Friday, March 29, 2024

Selling Success: What Your Personality Style Reveals Part 1a

Our success in selling is influenced a great deal by the style of our personality. There are four important dimensions to our personality that I’ve found helpful in finding success in my own selling efforts and in helping my clients not only improve in this area but also find much more enjoyment and success at same time.

This post focuses on these four dimensions in order to lay the ground work for personal application later in this post series. In this series I draw heavily on the Birkman Method, the personality assessment tool that I find the most accurate and revealing  of all the products out there. It is the primary tool I use for this purpose in my consulting and coaching practice.

If you are a manager or business owner and are unsure about why you should care about selling, please see my first post in this series to learn what every successful business leader knows about selling.

Who Are You, Really?

Have you ever wondered what makes you unique? How do you describe yourself to others? What holds your interest? Gives you energy? The Birkman Life Style Grid® (LSG) can help you answer these and many other questions. In fact, it tells us a lot about what we and others:

  • like about selling
  • the approach we are likely to take when we sell
  • what we need from selling
  • what we might do when we are stressed about selling

The Four Dimensions

The LSG is a simple 2 x 2 matrix we’ll use to plot various aspects of our personality at a 30,000 foot level. Each side of the matrix represent the four dimensions we’ll be using.

In the simple diagram below we see that the top half of the matrix represents how direct a person may be or prefer and the bottom half represents its opposite: indirect.

The other sides of the matrix are associated with preferences that are task-oriented versus people-oriented. These are represented in the diagram below.

Putting it all together we have the framework to begin understanding the four major personalities we’ll be using to improve our selling, increase our satisfaction doing it, and see better results by applying what we learn from the model.

Next up, we’ll discuss the four personality types this model depicts and how we’ll put it to use towards improving all aspects of our selling activities.

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