How Behavioural Styles Can Influence Sales

In the August edition of “Beyond Sales Effectiveness” we featured an article which talked about A New Kind of Selling for the 21st Century. In fact, “selling” is a highly misleading word in today’s global market place since the most successful Sales practitioners no longer sell to their customers. Rather they focus on creating and adding value to their customers’ businesses through their business acumen, industry knowledge and contact network. We call this process Customer Engagement.

So what exactly is an “engaged” customer? Amongst other definitions the dictionary offers three which for us explain it perfectly; to attract, to win over, to interlock. In other words, engaged customers are first attracted to you, then won over by your approach so that they become interlocked or somehow seamlessly attached to you and what you stand for. In this state, there is no need to do any actual “selling”!!

So is it really as easy as that? Sometimes it is, because you seem to hit it off with the customer from the outset and he quickly engages with you and your approach. At other times, however, you meet a customer whom you approach in an identical way but find that you cannot engage him or her despite your best efforts. Is this down to you or is the customer just being awkward and “trying it on”? Why do you seem to have a far more positive view of the customer who engages quickly than you do of the “stubborn” one? The answer could well be rooted in the preferred behavioural or social style of you and your customer or prospect

Behavioural or social style? Are we getting into the psychology of selling?

The fact is that each one of us has a dominant and preferred way of behaving in social and relationship situations which was first highlighted by the American company Tracon when they introduced their Social Style Profile (SSP) 50 years ago. Looking at people’s observable behavior the company identified two key factors which influence our preferred style which they labelled Assertiveness and Responsiveness. Assertiveness is the degree to which people like to influence others by either asking or telling whilst Responsiveness measures how people display or control their feelings or emotions. By combining the two measures the result is the creation of four potential preferred behavioural styles. Each of us has a dominant style which can seen as a sort of default position which we would unconsciously inhabit. So what does this have to do with Customer Engagement?

Quite a lot, actually! It is an old adage that people like to work with and do business with people like them and this can have a dramatic impact on interpersonal relationships. Just as most managers in a business tend to prefer to hire people of a similar style to themselves, so sales managers seem to find that their relationships with customers who share their own preferred behavioural style are stronger than those with customers whose default style differs from their own. Unfortunately, it is difficult to achieve your Sales goals through only 25% of the customer population so how should supplier managers ‘engage” the 75% whose preferred style differs from their own? The answer lies in the ability to “flex” ones style or, as Tracom call it, in an individual’s Versatility. Customer Managers who are able to move from their dominant style into the preferred style of the customer (thus leading the customer to see the manager as “someone like me”) will usually have more success in engaging that customer than a manager who persists in exhibiting his preferred style with customers who may have a diametrically opposed default style to his. It might sound complex but for those who manage to flex according to the style of their customers the rewards in terms of relationship building and business effectiveness can be dramatic