There's not a sales person alive who wouldn't want to up their game when it comes to sales conversations. But how many of us can truly say that our sales technique focuses as much on connecting as it does on converting?
We know that human connection is the key to great sales results. But are your sales teams as skilled as you need them to be at building chemistry, credibility and trust, and personalising their approach? Do particular team members lose confidence when a sales conversation takes the wrong turn, unsure where the connection got lost?
Last year, Salesforce surveyed more than 7,700 sales professionals from 38 countries for its 2023 State of Sales report. It revealed just how little time many sales reps have to connect with customers.
After all the networking, cold-calling, proposal-writing and data management, reps spend just 28% of their week actually selling. The same report showed that only 26% of reps say that they receive weekly one-to-one coaching. They’re often told “it’s a numbers game” or “work harder,” but aren’t given tools to improve.
To achieve true influence means developing the right dynamic with your customer. And to do that, you need to really connect with your prospect. And to do that, you need to understand how they - and perhaps their ringleader - prefers to communicate.
Once you’ve worked that out, it's time to work out how your own communication style will land with them, and, crucially, how much you should fine-tune it to suit their needs. (Yep, it’s a lot!)
If you’re in charge of a sales team, are you confident that your sales professionals understand how to weave these vital elements of self-awareness into their approach?
Here, we’ll explore how the four Insights Discovery Sales Effectiveness colour energies influence selling. We’ll look at the impact of dominant colour energies on how you communicate and respond - a useful deep-dive for active salespeople who need to be better at connecting (and a great starting point for onboarding energetic sales recruits).
Effective selling has three main requirements:
• A salesperson who understands themselves and is aware of how different customers perceive them
• An understanding of people who are different. Customers often have opposing needs, expectations, desires and motivations. These distinctions need to be appreciated and respected
• An ability to adapt our behaviour to connect effectively with and influence the customer
Using our sales-directed self-awareness tool, Discovering Sales Effectiveness, we assess which parts of the sales process the seller is strong or weak in.
Some of your best sales pros might be great at identifying customer needs and being persuasive enough to capture their full attention, but weaker at negotiating concerns or overcoming objections, friction and resistance.
Knowing more about how the four colour energies influence personal preferences and communication styles – yours and theirs - will help overcome sales objections and interpersonal sticking points.
Discovery Sales Effectiveness empowers teams to identify customer needs upfront and to ask questions that reveal customer preferences and priorities. When the customer talks about pain points, you can listen for how they express those pain points and adjust your response, tone and style to acknowledge and explore them (potentially uncovering hidden opportunities).
And during the sometimes lo-o-o-ng waiting game before the customer finally agrees to a sale, we learn how to reach out to quieter prospects in ways that won’t alienate them, and to keep just the right amount of energy up with outgoing and easily distracted prospects.
When we make better communication choices, when we focus more on how we show up, entire sales teams learn how to communicate with the kind of impact that drives conversions.
At Insights, we’ve debriefed millions of executives as part of Insights Discovery and Discovering Sales Effectiveness and found an interesting pattern: While most people think they are self-aware, they are often surprised by the personality and behavioural patterns revealed in the profile.
Even for sales leaders who have a good grasp of their own inner workings (they know their preferences, hopes and motivators), accepting how their behaviour is received by others – and making adjustments to respect others’ style - is a whole other challenge!
Once you know your dominant colour energy (see your personal profile), you can explore your associated strengths and potential blind spots. Recognise that not everyone communicates in the same way or sees life (or your product or service!) through your lens.
You can use your Insights Discovery Sales Effectiveness learning to tailor your approach to different types of prospects and quickly become more sensitive to their preferred style and tone.
For example, if your prospect is:
Cool Blue, they may be analytical, detail-oriented and cautious, and may come across as reserved. They may not want too much overt ‘get to know you’ chat. Talk about numbers, data, process, logical reasoning and keep reinforcing the ‘why’. Be orderly in your follow-up!
Fiery Red, they may be assertive and results-driven, and might be perceived as impatient. They want direct chat, brevity and clarity. Talk about goals, ambition, action plans and speed of application and reinforce these elements in your follow-up.
Sunshine Yellow, they may be social and enthusiastic, and could become easily distracted. Even when keen on your shared topic, it may be hard to focus them enough to explore your solution. Bring them swiftly back to your benefits and focus on the collaborative opportunities your service or product might bring. Keep the follow-up friendly and collaborative.
Earth Green, they may be empathetic and team-oriented, and may avoid anything that causes conflict. They might show stubborn-ness or disinterest if they weren’t internally involved in getting to this point. Highlight the likely impact of your service or product on their people, team dynamics and personal and professional development and radiate warmth in your follow-up.
If you have dominant Cool Blue energy (we call this Thinking energy) and prefer to focus on data and processes, or you have dominant Fiery Red energy (also Thinking) and a passion for goals and quick results, your sales approach could be perceived as too cold and unempathetic by a more relationship-minded prospect who leads with Earth Green energy (a Feeling energy).
Equally, your strong Thinking energy may be viewed as detached or aloof by prospects with more gregarious, social Sunshine Yellow (also Feeling) energy. Be sure not to leave out the interpersonal, bonding elements throughout the sales process, even if they take a little more time.
By contrast, if you’re the one leading with Sunshine Yellow energy and you prioritise humour and relationship-building over the data, a Cool Blue inclined customer may feel their time is being wasted and perceive you as frivolous and not close enough to the detail they need. Consider brevity over wit, bring the hard facts, summarise succinctly and be careful not to over-promise or over-elaborate. Be sure to create an organised system for follow-up and keep your antennae out for specific detail they’ve requested. For a Fiery Red customer, dial up your sharp focus and brevity in spades!
Understanding these contrasts, and why they occur, is key to recognising customer’s preferences, needs and values, as well as their strengths and challenges.
Just a final thought about AI in relation to the way we choose to communicate with our clients and prospects: even with more automation creeping in to business processes, we can take solace in the fact that our ‘softer’ skills (power skills!) will never be redundant in the sales role.
As Martin Roe, chief executive of business process outsourcing provider CCI Global, recently said…
AI will not be able to replace the human voice. The ability for sales and customer service teams to provide genuine human empathy to problems that human customers will appreciate, and the emotional intelligence skill difference of a sales team will continue to be the key differentiator to capturing and keeping market share
His words are powerful food for thought. If sales reps are able to appreciate and respond more aptly to how people prefer to receive information and conduct conversations, their connections will undoubtedly be better. In our experience, the common language of colour energies can result in more meaningful engagements, stronger customer relationships and better sales results.
The impact of Insights Discovery on our sales development function was profound. It gave us an effective language that we could integrate into our client relationships to understand them better.
Suddenly we were able to walk into a room and immediately get a feel for the client’s leading colour energy, and adapt how we approached the meeting to suit their communication style.
It was a game changer that spilled out into our ability to develop new business, and to have more meaningful conversations with clients that fed into the quality of the creative work we produced.
Chris McGillan, Strategy Director, Nzime (the digital creative agency)
We take sales success to the next level by making it personal. By focusing on the value of the relationship and the human connection behind the sale, we give salespeople the tools they need to connect with their customers through the language of Insights Discovery. Continue learning about Discovering Sales Effectiveness here