What I've seen is that there are certainly trends that people have in terms of
the personalities, and everyone is different. But I really do believe that everyone
is predictably different. You're listening to the Audible Ready Podcast, the show that
helps you and your teams sell more faster. We'll feature sales leaders sharing their
best insights on how to create a sales engine that helps you fuel repeatable revenue
growth. Presented by the team at Force Management, a leader in B to
B sales effectiveness. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Audible Ready
Sales Podcast. I'm Rachel Clatt Miller. Thank you for listening, and today
joining me is Jim Poolly Pullapolis. Welcome, Polly, Thank you, Rachel.
Great to be here, always great to be here. Yes, happy
to have you back today. Today we are going to talk about buyers.
You know, I shot Poolly a note a couple of weeks ago, and
I said, what would you like to come on and talk about any sent
me us slow topics, one of which was an angle on buyers, specifically
buyer personalities. And I know, Pully there are some trends here that can
help us as sellers if we know them. Yes, I think this is
one of those areas that a lot of sellers are very intuitive about but not
intentional, And I think what I want to try to do today is explain
how you can put a bit of a framework on understanding the personality of the
person you're speaking with, regardless of what role they happened to play in organizations.
So that's kind of like the teaser for the topic, if you will,
Right there you go, Yeah, I love that phrase you just to
use. We might be intuitive about it, but we are not intentional,
and we know that it's important to align to your buyer. So being intentional
can obviously help us in a lot of ways. Maybe talk through, maybe
just at a high level, how can understanding these different types of personalities help
us as sales professionals. Yeah. Perfect, So let me put it into
a very high level context. Right. So when we're involved let's say lead
generation, right, we're looking for prospective customers for us to reach out to.
Companies will typically create the ideal customer profile, right, which that tends
to be about the company we like to sell to in a B to B
space, Right, So the industry they're in, how many employees they have,
what kind of you know, major strategic issues. They typically run into
that ideal customer profile or ICP, is something that most companies do when they
begin to target who we are going to go out and do business with.
And then the next layer down from that usually is the buyer PERSONA and that
tends to be the type of role that a person plays. At times,
it could be like a fictionalization of the person that we want to sell to.
You know, maybe my SaaS company likes to sell to the CIO,
right, and so the buyer PERSONA is the CIO and there might be a
little bit of a of a background. They're saying it's a CIO who comes
from a technical background, who's worked in the industry for twenty thirty years.
So it's a description of a person, but it sits underneath that ideal customer
profile. So we've got the ICP and the PERSONA, and the buyer PERSONA
also tends to be very organizational, in other words, hierarchical, like where
does that person sit in the organization that we want to reach out to.
And I think there's a missing layer when it comes to selling. And the
missing layer is the let's call it the prospect's personality or the buyer's personality.
So if I reach out to a CIO, for example, and they have
one type of personality, Let's say they're very analytical, very thoughtful, they
take their time making decisions, that kind of conversation I'm going to have with
that CIO is going to be very different than the kind of conversation I might
have with a CIO who is gregarious, outgoing, a storyteller at heart,
right, So two very different personalities in the same role of the organization.
And I think sometimes we don't do enough to really discern the personality of the
person that we're speaking to until we're sitting there in front of them and realize,
oh my gosh, they're not as technical as I thought they were,
Or oh my gosh, this person likes to talk and I got to sit
here quietly and listen to it, Or oh my gosh, they seem like
they want to make a decision based on consensus. I thought they were going
to be a lot more decisive. So we kind of get stuck right in
the moment. And what I've seen is that there are certainly trends that people
have in terms of the personalities and everyone is different, but I really do
believe that everyone is predictably different. I think you can predict to some extent
what that person's personality is going to be. Like, Yeah, it's a
great point, and it's really about this pattern recognition. And I'm sure there's
a lot of people listening right now who are nodding their heads because right,
you mentioned the person who likes to talk, that doesn't like to be quite
right, We're all like, yeah, we've seen that before. And the
buyer persona is an important thing I think to bring up here because that's often
something that we see in marketing a lot. Right, here's our buyer and
persona here our target, but they can be really helpful as us as salespeople.
I just did some content with our colleague Brian Walsh, and we were
talking about selling in a new category, specifically around selling an AI solution right
where you're trying to embed like a new technology or a new way of doing
things within your organization, right, And we talked about ICP Right, who
are the target companies, but then also within the company in that particular instance,
you really needed to look at the buyer personalities because you want to be
able to find early adopters of technology as opposed to like the laggards or people
who might be more skeptic. So you know, obviously this is very important
for that selling that type of technology. But you know, we've alsold to
people who like to talk too much, and how do we encounter with that?
So maybe you can run through poolly just some of these patterns that we
typically see, buyer personalities that we typically encounter, and what we might do
about it. Yeah, let me tease out that AI example a little bit.
Right, Let's say you're talking to a prospect who you want to sell
some new kind of AI add on or some new AI solution to right,
AI is the cool new thing. It's the thing that people don't quite understand,
but they're all intrigued. So there are some buyers when you present that
to them, they get very excited, right because that AI add on,
that AI capability is something that's exciting that they can go tell a great story
about the organization that we've adopted this. Right, that's one category of these
buyers. There's another category of these buyers that look at the AI solution and
say, this will allow me to finally achieve this business outcome, and I
can put that big old trophy on the wall, or I can hold up
the trophy and say we got it, we made it right. This was
the missing piece of what we were trying to accomplish. Then there's another kind
of personnality that looks at that and says, I don't have enough information giving
the information, I am not going to make this decision unless I have way
more information than you've given me right now. And it's going to take a
long time for me to make this decision, but I'm going to make the
right one. And then finally, there's a fourth category of people who are
like, I don't like anything change. So if you're telling me things are
going to change, I don't want it to change, just I'm not interested.
Each one of those four can buy this cool new AI thing, but
you got to sell it different to each of those four personalities. To the
person who's afraid to change, you've got to convince them that maybe some little
things will change, but you know what, your day to day living is
going to be pretty much the same. You might be more efficient, more
effective, but it's not going to make it's not going to make it crazy.
The analytical seller You just got to keep feeding them information, but you
also got to put a little time pressure on them right to make a decision,
because they'll continue to analyze the storyteller tends not to focus on the details.
You want to make sure you bring those details in at the appropriate time
so that after they make the buy, after they buy the product, they
look back and they're happy about it, right, because those are the folks
that will buy something on Amazon, and when they receive it, then they'll
go read the reviews to make sure that they feel good about the fact that
they bought it. Right, They don't look at the reviews, first look
at it afterwards to justify their purchase, and then tells me, Rachel,
And it goes quite a bit long with this personality thing we're going to talk
about. And then the decisive decision maker, they're all about, how do
I get that trophy, that frame, that's something on the wall, is
it that revenue number that, you know, whatever it is. If I
can achieve that business outcome and scream from the top of the mountain that I
got there, that's what they want. Those are four very different buying motivations,
right, and so we walk into those conversations. We need to know
how to, you know, how to tune ourselves to that type of personality,
right, not just the buyer's role, but the personality they play.
So the framework that I use, which has been around since nineteen twenty eight,
it's called it's called DISC, right, the DISC. A lot of
people take a DISC test when they're in high school of college and see what
kind of career they should go into. A lot of employers use DISC as
a personality assessment when they're hiring people into specific roles. And because DISC has
been around for so long, there's a lot of data around it. And
I didn't really start, you know, sort of looking at DISK and understanding
how DISC personality systems work until probably twenty years ago, when I was doing
executive coaching, right and trying to help my my executive clients, you know,
kind of learn how to better communicate with each other. But recently what
I've done is I've looked at it and said, you know what, this
is such a great tool for sellers because it makes things so simple in terms
of identifying someone's personality right with the moment you begin speaking with them, and
frankly, even before you even meet them for the first time. So it's
basically two things that you look for in a person's personality. One is their
pace. Are they fast moving, action oriented extroverted people that's number one,
Or at the other end of that spectrum, are they introverted, thoughtful,
analytical? Do they take their time? Right, that's one kind of spectrum's
pace. The other one is priority, and priority really is how do they
make decisions. You and I just talked about buying something on Amazon and justifying
our purchase afterwards by looking at the reviews after we've bought it and purchased it,
just to make ourselves feel good about it. That type of person in
terms of priority, they typically make decisions based on people and relationships. The
other type of personality will make decisions based on data and information. So it's
basically a two by two matrix. Right. If you're thoughtful, analytical,
patient, and you make decisions based on data, you're what they call a
c or conscientious buyer. Right. That's the typical sort of technical buyer that
we come across, needs all the data, slow moving in terms of making
decisions. At the other end of the spectrum, if you're action oriented and
people oriented, you're an eye or influencer. So that's me. You know,
I'm a teacher, I'm outgoing. I make decisions a lot based on
how I think it affects people around me, and that type of personality requires
a lot of rapport building and storytelling before we make a decision. The folks
that are decisive, sort of action oriented, but very data driven, so
are kind of opposite what I am are the D type personality, the decisives,
and they're the ones that want that sort of trophy that framed award,
that revenue number. They're very driven by that outcome, you know, that
business outcome. And finally, the fourth category are the essays. They're very
stable, they're very people oriented, but they make decisions slowly and thoughtfully,
and they don't like change. That's the big bucket of people that we said
don't like change when they make a decision. So when you look at those
four and there's a lot of information out there about disc and people can go
out and you know, kind of research it online. There's a lot of
articles written about it and a lot of places you can find information about it.
But at the end of the day, the main thing about that framework
is that it allows you to kind of just generalize people into one of four
categories. And as salespeople, that's very important because you don't want to deal
with a personality assessment that takes a lot of time and effort to kind of
put people into those those buckets. Right, So, ultimately the goal is
to take someone's LinkedIn profile, for example, or some of their public statements
or their public persona able to kind of read into it a little bit before
you even have an opportunity to speak with them in person. I love breaking
this down further because so often we talk about the economic buyer, the champion,
the technical buyer, the implementation, but this is really taking it a
step deeper. And you mentioned like going through the LinkedIn profile, maybe making
an initial you know, it's just something where I'm like writing down the different
This is how I could see doing it, right, I'm kind of putting
people in buckets maybe before the call, and then as I'm talking to them,
I'm kind of feelating or I'm looking for those patterns that you're talking about,
and then you know, maybe adjusting my communication moving forward based on that.
Yes, that's absolutely it. So part of it is just being very
observant of the people that you're speaking with from not just what they're saying,
but how they're saying it. So if I'm speaking to someone, the easiest
way to do this is to think about extroverts and introverts, right, you
know, are you know I'm an extrovert? Right, I speak, I
use my hands, you know, I know that I have a lot of
dynamic energy behind when I speak. It's just I get excited when I'm talking
to other humans, and that is something that we watch for. Right,
So if you're extroverted, you will either be a D type personality, a
dominant personality, or an eye type, which is that influencer type that I
mentioned. So there's a great clue. Right. That means that if someone
is thoughtful and they slow down when they speak, and when you ask them
a question they pause for a few seconds before answering like this. That makes
a lot of salespeople uncomfortable, right because that pause they think there's something wrong.
But all that means is that person's introverted and they're thinking thoroughly through that
question before answering it. Very methodical about it. Those are the c's and
the s's are the s's and the seas the stable ones who don't like to
make decisions that disrupt their workplace, and the analytical ones that are, you
know, the conscientious calculators, if you will, that are thinking about the
business angles of this. So that's an easy one to kind of figure out
in terms of extraversion versus introversion, And your job typically is to sort of
if you're in sales, your job is to match that energy. Right,
If you're an extroverted seller and you come into an introverted seller space and you
just bowl them over with all that energy, it doesn't really work well.
Right. The same thing goes in the opposite if you're kind of more a
thoughtful introverted seller, and those people do exist, we don't, you know,
we sometimes think that isn't the case, But there are introverted, thoughtful
sellers out there. They sometimes need to pick up the pace and pick up
their energy if they're talking to someone who's more dynamic and extroverted. Right,
it's a little bit moving out of your comfort zone, but you know you
can do it because it's only for a short period of time. So extraversion
introversion, that's one way of doing this. The other thing is data oriented
in terms of decision making versus people or relationship oriented in terms of decision making,
so a little harder to tell, but you can. The clues that
are related to that are is the person asking quest questions of you about how
this new product or service will affect people and the jobs that they do and
the day to day effort that their team has to do, and will it
give them time to focus more on strategic things that they can work on as
a team, or that they can work on to, you know, sort
of improve the professional environment that people work in. Or are they asking questions
or asking you about your solution in terms of give me some of the specific
information in terms of what are the positive business outcomes I can achieve here as
an organization, or you know, how am I going to measure this solution?
What am I looking for in terms of the KPIs and the measured elements
of it? And how do I know that you've providing me with the outcome
that I'm looking for? So very data and analytical oriented, so you've got
to listen very closely to how people are asking those questions as prospects what are
they most concerned about? And I think that really then begins to unveil this
image of who these people are. I think one of the best ways to
practice this and when I'm training I work at Bentley University. In addition to
working a forced management with my students, one of the assignments I always give
them is we do this disk personality assessment right before they go away for Thanksgiving
break, and I tell them when they're home and when they're with their extended
families celebrating Thanksgiving here in the US, I want them to read as many
of their family members as they can and guess what disc personality type they are.
And it's fascinating because they come back from Thanksgiving break and they all tell
me the same thing. They have a new level of understanding of why they
like this particular relative so much, or why they've always had conflicts with that
other relative so often because of the different personality types and how they clash.
And I think the same thing applies in sales, which is try it out
thinking about really breaking down the personalities of the family members. You have your
close friends, the people that you know the best and have spent the most
time with, and that's kind of how you roleplay this idea of reading someone's
personality. Do it with people you already know pretty well, and then as
you begin to meet new people in prospecting or as you begin to meet new
people in discovery at the organizations you work in, just try to be a
little bit more again intentional about taking notes of not just what they're saying,
how they're saying it, where do you think they're coming from, And that
then will allow you to change the way you conduct discovery and close and negotiate
because now you're really resonating with that personality type very much at the base frequency,
if you will. That's when the magic happens. When someone doesn't feel
like you're speaking to them, but you're conversing with them. It builds report
and it draws them in because you're not treating them how you want to be
treated. You know the old golden rule, treat someone how you want to
be treated. You're treating them how they want to be treated. And that's
really a powerful way of doing this. So that you know, it's kind
of where I come at it from in terms of reading personalities, You've got
to practice it. I always say this, We set it right at the
very beginning. You got to be intentional about it before it becomes intuitive.
I've gotten to a point in my life I'm pretty intuitive about it, but
in the beginning it took a lot of sort of intentional focus on reading the
clues to become intuitive about overtime. I think that's great. I think it
provides us with another way to align our engagement with a particular person in the
account. And you know, Pully, we've talked about this kind of at
the earlier stages of discovery. You mentioned like negotiation as you execute the sales
process. But also you know, for those of you listening out there who
might be just struggling in an account to like get them to the next stage,
or maybe there's a thorn in your side of the account that you haven't
been able to you know, you haven't been able to crack that nut yet.
This might be something to try to kind of reignite some action in the
account. Yeah, I think so. I think so. You know you
mentioned the economic buyer, right, that's an archetype. Right, that's a
type of a person, right, that's a buyer persona that we always look
for. Who's the economic buyer? So let's think about this. If the
economic buyer, if we know who they are, we've had the opportunit to
meet with them, then we can step back and say, right, based
on that interaction, what did I learn about that economic buyer's personality? Right?
And when it comes to sort of these big sort of four categories of
personality, there are two things that motivate people to make changes in each one
of the different personality types. So one is sort of a motivation for change,
and one is like a fear. What's the biggest fear? So decisive
decision makers, you know, the D type personalities in the disc parlance,
those type of decision makers, their motivation is achievement. They are driven by
achievement that is publicly known. So if they're a CEO of an organization and
they're the economic buyer, then they want to be known for the person who
brought the company through IPO successfully or who doubled revenue in five years. Right,
whatever that achievement is, they see that as their as their goal.
Their biggest fear, the thing that drives them the most crazy when it comes
to being sold to, is when someone tries to bypass them or go around
them. They're fearful of losing their grip on power to some extent by having
a seller maybe go around them, go to the board, for example,
or go to someone else who has influence in the organization because maybe they've gotten
stuck at that economic buyer level. So knowing that should allow you to kind
of shift the way you maneuver around the organization a way that doesn't strike that
fear for the economic buyer. The influencers. The IE type personality is the
outgoing personality types. Those are the ones that their motivation is not so much
achievement, but they want to be known for the interesting things that they've done.
These are the storytellers, right. They want to be someone who can
tell this great story about bringing in this external solution and how it transformed the
way people work and the great things it did for the people in the organization.
So their motivation is to be liked. For lack of a better way
of saying it, their biggest fear is that someone dislikes them, or someone
highlights something that they did incorrectly or wrong and it becomes embarrassing to them.
It's more about the embarrassment than the actual decision itself. The S type personalities
those are the stable personalities that we talked about people oriented, thoughtful decision makers,
but introverted. They just like things to be stable. They don't want
to see huge disruption. In the language of high tech product adoption, they
are the late majority, right, They'll make a move to something new and
different as long as it's not going to cost too much, as long as
it's not going to disrupt operations too much, as long as their life afterwards
might be better but not necessarily revolutionarily better. Right. But their biggest fear
is disruption. Their biggest fear is, oh my gosh, if I bring
this new thing in, it's just going to completely upturn the way we do
things and I have to go back to scratch to learn how to do my
job or learn how to get this thing implemented. And the final set the
conscientious, calculating type of personality that are thoughtful, introverted, data driven,
their biggest motivation is just being thorough. They are so into that analytical model
of making decisions thoughtfully and going through the checklists and the matrix. That's what
they need in order to move forward. Their biggest fear is making a mistake,
which is why they're so analytical. So we need to kind of assuade
that fear somehow and show them with as much data as we can that this
is not a mistake. And I think there's a subtle extra level here with
those technical buyers that we all struggle with at times, and that is they're
afraid of picking a solution that's wrong, right, which is why they're so
analytical and picking it. But I think sellers have an opportunity to chip away
at that little fear a little bit by getting them to feel the fear of
not moving quickly enough to solve the solution, because that's also an underlying fear
for these technical analytical decision makers, which is if I take too long to
make this decision, I missed the quarter, I missed the cycle, I
missed this fiscal year for improvement. So sellers can kind of bring in a
little bit of that temporal pressure on those analytical buyers to say, the longer
we wait to have you incorporate our solution, the longer it's going to take
for the results to come in alignment, and you might be viewed as having
made a mistake and waiting too long. I mean, obviously we don't say
that directly, but it's that fear that we try to kind of think about
in terms of that discovery. So again it's just sort of a quick summary
of all these different types. But what I really want so the listeners to
think about is, don't just assume that a technical buyer is analytical. Don't
just assume that an economic buyer is always worried about revenue cost and risk management.
They are, but how they think about those things depends on their personality.
So the way you engage those conversations makes a huge difference and how much
rapport they feel they have with you, And the more rappor you build with
them, the more likely they are to work with you. If you have
two solutions that are of equal sort of value to them functionality wise, they're
going to want to work with a person they've felt the most rapport with during
the sales cycle, because that's like the type breaker. And so I think
this is why I really want people to be more intentional about scanning the personalities
of the people that they interact with. That's great. Really appreciate you breaking
down the personalities for us today, Poolly. You know, we always say
sales is a game of inches, and while some of these things don't seem
like a lot when you look at them in isolation, adding them up across
the landscape of an account throughout the sales process, they can really make a
big difference. So appreciate you going through that today and sharing your expertise on
it with us. I appreciate you having me on as you can tell them
pretty passionate about the topic, and I'm always happy to talk to folks if
they want to reach out and learn more about it. Yeah, and you
know we have This isn't a Pulley's only appearance on Audible Ready Sales podcast.
I'm sure as many of you know, we have had several conversations with him.
We'll link his other shows in the show notes, And I know we
have a lot that kind of go to really having a positive outlook on your
job as a salesperson. And that's also kind of the subject of your book,
Pully. Go ahead and give a plug for that in case people to
check that out. Yeah, thank you. So the name of the books
how to Be a Well Being, and it's a set of twenty two rules
to help people, you know, sort of tune their mindset for a little
bit more positivity throughout the course of every day. You know, it's like
one of those things moving from intentional to intuitive in terms of taking care of
your own well being and happiness. And I think, you know, for
salespeople especially, you know, we have a hard job and we're faced with
a lot of rejections. So I think a lot of the lessons in terms
of how do you just generate a higher level of personal happiness and a better
sense of well being for yourself really do help salespeople become better at what they
do, but also just have a better outlook on life in general. So
thanks for don't we talk about it? Yes? Who doesn't want that?
All right? Thanks Poolly, and thank you to all of you for listening
to the Audible Already Sales podcast. At Force Management, we're focused on transforming
sales organizations into elite teams. Our proven methodologies deliver programs that build company alignment
and fuel repeatable revenue growth. Give your teams the ability to execute the growth
strategy at the point of sale. Our strength is our experience, the proof
is in our results. Let's get started. Visit us at forcemanagement dot com.
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