Different selling styles are triggered by different types of coaching measures. Sales competitions increase the performance of those with a competitive selling style but lower the motivation of relationship-oriented salespeople. In his article, Christer B Jansson maps the different sales styles and how they work.
Different selling styles are triggered by different types of coaching measures. Sales competitions, for example, increase the performance of salespeople with a competitive selling style, while lowering the motivation of those with a relationship-oriented selling style.
And if, for example, you reorganize, it is those with a service-oriented sales style who have the biggest worries and feel the worst.
If you want to build a market quickly, you need salespeople with a competitive sales style, but if you can instead imagine much slower growth but long customer relationships, choose salespeople who are relationship-oriented in their sales style.
The sales style determines how you will coach and what sales training is needed
The importance of knowing how you as a manager should act to best support your salespeople is to understand how they are trained to sell.
Another big reason for you as a sales manager to keep track of your salespeople’s selling styles is to see what kind of sales training they need. If they already master a sales style very well why spend more money on something they already know? Better than to sell them in what they can’t do!
A third reason is if your salespeople have to process a new target group that has a different buying style than current customers, where there is a risk that they may lose track of the entire task. Not because they are bad salespeople but because they don’t have the right training to sell to this target group.
A fourth reason is to be able to help your salespeople make the best use of their selling style, even if the customer they meet has a buying style that the salesperson cannot currently match. Selling and buying styles work in such a way that if you sell on channel 1 and the customer buys via channel 4, it doesn’t help no matter how good you are at channel 1. You also need to master channel 4 to achieve that.
There are only benefits in knowing your salespeople’s selling styles and after studying more than 300,000 salespeople how they sell, we have found six different ways to sell. They overlap to some extent. and they match the corresponding six buying styles that customers use.
The six selling styles
Need-oriented selling style
This selling style focuses on mapping existing customer needs that can be met with the current product or service, rather than creating a need in
the customer.
Relationship-oriented selling style
This selling style is based on creating a relationship characterized by trust and mutual concern.
Competitive selling style
This selling style is focused on persuasion and targeted personal influence.
Image-oriented sales style
This sales behavior consists of “packaging and selling” a professional self-image.
Product-oriented selling style
This selling style focuses on describing, sketching, explaining and detailing
the product’s features and benefits.
Service-oriented selling style
This selling style emphasizes personal qualities, that commitments must be fulfilled, that customers’ expectations must be met or exceeded, and above all; that promises must be kept.
As a sales manager, you have everything to gain from mapping your salespeople’s selling styles with, for example, the SSPA test, which measures how a salesperson is trained to sell. Do you know how your salespeople sell so you know how to coach them and how your salespeople are compatible with your customers’ buying styles!
This article was written by Christer B. Jansson and was originally published on the Sales Effect portal.
