares how we can use empathy in sales to easily influence and build trust to drive growth. Insights she shares include:

  • Why we should develop empathy in sales
  • How to develop empathy in sales
  • How she overcame anxiety to become a public speaker and top salesperson
  • The business bedside manner and how she recommends we use it
  • 5 questions to ask to improve our business bedside manner
  • SWEATworking - what is it and why it's better than traditional networking
  • How to keep up with public appearances and still build deep relationships
  • Thoughts on events post-pandemic
  • How we can use events to drive business growth
  • and much much more ...

Predictable B2B Success

If you lead a bootstrapped or funded B2B tech company and need revenue to be predictable, not just possible, this podcast was built for you.

Predictable B2B Success is the only show built exclusively for CEOs at seed-to-Series C tech companies who are ready to replace random acts of growth with a scalable, repeatable revenue system from first dollar to $50M+ ARR and beyond.

Each week, host Vinay Koshy sits down with elite revenue operators, GTM leaders, and founders who have solved the hardest problem in funded B2B tech: turning chaotic, unpredictable growth into something structural, a system that holds under investor pressure, market shifts, and scale.

What you will walk away with every episode:

  • Operating frameworks for building predictable revenue pipelines
  • Real playbooks from founders who have scaled B2B companies from seed to Series C and beyond
  • GTM, RevOps, demand generation, and category design insights built for C-suite decisions, not marketing teams
  • Strategies that compound across your organisation, not one-off tactics that fade

Why 500+ episodes and a 5.0-star rating?

This is not a show about inspiration. It is a show about operating clarity. Every guest is chosen because they have built systems in sales, content, community, product, or customer success that made revenue predictable. After 500+ episodes, the patterns are unmistakable. This archive is your competitive advantage.

Trusted by founders and CEOs at bootstrapped and funded B2B tech companies across SaaS, cleantech, AI, and enterprise software.

Rated 5.0 stars on Apple Podcasts. Ranked top 5 B2B podcast by Feedspot (2026). 500+ episodes since 2020.

Subscribe now and get a new episode every week, turning your revenue from a moving target into a scalable system.

Show notes, frameworks, and transcripts: sproutworth.com Subscribe to The Inclined, the weekly newsletter for funded B2B tech CEOs: sproutworth.com/newsletter Connect with Vinay Koshy on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vinaykoshy