The Extended DISC model is easily applied to sales due to its simplicity and accuracy. Using Extended DISC theory in sales allows sales professionals to quickly and easily identify customer styles and adapt the sales pitch to their behavioural style. Imagine knowing exactly how to communicate with your prospect to achieve a positive response, or understanding how to motivate your prospect towards a sale. Using DISC theory, we can pick up on cues to help tailor our approach and close the sale.
Behavioural Cues
People prefer to buy from people they trust or who behave like them. For this reason, influencing and selling skills are important to the sales process. Extended DISC helps us to better understand our preferred way to interact and how to flex our behavioural styles to better approach our customers. For example D Styles are the most assertive style, they are strong-willed and direct. Whereas S Styles are the most calm, they are careful and patient. Being able to pick up on these cues helps us to build rapport, quickly understand and communicate with our clients. Using these cues we can also communicate with the appropriate tone, speed and rhythm based on the person we are interacting with. Small details such as tone or word choice ensure trust and rapport between sales professionals and prospects.
Communicating with the Styles
It is essential that we know how to speed read people to understand what motivates the prospects buying decisions. Speed reading our prospect is one thing, but adjusting our own styles to influence others is even more important. The first step to effectively flex our behavioural style to suit each individual customer is to understand our own behavioural style. Understanding how we naturally prefer to communicate allows us to identify our prospects dominant behavioural style and adapt our own to match that person. For example, if you are an S Style person selling to a D Style Customer, you may need to speed up and stay focused on the task and facts rather than people and details.
When communicating with the D styles, ensure your body language is bold and eye contact direct. To communicate with I styles, ensure your body language and voice emit positive energy. Approach S styles in a warm and relaxed way, with a soft tone of voice. When communicating with C styles, make your body language reserved and sit through the silences while they think.
Motivate Buying Decisions of Prospects
Most salespeople focus on selling their products or services through the sharing of information and identifying potential pain points and benefits. These are great techniques to employ in the sales process. However, one area is often overlooked and that is how the potential customer makes their buying decisions. This is getting down to the nitty gritty and the psychology of sales behaviours. If you want to take your sales skills to the next level, you do need to get familiar with Extended DISC methodology and the why or how of it all. We often believe prospects make their buying decisions the same way we do, however, this is simply not the case. Something to keep in mind is how you can make the decision making process easier for your prospect. Keep them interested and they will be motivated to ask questions, these are buying signals.
With an understanding of DISC theory we can build strategies to motivate our prospects to make buying decisions. For example, D styles prefer direct and short interactions. If you’re a D style, you probably never reached this point in the article. The first few lines were the make or break. On the other hand C styles need a lot of supporting information, evidence and statistics. If you are C style you’ve read this article a couple of times and have completed your own research to ensure what we have written is true! (p.s. C styles, check out our validation study!).
The Extended DISC Model is an invaluable tool to help improve communication with prospects and customers. Knowledge of the DISC styles helps us to understand how to communicate in the most efficient and effective way possible, to a range of different people. These skills can be used at any, or every, stage of the selling process; lead generation, first contact, closing and support. Maximise on Extended DISC theory to enhance your chance at closing the sale!
Get started with Workplace Assessments
