One of the biggest mistakes a salesperson will make is selling to others based on their own personality preferences and their natural communication patterns. Salespeople often rely on commission to make their living. Because of this, making a sale means overly accommodating the prospective buyer, based on their own experiences. As a brand evangelist, sales people are confident in the product they are selling. However, as a buyer, you might be used to doing your due diligence before making a large purchase. Here are some steps to help you, as a salesperson, learn how to separate how you sell from how the person buying from you makes their purchasing decisions:
1. Recognize key elements that influence buying decisions
There is a myriad of factors that play a key role in the outcome of any sales process: cost or value, efficiency, budget availability, immediate need or demand, product feedback, and impulsive buying to name a few. According to The Medallia Institute, extensive research shows that three out of four Millennials are likely to research a product, company and/or service for up to two weeks before making a purchase. This includes online reviews, feedback from friends, video views, and in-person product discovery. Over their lifetime, millennials alone are expected to spend over $10T – just $200B, annually. There are 92M millennials in the US, alone, and any one of us is 20% more likely to come across a millennial than the next largest group of consumers – the Baby Boomers. As a sales person, this means that approximately 9.6M or-so millennials you come across will be “quick to buy, early to purchase.” It’s also important to note that there are an approximately 327.2M people in the US, overall. So, you will not always be selling to a millennial.
2. Understand how personality plays a role in how people buy
Knowing how your personality interacts with other personalities will provide you with a great advantage when engaged in the buying and selling process. Understanding the core influencers that drive a person to buy, based on their personality type, is one thing. Getting them to buy from you? That’s another.
If you’re serious about making sales, we strongly suggest familiarizing yourself with the various DISC personality types and how they interact with each other. DISC certification can give you this knowledge, as well as add to your professional credentials. Leveraging key characteristics of different personality styles will help you to better understand what would raise any objections and how to maneuver them early on in the process. Knowing someone’s personality type will also help you to prepare for your first face-to-face meeting. If you show up to a meeting armed with the right knowledge, you will be dangerous enough to easily leave with a big sale.
3. Reframe your mindset to sell how others buy
If we put too much pressure on our prospect, we will lose them without a second thought. If we let them leave without purchase, we won’t make the sale either. We need to instill a sense of urgency into the buy cycle and push our own assumptions out the door. Sell based on your customer’s needs, don’t sell as if it were yours.
Learning to recognize how others make their buying decisions and reframing your mindset to sell how they want to be sold will make a bigger impact to your bottom line. Not to mention, people love to buy from people like them, so happy buyers will bring more referrals to your pipeline.
