When it comes to sales, having the ability to relate to your prospective buyer can help easily boost profit. With today’s competitive sales approaches, any effort that can be done to build stronger relationships with prospective clients is worthwhile. A personality test can be an effective way to accomplish your goal of increased sales and stronger professional relationships.
The DISC assessment, a group of psychological inventories developed by John Geier, examines the behavior of individuals in their environment. Traditionally, the DISC personality test consists of 12-24 questions covering topics such as work, family, and socializing habits. The goal of the test is to best describe personality types and assist with personality profiling at work.
How it works
DISC is based on a quadrant behavioral model and is an acronym for:
- Dominance – relates to power, control, and level of assertiveness
- Influence – relates to communications, specifically with varied social situations
- Steadiness – relates to a person’s level of patience and persistence
- Compliance– relates to the ability to succeed in a structured and organized environment
These four dimensions can be grouped in a grid with "D" and "I" sharing the right column and representing extroverted aspects of the personality, and "S" and "C" in the left column representing introverted aspects, like the graphic below:
How DISC can help a sales professional
In sales, making an effort to relate to your client is half the battle. The other half has to do with your product. Having a better understanding of personality types, including your clients’, is a step in the right direction. By identifying the behavioral habits of yourself and others through the DISC personality test, you can achieve more on a day-to-day basis and close more deals in less time.
Additional professional benefits to the DISC personality test include:
- Improved customer relationships and customer satisfaction
- Ability to build trust
- Enhanced ability to be coached and mentored
- An effective way to match a mentor to a mentee
- Better understanding of personal strengths and challenges in order to improve behavior in the future
- Opportunity to create a diverse workplace
- Ability to increase sales skills by understanding how clients or customers behave and make decisions
Each of these factors make the time spent taking the DISC assessment extremely valuable. By focusing on the four elements from the test, a salesperson can determine who they work best with inside the office and outside, creating a better advantage for potential sales leads. After all, once you understand how others prefer to interact, the easier overall communication can be.
From the test scores, supervisors, employees, and clients can realize exactly what is needed to work more fluently together, forming stable, nurturing and long-lasting relationships.
Want to learn more about personality profiling at work? Here at The Ruby Group, we offer a DISC Behavior Profile Workshop, which will help strengthen bonds with clients, shorten the time spent on selling a deal, and sway the prospect to say “yes.”
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