With the sales industry being faster than ever before, if you want to keep up and achieve the best results possible, you’ve got to be able to recognize your strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the different sales personality types can help you make the most of your unique traits.
By considering your overall sales personality traits, you can learn how to use or adapt your approach to better connect with your prospects and customers.
Discover 10 types of salespeople below to find what type of salesperson you are! (Alongside some helpful tips for improving your approach and skills)
Key Takeaways: What You’ll Learn
- Why your sales personality matters. Understand how identifying your natural traits can help you tailor your approach, build better rapport, and close more deals.
- The 10 distinct sales personality types. Explore profiles ranging from the “Order Taker” and “Script Reader” to the “Closer” and “Educator” to see where you fit in.
- Strengths and weaknesses of each style. Learn which types excel at networking but fail at follow-up (like the “Networker”), and which are great at data but struggle with persuasion (like the “Order Taker”).
- The definition of a “Great Salesperson.” Discover the common denominator among top performers: a blend of enthusiasm, resilience, and deep empathy, regardless of their personality type.
- 6 actionable tips to improve immediately. Get practical advice on how to level up your skills, from active listening techniques to building resilience against rejection.
What are Sales Personalities?
Sales personalities refer to the combination of traits, characteristics, and behaviors that are common among successful salespeople.
While not every successful salesperson will possess the same traits equally, by developing these traits and building their skills over time, salespeople can improve their performance and achieve greater career success.
For example, the personality type you could fit into are the following:
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 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.
You’ll know that reliability is your core strength if you’re the order-taker sales rep. 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 a new business may not be your best quality, you’re a trustworthy fit for familiar customers who are 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. You 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 a data-driven 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, uniform brand experience, it means missing out on prime opportunities to cross-sell or upsell.
Overall, script reader salespeople are strongly suited to businesses where the brand is a large sales piece. However, there’s always room to customize actions and words for each interaction to maximize 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 prioritizing their needs and wants, 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 and high-touch sales 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.
They know that the secret to a memorable pitch isn’t just the facts but the story that wraps around them. The downfall of opener salespeople is that they don’t always remember to follow up with the client repeatedly and in different ways.
As a result, they often lose sales 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.
They’re natural team players who collaborate well with other departments to ensure customer satisfaction.
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-oriented, driven, and bold sales personalities and can always ask for a 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 pain points, needs, 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 masters 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.
Building relationships comes naturally to them, and they excel at creating genuine connections that last beyond the initial sale.
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 networkers is when they neglect follow-up messaging to turn connections into sales because they’re too busy focusing on relationship building.
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 customers’ needs.
These types of salespeople have a fluid ability to condense complex products down for consumers and instill 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, which is a winning combination.
Final word: What Makes a Great Salesperson?
A great salesperson does more than pitch solutions. They’re enthusiastic, resilient, and deeply empathetic about their prospects’ problems and issues. More so, they have a genuine passion for taking the time to understand, identify, and explain customers’ needs, alongside boasting expert product knowledge that never fails to satisfy.
Overall, great salespeople have mastered how to be intuitive and consistent. Discover more characteristics that make all great salespeople below:
Tips to Improve Your Sales Approach & Skills
If you’re not quite where you want to be, discover several tips to improve your sales skills, regardless of your sales personality type below:
Believe in What You Sell
More so, know everything you can about the product you sell. You’ll always make more compelling sales when you believe in what you’re selling and genuinely like the product. That’s because becoming a product expert will simplify and shorten the buying process for your customers.
Read Sales books
Maybe it’s time to mix things up with some good old-fashioned reading to learn new skills. Considering Mark Cuban states that he spends three hours reading daily, it can’t hurt to try! Check out our top 10 recommended best sales books on selling that will help you fine-tune your sales skills in no time.
Watch Sales Training Videos
The reality is the internet is full of free sales training videos suggesting that they’re the best, but when you’re upskilling, there isn’t any time (or money) to lose on vague and outdated videos.
That’s why we’ve compiled a selection of expert free online sales training videos we’re sure will help you change how you sell and ultimately help you sell like a pro. Check it out: Learn To Sell Like A Pro: 19 Best FREE Online Sales Training Videos
Listen to Sales Podcasts
We know you’re always busy, making exploring new sales skills or strategies tricky. The answer to learning quickly on the go is sales podcasts. Don’t waste time scouring the web for hours, though; pick one of the best sales podcasts from this article and get started – it’s that easy!
Listen to the Customer
If you want your potential customers to pay attention to what you say, you have to be willing to listen to them first. That doesn’t mean just giving your prospect time to speak, but actively listening to what they have to say.
By dialing back your presence, you allow the prospect to speak and gain a unique insight into their problem, giving you a better chance at pitching the solution and ultimately making that deal. It also helps build initial rapport and proves to the customer that you value what they have to say.
Be Resilient and Persistent
There is no doubt about it; working in sales is full of rejections. That’s why you need to know how to avoid becoming discouraged when you hear the word “No” repeatedly. Instead, you must be persistent and find other ways to get the desired result.
