Remote Selling -part two: Personality types

Read part one: Remote Selling

The importance of understanding personality types

The one skill making headlines right now is understanding personality types.

Why? There is increasing fatigue over mindset training. It seems everyone is obsessed with psychology and human behaviour. Basically, we want to know about ourselves and others.

Personality types

As a sales leader, knowing about the personality types within your team gives you a great insight into understanding the individuals and their behaviour.

Educating your team about personality types means they can better understand themselves and peers, so they have more empathy and can communicate better.

Your team’s knowledge about personality types will also help your clients. Imagine your team knowing the unconscious drivers, motivators and buying behaviours of their clients. This means they can connect and engage at a different level. This catapults your competitiveness out of the water, totally giving them a huge advantage.

Why am I mentioning this now?

If your team are under stress, then their innermost default style will appear. It may have been masked up until now.

Also, many leader are looking for a ‘pick me up’ for the team, embedding skills they are not aware of and inspiring, motivating and enlightening them. This is one of those areas that always gets a 10/10 for team buy in (everyone, it seems, loves knowing who they are), and 10/10 for the team ‘morale’ (knowing about each other’s differences makes you smile, laugh together and respect each other, internal communication improves dramatically) and 10/10 for driving growth (better conversations with clients, aligned proposals, more conversions).

So, how do you learn? You can search for who runs personality type training sessions. You can get some easy fixes on YouTube etc.

For a deep dive approach: ‘if we are going to do it, let’s do it properly’, we run programs (virtual team building classes). The added benefit of coming to us is:

  1. a) we address this in a sales context (how to prospect for different style, how to write emails, how to present)
  2. b) we are obsessed with buyer behaviour (I personally do keynote speaking on this regularly)
  3. c) we love making learning successful (interactive, interesting, engaging, motivating)

Our goal is for your team to learn, retain and use the information.

Personality profiles according to DISCHere are some quickie insights now with the client in mind.

We use many psychometric systems, but for this I’ll tap into DISC (we are Extended DISC certified trainers)

 

Driver

Who is it?: someone who is quick to the point, can talk over you, goal driven.

Exploration: do your homework, ask intelligent questions, give them results they will get.

What to do: get to the point quickly. Be direct. Be fast.

Emails: short, to the point.

Do: only give them what they need, no fluff, don’t discuss ideas – be direct and bring in credible points with conviction.

Don’t: chat about day-to-day stuff. They will get frustrated and wonder where it’s going. Don’t take things personally, they are not being rude.

 

Influence

Who is it?: people person, friendly, optimistic.

Exploration: longer rapport, they need to like you, show an interest in them.

What to do: go at their pace, quick, darting – they may be chaotic so you need to clean up notes after as they may have diverted down many rabbit holes, show what outcomes are in it for them.

Emails: more chatty, more personal at the beginning

Do: ask about their dog, spend time chatting, talk about ideas together, collaboratively.

Don’t: jump the rapport, don’t jump straight into proposal mode.

 

Steadiness

Who is it?: Steady, stable.

Exploration: do your homework, be considered over what you ask.

What to do: have a clear process that’s transparent so they know it’s all in hand

Emails: precise

Do: have patience, realise they may be nodding but not agreeing, they like one-on-one or small groups they know. They need clear instructions.

Don’t: give them any fear at all. Watch your language, no ‘it might’ ‘risk’ or ‘maybe’.  Put them on the spot.

 

Compliant

Who is it?: Precise, perfectionist, they don’t want to be wrong.

Exploration: don’t ask questions in a way that might show a hole in their knowledge. Give facts when educating. Do say what has worked for the company before.

What to do: logical, be ‘rules’ based.

Emails: short, logical steps in sequential order, accurate.

Do: realise they prefer email and not talking to you.

Don’t: give opinions.

 

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What to do

Help your team by being positive about remote selling, see it as the future and not as the poor cousin

Join us:

 

 

Piece written by Charmaine Keegan,  author of over 20 eBooks, is a sought-after guest speaker, panellist, and keynote. She is a Certified Trainer Extended Disc System, of Situational Leadership, of NLP (how we operate), Hypnotherapy (unconscious communication) and Timeline Therapy (recognising your beliefs about sales and money – and recognising that of your customer). She has studied the psychology of human behaviour and is considered an absolute authority and true expert on sales techniques. She has ‘walked the walk‘ so her content, programs and key notes are highly practical and focused on results.

Smarter Selling is sales and mindset coaching for high performing leaders and teams