Keeping in step

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

“There is a difference between who you are and how you behave,” he says. “Try to [adapt] to the behavior that this customer’s most comfortable dealing with.

“It may sound like a fine point dancing on the head of a pin, but in sales training, a lot of firms have actually tried to tell people to be someone they aren’t, to change their core personality.” That’s an impossible task, he believes, considering research that has shown most personalities are 80 percent developed by the age of 8, with the rest determined by 18.

Research has shown that the most suitable personalities for sales are combinations of dominant/driver or interpersonal/interactive. But each personality type has inherent benefits, and Phillips has known salespeople without the classic salesperson personality who could use the best parts of their personality while adapting certain behaviors.

The biggest challenge for safety-minded and critical thinker salespeople is to keep the process moving at an acceptable speed. These types aren’t big risk-takers and tend to move slowly. However, the salesperson must act as the engine to achieve the ultimate goal. They must move quickly enough to hold the interest of the less patient D’s, and to keep S- and C-type clients on track.

Salespeople even have to show discipline when they have the same personality type as the client. “Two of anything is tough,” Phillips says. “Two D’s will tend to bang heads, two I’s will sit around and talk all day and never get down to [business], two S’s will sit there and stable each other to death and two C’s will find something and take it down to the 16th level of detail and analyze it together.”

Phillips offers some keys for softening those rough spots when working with the following client-salesperson personality mixes:

Dominant client and salesperson: Here, you have two people used to making things happen on their own terms, Phillips says. Because D’s only respect confidence and ability, this combination can actually be rewarding, as long as the salesperson follows one rule: Always be willing to “finish second,” Phillips says.

“By the nature of those personalities, they’re going to have a contest to see who’s the smartest, the best, to see who’s going to be No. 1,” he says. “You need to be dominant as well, but you always need to finish second. Otherwise, you can’t finish first.”

You need to know when to challenge them and how, he says. But do it in such a way that says you know you work for them, but you have the expertise.

Dominant client with Interpersonal salesperson: High-I’s thrive on conversation. But high-D’s just want to get the job done right and have no patience with small talk.

“If you’re a high-D, you need to bite your lip when you want to start digging three layers deep into the conversation when they only want to go one layer deep,” Phillips says. “You run the risk of having the high-D kind of roll their eyes back up in their heads and shut them off and say, ‘When will the pain end?’”

Security-minded client with Dominant salesperson: The nice thing about S’s is that they tend to adapt well, Phillips says. “They tend to be sort of amoebic in nature,” he says. “They just want to know everything is going to be predictable, that there are concrete plans and they tend to be detail-oriented.”

So these clients may not settle for a dominant salesperson taking charge and merely saying, “Trust me,” Phillips says. They’ll want details to assure them that a good plan is in place. If a salesperson says the project will be completed by the end of the month, for instance, “The [security-minded] person wants to know what the project plan looks like,” Phillips says. “They’ll ask, ‘By the 15th, what should I be looking for?’”

FEATURE STORY
They've Got Personality
Gaining your clients' trust requires keying into the needs of their specific personalities.

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.