They've Got Personality

Gaining your clients' trust requires keying into the needs of their specific personalities.

Then Phillips realized he was dealing with a different personality type. So he changed his approach and started meeting the client over coffee for a very different kind of sales meeting.

“For every meeting that would last about 1-1/2 hours, we would spend 10 minutes talking about his business,” says Phillips, now president of the sales training firm Sales University Inc. in Round Hill, Va. “He would tell me about his fishing boat and his kids.”

With about 10 minutes of the appointment left, the client would explain what problem he was having and ask Phillips if he could help. “I’d say, ‘I think we can help. I’ll think about it. What do you say we get back together next week?’ I had the answer, but he didn’t want the answer right away. He wanted to get back together the next week over a cup of coffee and talk about it.

“I can’t tell you how much stuff I sold him through the years,” Phillips says.

Phillips’ success shows how important it is for salespeople to recognize and react to the different personalities they encounter. The more comfortable salespeople can make customers feel, the more likely they are to buy. Indeed, experts say it’s at least as important that clients like you as much as they like your product.

“All things being equal, people buy from people they like. People like people who are like themselves. Ergo, it is our job to become the emotional twin of our prospect,” says sales consultant and pool-sales veteran Ray Leone.

In his sales training courses, the president of Leone Resource Group in Charleston, S.C., devotes half the time allotted just to building rapport and understanding personalities, with the rest devoted to product presentation. “If you don’t have rapport, which generates trust and having that client open up to you and breaking down all the barriers of communication, there’s no point in going forward,” he says.

A crucial part of developing rapport is understanding the type of personalities you encounter. “We want to find out what’s most important to the client,” says Steve Ast, vice president of sales and marketing at Shasta Industries, a Phoenix pool builder. “Part of it is just understanding what type of personality type they are. We try to get our sales staff to be conscious-competent, so they understand the personalities within 5 minutes.”

After correctly assessing the client’s personality, the salesperson can predict what kind of person the client trusts and what kind of information he or she will want.

Assessing a new client’s personality can even help you determine at the very beginning whether or not to try for the first-call close. “People process information differently and go at different rates of speed,” Leone says. “If I’m dealing with an engineer or somebody who writes code for Microsoft, that’s not the same as if I’m presenting to a marketing specialist who likes the big picture.

“[Clients] are so diverse in the way they process information and the amount of information they want. You must adjust your entire presentation almost from ‘Hello’ because each [personality type] requires totally different opens, middles and closes.”

The ABC’s of DISC
Fortunately, there’s a guide to help sales professionals figure out which personality type they’re dealing with. In the early 1920s, American psychologist William Moulton Marston created a system for categorizing personality types, which many salespeople now use to help them better understand their clients. Inspired by findings from Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, the system contains four personality types represented in the acronym DISC. Different people give different names to each letter, but the same four personalities are represented: dominant (also called driver), interpersonal (or interactive), security-minded (or steadfast), and critical thinker (also called cautious).

No one falls purely within any of these categories, say these professionals. But you can observe your clients to see which characteristic is most prominent.

Each personality type has different interests, motivations and fears. So they have different criteria for buying from you, as Leone explains: “The dominant must respect you to buy from you; the I (interpersonal) must like you; the S (security-minded) must trust you; and the critical thinker says, ‘You don’t enter into the decision. All you have to do is provide me with the data.’”

Generally speaking, those on the dominant and interpersonal side of the spectrum are extroverts, while security-minded and critical thinker clients go more inward. “Some buyers are ‘move-away’ and others are ‘move-forward,’” Ast says. “With the analytical and safety-minded person, you may not be so apt to move forward with your hand to shake it when you initially meet with them. They want their private space and before they’ll shake your hand, they may want to get more comfortable with you. The driver will walk into your office, grab your hand and say, ‘I want a pool.’”

So if they’re outgoing, Leone says, you can guess they’re either dominants or interpersonals, whereas the more timid fall into the category of security-minded or critical thinkers. Security-minded clients and critical thinkers usually don’t ask a lot of questions and rarely initiate conversation.

Dominants and interpersonals are generally impatient people, Leone says. Dominants especially want to move quickly and make it happen. “D’s and I’s can be first-call closed,” Leone says.

“S’s and C’s rarely buy on the first call,” he says. This doesn’t mean these clients want you to give them all the information and then leave. “If you go through a complete presentation, including pricing and closing at the end, that’s not a call-back — that’s a hope-to-be-back,” Leone says. “A call-back presentation is one where you only go halfway through, stop and then complete it the second time,” so that these clients can mull over the information so far. “If you go for a close on a C, you’ve messed up big-time,” Leone says.

Security-minded clients and critical thinkers don’t want to feel pushed, Ast says. “If you’re looking at somebody who’s timid, you may want to spend a lot of time developing rapport,” he says, “and make sure you’re allowing them to buy instead of selling them the product.”

Once you’ve determined which half of the DISC a client falls on, Leone says, you can narrow it down to the exact type by asking one question, depending on which side they fall on.

“If they’re outgoing, you say, ‘Is this person more of a relater of people or a director of people?’ Leone says. “If you believe they’re a director of people, then they’re a D. If you think they’re a relater, then they’re an I.

“If they’re reserved, you ask yourself another question: Is this person more accepting of people or assessing? Acceptors are S’s, assessors are C’s.”

For a more detailed look at each personality type and how to approach them, click on the links in the right-hand column.

MORE INFORMATION
Dominants/drivers
This personality type likes to make things happen.

Interpersonal/
interactive
Clients with this personality tend to be the life of the party.

Stable/security-minded
This group hates disruption, hassle, change and risk, experts say.

Critical thinkers/
cautious
These consumers enjoy obtaining technical information and making an informed analysis of situations.

Keeping in step
To be successful, sales professionals must also understand their own personalities.