Purchasing and Negotiation Training

"Shorten your sales cycle & increase your win rate through competitive excellence"

Editor’s note:  Stu Schlackman is a frequent contributor to this blog.  In this Part II of a two part series, he relates power in the sales prcess to personalities.  In Part I, he discusses the affect of power on the sales process.   

One key aspect of your motive has to do with your personality style. Each personality style chooses a career in sales for different personal motivations:  

• Blues are motivated by building a long term relationship and pleasing the customer.
• Golds are motivated to sell their company’s reputation and are driven by the financial benefits the customer will receive.  
• Greens are motivated to help the customer craft the perfect solution and enjoy solving technical problems and resolving complicated issues.  
• Oranges are motivated to beat the competition, win the business, and help the customer achieve the immediate benefits of the solution.

Build the relationship by knowing communication styles

Knowing your personality style will help you naturally improve building relationships.  It also can teach you when to downplay your primary characteristics and how to pull out your other character traits that the specific customer personality style likely will respond to favorably.

You must also discover the customer’s personality style to understand what engages them. Discovering your customer’s personality style is crucial to knowing just what parts of your personality to emphasize in order to positively click with the customer.  It also shows what parts of your self to downplay when engaging that color style. Each personality color is influenced by different factors:

• Blues by what a solution can do for people and productivity
• Golds by financial returns
• Greens by innovation and improvement
• Oranges by improving their competitive position.

Face time, follow through, motive

These three points are crucial to building the customer relationship and influencing their decision to buy from you. Proper understanding of personality style improves the relationship, leading to more face time and more effective follow through. To put the customer first, you must know what of yourself to emphasize.  To effectively communicate the value of your products and services, and therefore get more face time, you need to know what the customer personality style values.

To strengthen your influence with the potential customer, pick up  Four People You Should Know. You will learn how to type character and leverage the knowledge of character types, as embodied in the four color personalities.