How to Sell to Everyone: The 4 Personality Types

Everybody fits into one of four major personality types.

It may seem stereotypical to pigeonhole everybody into one of four boxes, but in the buying process each type has different needs.

Your website text (and sales team) must speak to each personality type individually to be the most effective. Should you go for the competition angle or the exciting angle? It depends on the personality of your customer.

There are a bunch of different names for the four personalities, like:

• Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic
• D, I, S, C
• Assertive, Amiable, Expressive, Analytical
• Competitive, Spontaneous, Humanistic, Methodical

We’ll break them down by those last four (with celebrity examples!) because they’re the most aptly-named.

Competitive – Donald Trump

Donald Trump

Also known as the Type-A personality. They’re in it to win it and get a thrill from crushing competitors. To them life is survival of the fittest and they put a lot of energy into making sure that they stay ahead of everybody else. Contrary to how they may be perceived, the goal isn’t more money or a great life (although both of those things come from crushing the competition).

How to sell to them:

Appeal to that inner competitor. Let them know how your service helps them get ahead. Regale them with tales of 85% market share and squashing upstart competitors. Frame your service as a competitive advantage.

Spontaneous – Walt Disney

Walt Disney

This is my personality type. We live for the fun of the project. We’re don’t care too much about competition; we love that exciting feeling we get when we do something interesting. The world is full of possibilities and ideas, and a great idea that changes everything is our Holy Grail.

How to sell to us:

Get excited. Is your product cutting-edge and new? Will it be a blast to work on and be awesome in the end? Let us know! Speak in exclamation points! !!!

Leave out the details. They don’t matter to us and we’re not interested. We live for the big picture so talk about that.

We act quickly but lose interest quickly. You’ve got to be immediately compelling and exciting. If you’re boring we’ll go to someone who’s more fun.

Humanistic – Princess Diana

Princess Diana

People, people, people. Humanistic personalities care intensely about the people around them and continually put others’ needs ahead of their own. They focus on the feelings of others and will go to great lengths to maintain a happy and healthy environment for all of the people close to them.

How to sell to them:

Show happy people. Roll out all of your best testimonials, especially the ones from other Humanistics about how much your service boosted morale, made everyone happy, etc. The Humanistic personality cares most about people and feelings: so make sure they feel comfortable that your service will be good for their team.

Methodical – C-3PO

C-3PO

Methodical types crave information. They don’t feel comfortable making a decision until all the facts are available, laid out, and analyzed. They are “data” people: they do do due diligence to make sure they have all the facts to accurately predict the outcome of a project.

How to sell to them:

Numbers. Methodicals place the value of facts above all else, and in most sales situations the most unbiased and trustworthy facts are numbers.

If you’ve increased productivity over 20% for 80% of your 125 customers give them that data to crunch. Only after they have a sufficient amount of facts will they feel comfortable making a decision.

So how to you put all of this stuff together into a cohesive website? Contact us to find out.

Do you see yourself in any of these personality types? Comment to let us know!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Internet Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.