Have you ever wondered why you connect with some leads instantaneously just on a phone call and you end up successfully converting them as customers?
Why some others, you know you have had a great conversation and everything is rosy but, months later you are still wondering why they aren't converting?
As an enthusiastic salesman, you must always be looking for answers to questions like - How to close more sales?
How to close big deals and reduce the sales cycle?
What are the effective sales closing techniques that your competitors are adopting?
If so, read further to learn the technique that worked wonders for us to close many big business deals.
It so happened that I wrapped up our annual sales numbers a few weeks back and as any strategist, I was looking into our successes and failures.
When I started looking into our clients, I really didn't find a pattern of a particular persona or industry or a deal size that we were able to close fast.
I just couldn't resign to the fact that selling was just pure timing and the reason we could sell to these clients is that we reached out to them at the right time offered right value.
This is partially true, but leading a team of a high-performance sales team we have enriched them with enough tools to understand these metrics and use that to their advantage.
So what was really inhibiting the sales velocity? Why some deals were converting in a few hours and few other took a few months with similar deal sizes?
Was there some effective sales closing techniques that we were missing?
So before we move ahead, sales velocity is a simple formula:
Velocity matters to you because it gives you a real indication of how many leads you actually need to achieve your sales goals based on your conversion rate.
This started a two-day sojourn of mine making sense of my CRM data. I downloaded our extensive customer over the last 2 years and went about segregating them across different metrics.
The usuals (read Linkedin Filters here), but I went a step ahead looked into gender, days to close deals, whether they were a B2B, B2C, or an NFP organization, deal sizes and lead sources.
Something interesting happened, I started noticing that one of my top sales guys was consistently closing some great accounts under 14 days where the decision maker was a woman.
This was very interesting for me to understand why this was happening and I really wanted some data to back it up.
I ran up some basic analysis on R and created a few summaries and this is what I found.
My top sales guy let's call him 'K' - took an average 21 days to convert a lead if the design maker was a woman, however with decision makers who were men he took over 61 days to close.
The contract sizes were staggeringly different while the Male leads were closing at $15K a contract and female leads at $11K a contract.
As a business, our numbers averaged 49 days @ 12K for Female leads and 45 days at 12K for Male leads!
So the contract sizes weren't different and in terms of the conversion rates and the gender ratio in the leads, they were consistent.
I then went to our repository and pulled out some call recordings to listen to some of the conversations he had with the clients, his pitch was all but consistent with either gender, so should I resign that his baritone was a factor? I couldn't do that.
I feverishly started combing other possibilities and I felt I was dealing with a case of analysis paralysis. But, my gut was telling me that it is something to do with our standard pitch.
As I got down on research, I chanced upon a tool called 'Crystal Knows'. Here is a Guardian Article which describes the best of what it does.
The personality assessment platform scrapes data from social media and analyses an individual personality using the DISC styles.
I signed up for the free service to test it out and used the plugin to check my own LinkedIn Profile, results were downright creepy.
I then ran a relationship report of my personality with me and my wife! Et, Voila! they found a new subscriber.
In short, there are four personality types (Require a graphic here)
people prioritize results over everything else. They care most about their bottom line and are very direct in their communication.
people care most about influencing or persuading others. They put a lot of weight on their relationships.
people emphasize security. They look for sincerity and dependability over anything else.
people want as much information as possible about your product or service. They value quality and accuracy and are afraid of making the wrong move.
I started to comb back my data by profiling every one of customer's DISC personality and then ran my results and there it was, my hypothesis was validated.
It was indeed the problem of the pitch.
Our sales were generally done in autopilot mode and this was crippling our velocity, as any sales team, my team was a bunch of outgoing, talkative, emotional, ebullient and enthusiastic personalities and they sold in a way that they wanted to be sold to. In short except me, my team was made up of 'Influencers'.
The results were exciting for me to see:
'Influencers' accounted for over 43% of contracts and 59% of our revenue last year, with an average contract value of 11k and it just took 24 days to close a deal and 'K' a High Influencer was closing them in 14 days and accounted for a 1/3rd of that revenue.
It just meant that we were doing great when selling to a decision maker that has the same personality as they were, but what happened when our lead was of the other three types?
What if they are less willing to take a risk or less optimistic about our service.
This was killing our efficiency, the time that we spent on these leads and the return wasn't making sense.
See for example, 'Dominant Type' Personality, accounted for 1/10th of our revenue, with an average contract size of 6K and took an average 80 days to close a sale! 'K' was struggling too, with an average contract size of 6.5K and 52 days to close but I was doing better, as a 'D' personality, I accounted for all the 80% of all D type revenue.
This brought about an important learning, that would go about transforming our customer experience and here it is:
The best salespeople believe in 'Horses for Courses', they modify their script to their audience based on their personality, they understand the same spiel won't work with two different personalities.
Each of then would need different buying experiences and offers and the sales playbook continues to evolve as we feed it with new learnings each day.
So in short, How do you go about your spiel to your personality?
If you’re selling to a high “D” customer, show you respect their views and requirements without making them feel like you’re simply agreeing with whatever they say.
They’ll view that as a sign of weakness.
Use Testimonials and avoid focussing on them personally, stick to facts in hand.
“I” personalities like to talk about their ideas and emotions, so ask them what they’re thinking and feeling.
Let them vocalize what’s working and what’s not.
They can also be disorganized and avoid details, so providing summaries or takeaways of what you discussed can help them focus on what you want them to focus on.
But only include details that are absolutely necessary.
People with high “S” personalities are even-tempered, composed, and good at listening.
Show them you’re interested in who they are as a person and don’t let your sales pitch feel too “transactional.”
Make it clear you value the relationship. Don't focus on Facts and numbers, you'll risk coming off as impersonal.
"People with high “C” personalities like having as much information as possible.
Give them the information from your verbal pitch again in writing. Knowing they can review all the documents later and make an informed decision puts “C” people at ease.
Having a detailed pro and cons list in your proposal can also help them make a decision.
Compliant people are very afraid of making the wrong decision, so offering some type of guarantee or refund can help ease their worry."
Now that you’re aware of the 4 sales personality types, comes the most obvious question: How do you execute this awareness to achieve better returns?
After all, most of us do know what needs to be done but we often feel lost when it comes to how it should be done.
In that context, with your understanding of sales personality types, here 5 tips to close more deals faster:
Create buyer personas
This is the most fundamental part of this process.
The people you’re targeting, who are they? What are their interests and pain points? What are their personality types?
The better you understand your customers, the more effective your sales strategy could be.
So, do create buyer personas based on different factors with a priority focus on personality types. Categorize the personas under the DiSC banner. Then have multiple personas within every category.
For instance, a 40-year old male earning $68,000 annually may have the same personality trait as a 38-year old female who makes $82,000 a year.
Sort your personas primarily based on the four personalities. Within that, have multiple segments and then individual strategy for each segment.
Train your sales team
This goes without saying.
Understanding the sales personality types and then adjusting the sales strategy and approach is challenging. It demands time. And, most importantly, it demands training.
So, take out some time every week or month to hold discussions on the subject with your team members. Teach them about how customers’ personalities play a critical role in closing deals and sales velocity. Hire experts to hold training sessions.
Use means like animated videos to communicate a concept better with your sales team. Provide them whitepapers and books to enhance their selling skills.
Through effective training, arm your team with the right tools and approaches to make smart sales pitches that are focused on the personality traits of the prospect.
Personalize your communication
Personalization is one of the best conversion strategies. For instance, if you’re talking to a 51-year old manager who works in an insurance company, you can close the deal successfully and much faster if you can personalize your communication or sales pitch accordingly.
This is one of the benefits of creating buyer personas. You can know what are the needs and personality traits of who you’re talking to; what are the challenges they are facing. Based on that, you can personalize your sales pitch for higher relevancy.
At the end of the day, you want the person you’re selling to feel heard, understood, and important. This is only possible with personalized communication.
Maintain (and re-visit) DiSC data
Your sales strategy isn’t perfect. Your sales pitches have loopholes.
The DiSC personalities you’re targeting (Dominance, Influential, Stabilizing, and Cautious), these are still different people.
For example, if you are talking to a customer with a Dominant personality, while they are more result-driven and caring about the bottom line, how you satiate their needs and preferences through communication would be different from someone with the same personality trait.
This is why collecting and revisiting DiSC data is so important. It would help you understand what sales strategy is working best for people with different personalities and how you can improve from there.
Remember, with sales and marketing, it’s all about improving from where you are. This is why you need to treat data with utmost criticality. Without relevant data, there’s no way to make efficient improvements.
So, all the while on your journey to build sales strategies based on the target audience’s personalities, keep collecting, sorting, maintaining, and referring to DiSC data to identify opportunities to improve.
Not all salespeople are made equal and your sales team is as strong as the weakest link, as a strategist you must strive to ensure that you provide your team with every tool to ensure that they don’t look like a lamb in front of your client. You know that your client is evaluating your company through your salesperson and what he says and does in those 15-20 minutes really is going to decide whether they will ever do business with you.
In closing, perhaps what Zig Zigler says about being enthusiastic in sales meeting would be quite infectious for a personality type ‘I’ or ‘D’, but an S or C is actually making mental notes about the company you don’t want to project.
How do you go about your sales pitches, would these personalities matter? What is the effective sales closing technique that worked for you? Please share your thoughts, experiences and tips for closing big business deals in the comment section below.
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