5 sales insights
TO take your sales tactics
to the next level

There are introverts, extroverts, expressive leaders, analytical thinker - but what is the best personality style in sales?

The answer is a mixture of them all: ambivert. Ambivert? Exactly! Ambivert is the one who has a balance of extroverted and introverted features in their personality. And guess what? The best salespeople are ambiverts.

A study compared salesman earnings ($) per hour, grouped by personality types. The chart below shows: the clear winner is the ambivert!

Two recent HBR studies of sales professionals found that top performers are less social and chatty than below-average ones and that the most sociable salespeople are often the poorest performers of all. Ambiverts are the best salespeople, they know when to push and when to hold back, when to speak up and when to shut up.

Analyse for yourself which personality type you are and depending on the result pay attention to what you should adjust: be a little more outgoing or talk a little less - or if you are an ambivert, just stay the way you are.

Persuasion comes from understanding. And how do you make people understand better what exactly you want to tell them?

It's simple: with analogies and metaphors!

Analogies and metaphors work as logical arguments and are helpful to transfer an important message. They connect something unfamiliar with a familiar framework – leading people to understand a product and its value better and to know what to expect.

With technical and lengthy descriptions you tend to lose a person's attention. However, if you use an easily understandable and familiar comparison, people will be more likely to listen and to understand what exactly you want to tell them. For example: "It works as easy and fast as flipping a switch!", "Our solution is a wheel to your car", "We will transform your business from a caterpillar into a butterfly".

Do you sometimes find yourself in a situation where your prospects don't take the next step in your sales process? They don't buy something or simply don't request more information? How do you actually encourage someone to act?

It might be easier than you thought – ask for action, not permission!

Just asking for permission won't influence people to act on your content. Instead, you should ask them for what exactly you want.

Asking for action:

A picture's worth a thousand words – almost literally.

Did you know that visual data is being processed significantly faster and remembered easier than words? You should use this fact for your advantage: explain your content with visuals!

We all know that tiring feeling when we sit through a powerpoint presentation that's loaded with text. The information presented is usually hard to understand and almost impossible to remember. And you are not alone with this: only 10% of people remember what they heard, 20% what they read and 80% remember what they saw and did.

This shows us: visuals can help! Not only processes our brain visual information more effectively than text, but they are also more persuasive and easier to remember. This is an efficient way to easily convey information to your customer and convince them of what you want to tell.