Why Determine Your Sales Personality Type
As a salesperson, it’s crucial to understand your sales personality.
Knowing your strengths and weaknesses can help you tailor your sales approach to different types of customers and situations.
For example, if you can connect with others, focus on building rapport and establishing a personal connection with potential customers.
Or, if you’re more analytical and detail-oriented, provide data and statistics to support the value of your product or service.
Identifying areas where you need to improve, such as persistence or resilience, can help you become more effective.
By understanding your sales personality, you can improve your performance, build stronger customer relationships, and achieve greater success in your career.
With that said, let’s explore ten sales personality types to help you find yours:
10 Sales Personality Types: What Type of Salesperson Are You?
Discover the type of sales personality you have below!
1. Order Taker
Order takers don’t persuade customers to buy products, upsell or cross-sell; instead, they book customer orders and pass information to the relevant department. These systematic salespeople are accurate and always have up-to-date information about when an order has been booked and when it will be supplied.
While easy to contact, good at answering questions, and readily accessible to help anyone, the laidback order-taker sales personality likes to play the waiting game and is never assertive.
If you’re the order-taker sales rep, you’ll know that reliability is your core strength. Still, you prefer to wait too long for the right customer to come along – usually, someone who knows what they want in the transactional phase. While looking for new business may not be your best quality, you’re a trustworthy fit for familiar customers ready to buy.
2. Studious
If you have a studious sales personality, it makes sense that you’re here. You’re a lifelong learner and believe sales is a science, not just an art and most likely already have a few sales theories waiting to be made into a book. However, studious sales reps still believe they’re a work in progress, which spurs you always to be a better salesperson.
As a result, your product knowledge is immaculate (obviously), and because you’re data-driven- a master of your CRM.
These sales skills and qualities mean that you can answer prospect objections and questions in record time while ensuring they get all the valuable information they need.
3. Script Reader
Script readers rely on using the same sales phone script, sales and elevator pitch for every potential customer.
While this provides customers with a reliable, comfortable and uniform brand experience, it means missing out on prime opportunities to cross or upsell.
Overall, script reader salespeople are strongly suited to businesses where the brand is a large piece of the sale. However, there’s always room to customise actions and words for each interaction to make the most of their time with customers.
4. Conversationalist
The conversationalist salesperson’s strength is creating a welcoming, warm, and relatable first impression.
Conversationalists instantly put prospects at ease by prioritising their needs and want, meaning most of their customers are often repeat or returning purchasers.
The only real downside to this type of sales rep is their inability to close sales, preferring not to be seen as “pushy” or overbearing.
The good news is that these types of salespeople are an excellent match for luxury retail environments where customers mostly pay for the sales experience.
5. Opener
Openers are masters of connecting with prospects, so much so that they have tons of leads ready for the pipeline.
This type of salesperson focuses on reaching out to prospects and is most energetic when making cold calls, sending emails and delivering sales meetings or presentations. The downfall of opener salespeople is that they don’t always remember to follow up with the client more than once and in different ways.
As a result, they often lose the sale because they can’t keep the customer thinking of them after the initial impression.
6. Empath
Empaths are the most insightful type of sales personality. Their main strength is tuning into the lead’s needs and wants quickly by noting subtle social cues while listening to everything they say.
As a result, they’re successful persuaders who seamlessly tap into different buying motivations and make it their mission to connect prospects with products that benefit them greatly.
Overall, empath salespeople don’t just care about making the sale; they want to make customers’ lives easier – and will always give exceptional value to every sale they make.
7. Closers
Closer salespeople have goal-orientated, driven and bold sales personalities and can always ask for the sale without being pushy. They have a magnetic enthusiasm that helps them reach new customers and close deals quickly when they listen intently to their needs, challenges and wants.
The pitfall for closers is their need to consistently make sales, which means they often lose focus on small but trusted sales relationships.
8. Chasers
Chasers are the master of the follow-up sales cadence. This type of salesperson is relentless by nature and will contact prospects until they get the desired result. However, chasers can often overlook the need to listen to customers and often lose out on a sale because they didn’t balance the desire to close the deal with their needs and preferences.
9. Networker
Networkers are the life and soul of the party as they seek out situations to meet new people.
Networking salespeople are at their strongest when making planned or unexpected connections; they welcome every opportunity to meet new clients and start new relationships with others. The only downfall of the networker is when they neglect follow-up messaging to turn connections into sales because they’re too busy nurturing trusted relationships.
10. Educator
The Educator salesperson prioritizes the product as the focus of the sales process by guiding conversations with either a skilled hands-on demonstration or a thorough explanation that best suits the need of customers.
These types of salespeople have a fluid ability to condense complex products down for consumers and instil confidence in their purchases. You’ll often find this type of salesperson in tech or SaaS sales because of their ability to explain complex products and core people skills needed to build rapport and trust, a winning combination.
