I was always taught that a salesman needs to have the knowledge to identify the DISC profile of the person they are speaking with. It is helpful to know if a person a more dominance, influencer, compliance, or steadiness. Rather than you trying to analyze the buyer to discover their hidden disc metric and get caught up in all that time waster. I believe that there is an easier way to break down buyers that comes out in their behaviors even more quickly when they ask questions.
In my experience there are three types of buyers. Each is equally important especially when selling to a corporation where decisions are made in collaboration with each department. The first type of buyer are the specialists who are more interested in specifications and how the product or company meets that need. They are very detail oriented and can be very technical like engineers and department managers.
The second kind of buyer are the users. The user buyers are those that will be operating the product. They are usually dental hygienists, nurses, and mechanics. These are the people that are really key people to get engaged as they are the ones using the products all the time. They are the most important people to engage to understand how the competition is doing. They can tell you what they like and don’t like with application. Keep them in mind when working through the selling process.
The third kind of buyer is the main decision maker. They are impacted by the return on investment. They take the 10,000 feet view of everything and want to make sure they are profitable. The main decision maker will ask for input from the other two buyers before they make their final decision. This buyer is the last person to focus on as the other two buyers will have the main decision maker’s trust. This is the case for most organizations today.
For owner operators and end users the they will likely fall into all of these three buyer styles as they need to be. Some people are very technically oriented and use the product themselves day in and day out. They also are the main decision maker that is thinking about how this investment will impact them. How will they make money on this purchase and how soon they will see success is their main questions for entertaining your presence.
I am working on a small diagram that will help to understand these three types of buyers so that those of you that are visual people will be able to see what I am talking about. It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I hope to have that out to everyone before next week’s blog post.
As always if you have questions, want to dig deeper, or if you would like to ask about other topics feel free to reach out to me at info@kevinsidebottom.com
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
Sales and Leadership Enterprises