How Understanding Personality Types Can Improve Your Sales Results

Intro: You’re listening to the Sales Focus Podcast. Your go-to for developing high-performing teams, next level sales skills, and real results. It’s time to get focused.

Welcome back to The Sales Focus Podcast. I’m your host Tony Horwath, Founder and CEO of Sales Focus. Today, I want to talk about a sales tip or technique, and it’s really essential. I get asked all the time, what makes a good salesperson? And, my answer is it depends. It depends what you’re selling. It depends who you’re selling to. A lot of people think that you have to be a great speaker, or you have to be very extroverted. I don’t believe that’s true. I think really good salespeople have to be chameleons. I think a really good salesperson has to understand personality types, and that’s what I want to talk about today. At Sales Focus, when we do our training in personalities, we break it down into four key personalities. Now, many of you may have done a personality test somewhere along the line, a Myers-Briggs perhaps, where they have 16 different personality types, and if you haven’t done it, I highly recommend it. Also, realize personalities can change a little bit depending on what happens to you in your lifetime. Sometimes, a tragedy may make you see things differently or may adjust your personality someway. But in sales, a good salesperson needs to be able to figure out the personality type that they’re selling to. When you’re selling to someone, you want to match their personality type. It’s not that you have to stay the same because, guess what, your customer is not going to change. You have to adjust to who you’re selling to. So, when we talk about the four personality types, we talk about four key categories: driver personalities, expressive personalities, amiable, and analytical. Now, it doesn’t mean you’re one type of personality. Your makeup is going to be your makeup, so you may be somewhat analytical and somewhat expressive and have some amiable qualities as well. But again, the key to success in sales, besides many other things, is understanding the personality type that you’re selling to. This is not an easy task. It’s not an easy thing to learn, and it takes time. I always tell our salespeople to really test it. Go to a personal event. Go to a party and start talking to someone and listening to them and try to analyze kind of their personality type. Some are easier to figure out. As an example, driver personality is going to be someone who want to be in charge, right. That’s typically a lot of CEOs or C-level people. They want to be a decision maker, and in that case, you want to let them make decisions, and if you’re a salesperson who’s pushy and pushy and pushy, that customer is really not going to do well with your personality. So if you adjust your personality to a driver personality, that means you’re going to give them options but let them make the decision, or lead them down the path to letting them make the right decision for their business. If you’re trying to push something on them, it’s not going to go well. An expressive personality is somebody who wants to be first, right. They typically drive bright colored cars. They like to buy the first thing when it hits the market. These are typically the easier people to sell to, again, as long as you have a good value proposition, but the good part about expressive people is typically they’re going to let you know how they feel. Right. So, asking questions and doing discovery, they’re going to put it all out there, and then, you have to adjust to make sure that you’re hitting their needs. When you’re working with amiable people, which a lot more people, perhaps in the front desk or someone who’s answering the phones, these are gatekeepers a lot of time, and they typically want to make people and everyone around them happy. Right. Their goal is for everyone to be satisfied, so when you’re working with someone like that or you’re trying, let’s say, get past the gatekeeper who has an amiable type personality, you want to make sure that you’re warm, comforting, making sure that you’re not going to be intense or abusive. You want to make sure that you include them so that they feel like they’re part of a team because that’s very important to them. The analytical type people sometimes can be the most difficult people to sell to because analytical people want to know results. They want to know testing. They want to know why. They want to dig deeper. It’s about giving them information, so they can make decisions. So think about the next time you’re out, whether it’s at a social situation or selling situation, start thinking about the personality type of the person you’re speaking to. That’s the way you want to address that person, so if you have an expressive personality that you’re selling to, you also want to be expressive. You want to talk to them about the things that are important to them. Being first. Right. Leading the pack. Being recognized. But if you’re selling to a driver personality, you have to make sure that you allow them to make their decision or their time. It doesn’t mean you don’t provide them information. It’s important, but if you try to push them to hard and you don’t allow them to make the decision, you’re going to lose that deal. Analytics, analytical people if you will, they’re more difficult, but if you hit them the right way, if you give them the information to show them that you can make the company. You can make it less expensive. You can be faster technology-wise. They’re going to come along very quickly. They love buying things that improve performance, so take your time, study a little bit. If you want to know more about personality profiling, follow us at salesfocusinc.com, and we can help you out and make you a better salesperson. Until next time. This is Tony with Sales Focus. I appreciate your time.