How to Match Your Selling Style to Your Prospect's Learning Style

Excerpted with permission from Secrets of the Softer Side of Selling, Second Edition By Donald S. Crawford & Lois Carter Crawford, © 2017, Marketing Idea Shop, LLC. All rights reserved.

Windows to the Soul

Another method of determining personality styles is to watch your prospects’ expressions and where they focus their eyes when they communicate. Remember that we are not experts in these methods for determining personalities. Through years of experience, we have learned to use them as indicators of personality styles.

Highly Visual people, or people who learn through seeing, will look up. Auditory people, or those who learn by listening, look toward their ears. And Kinesthetic people—those who learn by touching and feeling—look down (sort of internally). The system of teaching Visual/Auditory/Kinesthetic people was introduced by psychologists in the 1920s. Howard Garner later described these types of learners in his book Frames of the Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligence (1983).

This same theory proved that people look one way when they “create” information and another way when they simply “retrieve” it. Not everyone looks the same way for these functions; each person has their own direction that they look when creating and when retrieving.

So if you can determine which personality type they are (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic) and then figure out which direction they look when they are retrieving information, you can usually also tell when they are lying! (That would be the direction they look when they create new ideas.)

Lois, for instance, is a Visual personality. She looks up when she answers questions—up and to the right for retrieving stored information and up and to the left when creating a new answer.

It takes a bit of questioning to determine which of these three personality descriptions fit someone; then you have to ask questions to see which way they look to create and which way they look to retrieve. Your retrieval questions have to be about information they have to access, or think about, to answer. Otherwise, they will simply rotely reply.

“Where were you born?” is unlikely to encourage a person to shift their eyes because the answer requires a rote response; they have answered this so many times, it becomes automatic. But “Where did you go on your last vacation?” or “How long have you worked for XYZ Company?” may work well because they probably have to think about the question before they answer.

Once you determine which direction you think they look when retrieving information, you can move on to asking questions they will need to answer creatively. Some questions that may require creativity are:

Open-ended questions are by far the best questions we can use, not only in building rapport but throughout the qualifying process. Our goal in qualifying is to discover all we need to know to eventually close the deal.

Open-ended questions get the prospect talking. Remember, those Drivers and Analyticals/Compliants don’t want to say much, so well-crafted open-ended questions are important when dealing with these personality types.

If you are doing all the talking, you won’t learn much from the prospect.

Pretend you’re on a blind date and you want to find out as much as possible about the person, but you want to maintain your own privacy until you decide if this potential relationship is worth your personal investment. What would you do? You’d keep them talking, wouldn’t you? And it’s not usually very hard to do because people love to talk about themselves.

So an open-ended question is a lot like the questions you’d ask to your blind date. It’s a question requiring a substantial answer from the prospect. These questions can begin with “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “how,” “what if,” and sometimes “why.” Open-ended questions can be posed as a statement as well: “Tell me about your most recent success.” Or: “Paint me a picture of how you see your business in ten years.”

An open-ended question like “How are you today?” might get a single word answer from Drivers or Analyticals like “Fine” or it might elicit a long discussion about all their aches and pains from Expressives/Influencers or Supportives.

Ask questions you think you can solve with your products or services. Try to stick to appropriate, specific questions like “What problems are you having with delivery?”

Closed-ended questions elicit a simple response. They typically begin with a verb: “Are you ready to buy?” or “Is it the red one or do you prefer the blue?” With those less-responsive personality types even expertly crafted open-ended questions can become closed-ended. If so, you’ll probably have to ask many questions to understand the situation.

Closed-ended questions are useful when summarizing conversations. After presenting your impression ask, “Is that correct?”

Reversal questions. What do you do when you are asked a question by the prospect? If an answer at this time would benefit your sales-call goal, then answer it.

Otherwise, keep the prospect speaking about what you want to know by using the reversal technique. The art of reversing is answering a question with a question to keep the prospect speaking.

Here is a simple reverse:

Prospect: “What can you do about this situation?”

Salesperson: “What would make you happy?”

However, the more common situation is when the customer wants to take control of your sales call. Too early in the process they may ask, “What’s this going to cost?” A polite reverse to this is to first offer a softening statement: “That’s a very good question, but first, I need to ask you a couple more questions to determine what it might cost. Okay?”

In other cases, a question might come out of the blue like in this conversation:

Prospect: “Does your product come with a 100% unlimited, lifetime, transferrable warranty?”

Salesperson: (softening first) “That’s a very good question.” (reversing) “Why do you ask?”

Prospect: “The last time I bought one of these whimmydiddles from your competitor it broke after two months and they didn’t do anything to help me out.”

Now the salesperson has several new pieces of knowledge to be used at the appropriate time in closing this sale.

Clarifying questions are asked to be sure you heard the prospect correctly. They are formed by repeating or rephrasing what you heard and asking for agreement. For example:

Salesperson: “Jacquie, what I heard you say was the most important thing of all is your new home be in a good school district. Is that correct?”

Or “Sara, I see your company is poised to grow at double digits, but your sales team is not strong enough to make it happen, is it?”

The Value of Rapport

We were having breakfast at a local diner with a couple of friends and discussing this book. Ken, a small business owner, offered this story: One day a nicely dressed, pleasant young woman, came in to Ken’s business to sell office supplies. The young woman was full of energy and enthusiasm, which she readily shared with everyone she met in Ken’s office. Ken thought she was rather short on the knowledge of her products; nevertheless, he bought $400 worth of office supplies from her—enough to carry his business for six to eight months.

We asked Ken why he made this buying decision. Ken said office products salespeople often come into his office. He felt most of them are more interested in talking about themselves and their products than finding out what his needs are. This woman paid attention, and she showed an interest in his business and what office products he needed to be efficient.

The lesson here is even though the seller had an undifferentiated commodity product, she made the sale because she got Ken to like her.

That’s what the rapport step is all about. Always remember, people do business with people they like, know and trust.

Treat everyone with respect

A few years ago, we went looking for an additional car. We were in the market for a fun little sports car. We thought getting a two-seater, sporty convertible would be a pretty good way to take care of Don’s “midlife crisis.”

Anyway, we stopped at a nearby dealership first because Don was interested in seeing the manufacturer’s new two-seater sports car model. A salesman came up to us, offered his hand to Don, and said, “Hi. I’m Laurence Hobbit (name changed to protect the guilty), and you are?”

Don shook his hand and replied, “Don Crawford.”

Lois put out her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Lois Carter Crawford.” At first, the salesman totally ignored her. Then he did a double-take and finally shook her hand. It was a good 20 to 30 seconds delay. Lois was steaming!

Don and Lois both knew the salesman totally blew it. (We don’t think Laurence had a clue.)

Because what the salesman didn’t know is Don may be the primary driver of the car, but he would never buy a car from someone who didn’t treat Lois with respect.

In fact, Don didn’t even consider buying a car there. He knows if he did, every time Lois got into the car, she’d be angry, and say, “I can’t believe you bought this car from the salesman who treated me so poorly!”

Don’s a pretty smart guy. He’s not going to chance ruining his fun time by buying from a guy who treated Lois as if she didn’t exist. So he said, “Thanks for your time,” and we moved on.

We went to two other dealerships where both salesmen were smart enough to acknowledge Lois. In fact, the salesman at one business really catered to her and subsequently won the sale. (Smart guy.)

Without much effort, he sold us a Porsche Boxster convertible. The salesman bent over backwards to let us check out the car, too. We took it out for a drive for about an hour. And it was like the good old days—no salesman rode with us to listen to our every word and make sure we didn’t steal the car. We drove it alone. (Fast! With the top down.)

Most people don’t complain to the offender or his supervisor. They tell everyone they see about your poor customer service—maybe 250 people before they get tired of talking, texting or posting about it. Comments like this would be pretty bad for your business, wouldn’t it?

And today, the damage can be much worse. Because every day, customers who feel they’ve been mistreated not only tell everyone they know about the problem, they often start to comment about it on social media, publish articles in local newspapers, and write about the experience in their newsletters or books like we have (although we didn’t name the culprit). It’s picked up by others, spreading like a cold virus. Soon your reputation is in the toilet.

What could the first dealership do to solve the problem? Probably not much. But a personal phone call would be a step in the right direction.

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