Sales Prospecting

Personality Analysis for Better Sales Prospecting

Anand Venkatraman
Anand Venkatraman
Anand Venkatraman
8
min read
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Personality Analysis for Better Sales Prospecting

Key Takeaways

  • Personalizing sales pitches to align with the prospect's communication style and motivations increases conversion rates.
  • Understanding personality traits enables tailored responses to objections, enhancing persuasion and trust.
  • Personality analysis helps craft specific value propositions and messages, resonating more effectively with prospects.
  • Are you tired of one-size-fits-all sales pitches falling flat?

    Prospects today are less responsive and suffer from information overload. The spray-and-pray approach of reps is wasting resources and yielding minimal ROI on selling activities. 

    This is because 80% of customers are likelier to purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. 

    The problem is clear —a lack of personalization in the sales pitch and its alignment with the prospect’s motivations. This is where a prospect personality assessment comes into play. It helps sales reps rely on credible and the latest customer intel to find prospects instead of relying on guesswork alone. 

    In this article, we will get into the process of understanding your prospects’ personalities and enhancing your prospecting approach with Happysales.

    Why is it important to assess your prospect's personality?

    Carrying out prospect personality analysis offers solid insights that can dramatically improve your sales outcomes. Let’s find out how. 

    1. Higher sales success

    Prospects are more likely to convert when the sales reps they are talking to share a similar communication style and traits. Personality analysis for sales prospecting allows customizing your sales methodologies to match your prospect’s preferences, motivations, and needs. This makes customers less hesitant to move forward with your brand and make the purchase.   

    2. Improved objection handling 

    Once sales reps understand what drives and influences each personality profile, they can be prepared to address objections and frame their responses more persuasively and logically. 

    For example, C-type personalities heavily value logic, data, and reason. This allows reps to prepare fact-based responses to product concerns focused on stats and ROI rather than just benefits. For I-type profiles, the sales team can overcome relationship objections by becoming their trusted partner.

    3. Personalized sales messaging 

    The prospect personality analysis enables you to develop value propositions specific to each prospect's priorities and pain points. 

    Personality analysis for sales prospecting allows you to hyper-personalize messaging connecting from the prospect’s first touchpoint. This way, your brand talks about things that matter most to them—whether it’s productivity, profit margins, collaboration, or innovation. You can customize content based on their preferred tone, depth, format, and channels.

    4. Identify decision-making factors 

    Understand your prospects’ personalities to get a crystal clear picture of what factors predominantly influence their decision-making. This tells what aspects reps need to focus conversations on or what metrics to highlight in pitches. Meeting prospects where they are becomes possible with prospect personality assessment.

    For example, dominant prospects want hard numbers regarding ROI, while conscientious prospects care more about past customers or market standing. 

    How to use prospect personality assessments to sell efficiently

    Analyzing the digital footprints of prospects across email, social media, and other channels helps identify their personality traits and characteristics.  However, doing this manually for a long list of prospects is nearly impossible.

    Tools like Happysales analyze thousands of data points for you to prospect effectively with minimal manual effort.

    1. Dominant 

    Dominant personalities focus on ROI and don’t like to sugarcoat their asks in any way. They prefer limited small talk and have an expansive professional network, especially on career-growth-focused social platforms like LinkedIn. While prospecting dominant personalities, use direct language sans any flowery adjectives.

    Dos

    • Summarize product abilities into 3-5 concise, hard-hitting benefits
    • Quantify results in terms of metrics like x% cost savings 
    • Offer package options for different levels of features
    • Outline the execution plan for implementation
    • Discuss how the product will impact their KPIs

    Donts

    • Make small talk in the pitch 
    • Wait for them to ask questions
    • Use aspirational language like “we aim to potentially...”

    You can start natural conversations using Happysales’ Conversation Starters feature with this authoritative persona. Furthermore, get one-click suggestions for communication and generate relevant and personalized emails so that your brand talks about what your dominant prospect wants to hear. 

    2. Influential 

    Building relationships is what motivates influential prospects. You can easily recognize them from their emotive language and two-way conversations filled with personal chitchat beyond professional objectives. 

    They usually prefer visual communication with multimedia. Such prospects are part of large professional circles across different networking platforms, especially groups focused on collaborations, ideas, and people connectivity.

    Dos

    • Discuss ability for innovation and growth
    • Share case studies and customer testimonials
    • Begin the pitch by building a personal connection
    • Outline how your product adds to the human potential

    Donts

    • Fail to address personal questions
    • Overwhelm them using charts and numbers 
    • Directly disagree with their views in front of other stakeholders  

    3. Steady

    Steady prospects prefer talking to tried-and-tested close connections rather than random connections. Use cautious and supportive language and avoid extremes.

    They prioritize company vision, culture, and team over numbers, risk management, and consensus building. 

    Dos

    • Provide proof of product usefulness
    • Offer assistance during onboarding
    • Be all ears to their concerns and feedback 
    • Highlight features that minimize uncertainty
    • Emphasize inclusions of technical support and maintenance

    Donts

    • Rush through explanations 
    • Overwhelm them with changes
    • Push them to make quick decisions
    • Miss scheduled meetings & commitments

    Using Happysales, you get one-click AI-powered personalized email and LinkedIn sequences for your steady prospects so that they can establish trust in your brand. You will also get intent signals to know when they are ready to purchase (without the rush). 

    4. Conscientious  

    Your prospect belongs to this personality category if they use precise and formal language, data-driven communication supplemented with charts/graphs, and have niche professional circles of domain experts rather than large general networks. Their communication concerns specifications, quality norms, compliance issues, and risk management.

    Dos

    • Share results and metrics achieved by others
    • Offer trials and demos to test quality firsthand
    • Show a comparative study against competitors
    • Clearly explain methodologies used to generate data

    Donts

    • Avoid questions about limitations
    • Over-inflate or generalize statistics 
    • Give vague commitments like “performance results may vary”

    General Prospecting Tips Across All Personalities

    Flexibility: The ability to adapt your selling style is crucial. Recognize cues that indicate a prospect's DISC type and adjust your approach accordingly.

    Active Listening: Pay close attention to the prospect's words, tone, and body language. Active listening helps tailor your pitch to their specific needs and concerns.

    Follow-Up Strategy: Customize your follow-up based on the personality type. For D and C types, a concise summary email might be best. For I and S types, a more personal follow-up, perhaps a call or a meeting, can reinforce the relationship.

    How to match your selling style with a prospect’s personality

    Successfully connecting with prospects and turning them into paying customers requires your reps to come onto the same page as your prospects. This means aligning your sales approach with their unique personality style and preferences. Here’s how to do personality analysis for sales prospecting. 

    1. Understand prospects’ personality 

    The first step is to understand the prospect's personality type. Are they more analytical? Relationship-focused? Goal-oriented? 

    You can assess this by asking smart, open-ended questions, listening actively to their responses, and highlighting benefits that appeal to their personality.

    2. Identify gaps and adapt your communication 

    Observe gaps between the prospect’s personality and the natural sales style of your reps. A C–type prospect needs more facts and figures, while an I-type expects more personal trust building. Identify gaps to build a sales prospecting plan and match your communication, including messaging, content formats, conversation style, etc. 

    3. Mirror their behavior

    Once you know their style, subtly start mirroring their verbal and non-verbal behavior. Matching their speech patterns, energy levels, and communication biases helps establish quick trust. This may include adjusting your tone when talking to a dominant prospect or communicating through a different channel.

    4. Revise your prospecting approach as needed

    Pay attention to prospect reactions and be ready to change course. If you see a loss in engagement, immediately alter your approach —ask clarifying questions to pinpoint disconnection. Measure conversion rates both pre- and post-the changes to better gauge the effectiveness of the adaptation. 

    It is true that effectively selling to DISC personality types takes a lot of hard work, but it pays off in the long run. You can switch hard work with smart work by using tools like Happysales that deploy AI to evaluate and recommend the next steps for each profile. Happysales does all the account research for you to understand if a prospect is a good fit and their personality traits. Moreover, you also get customized value propositions for each personality and DOs for communication with them.

    Getting started with Happysales is free. Try it today and see the difference in your conversions! 

    Use Our AI Bot Workforce for Prospecting, Enablement & Coaching
    Sign up for a free trial

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