Sales is a competitive industry, and at the negotiating table, your people need every advantage they can get to ensure they capitalize on opportunities, close more deals, and avoid falling short and losing to the competition. By learning how to pitch to different DiSC personality types, your team will be playing chess while your competitors are playing checkers and wondering what they’re doing wrong.
At Consilio, we have helped companies, from bootstrap startups to Fortune 100s, maximize leadership and sales using DiSC insights for years. To understand the value of DiSC assessments, read the next installment of our series to learn how to pitch to DiSC type S.
Pitching to DiSC Personality Types: DiSC Type S
DiSC assessments are vital for sales teams because they can tailor their pitches and communications to each prospect’s specific personality and motivations. Below, we will cover how to pitch to an S-type.
An Overview of DiSC Personality Types
DiSC assessments are behavioral and personality tests that categorize people into four core personality profiles. By identifying DiSC personality types, you can tailor your pitch to appeal to their motivations. The four personality profiles are:
- Dominant: Someone who is a DiSC type D emphasizes accomplishing results and is focused on seeing the big picture. These individuals are confident, blunt, outspoken, and demanding.
- influential: Someone who is a DiSC type i emphasizes influencing and persuading others. These individuals are often enthusiastic, optimistic, open, trusting, and energetic.
- Steady: Someone who is a DiSC type S prioritizes cooperation, sincerity, loyalty, and dependability. These individuals typically have a calm, deliberate disposition and do not like being rushed.
- Conscientious: Someone who is a DiSC type C prioritizes quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency. These individuals value independence, need to know the details, and have a strong aversion to being wrong.
What Sets DiSC Type S Apart?
These DiSC personality types are warm and supportive, seek out connection and trust in their relationships, and value cooperating with others within existing circumstances to accomplish goals. S-profiles are motivated by opportunities to help and feel appreciated.
A DiSC type S emphasizes supporting and working with others and maintaining stability, and they are calm, patient, predictable, and consistent. They fear change, losing stability, offending others, and letting others down, and value loyalty, helping others, and security.
In communication and work, they overuse modesty, passive resistance, and compromise. When influencing others, they leverage accommodation and consistent performance, and in conflict, they tend to listen to others’ perspectives and don’t express their needs.
These individuals typically strive to cultivate harmony and stability, realize team accomplishments, find group acceptance, achieve power through formal positions of authority, and maintain the status quo and control of an environment.
Those who are a DiSC type S have trouble quickly adapting to change or unclear expectations, multitasking, promoting themselves, confronting others, overcoming indecision, and resisting over-accommodation.
How to Pitch to DiSC Type S
When pitching to these DiSC personality types, you want to be polite, personable, and amiable. Do not apply pressure to a DiSC type S.
Express your interest in them, communicate what you expect from them, provide ample clarification, and avoid confrontation. Remember, even during the buying process, S-types seek connection and trust in relationships.
Specifically when using DiSC insights for sales, you will want to ask them questions about themselves, teach them about the product, and establish a more comfortable and secure environment before discussing pricing.
Small talk will go a long way, and establishing a rapport is important. Maintain a personable, warm tone, demonstrate a genuine interest in their needs, questions, and concerns, and communicate sincerely while giving them plenty of time to respond.
Stacey McKibbin, CEO of Consilio, offered more insights into how you can use DiSC assessments to pitch to S-profiles.
“When you recognize some high Steady traits, focus on commitment and predictability. Detail how they can achieve more certainty and stability with your offering, break down individual parts of your offering before getting into the total cost, and provide opportunities for a long-term commitment. If you can, helping them get approval from others will go a long way. Try to ask rhetorical questions like, ‘How important is stability?’ and, ‘Are there others we need to run this by?’ And use phrases like, ‘We both need to be comfortable with this…’ and ‘Let’s go through the options together…’ Having these phrases in your back pocket can be your key to closing the deal.” – Stacey McKibbin, CEO, Consilio
One thing to anticipate is they will likely already have someone working with them on what you are trying to sell, and their loyalty will be strong. Don’t go in saying, ‘We’re better,’ because that implies the past decision was wrong or the relationship is bad.
Instead, take a, ‘What got you here won’t get you there,’ approach. This approach helps them save face over past decisions and they can feel OK when telling the incumbent they are no longer right the fit.
“Essentially, you’re helping them preserve the relationship with the person by saying, ‘It’s not you; our company has just changed, and we’re no longer a good fit.’ That fear of disappointing the other person will keep them on the fence if not outright cause a hard no.” – Stacey McKibbin, CEO, Consilio
Still, avoid focusing on competitors’ pricing and asking them to make too many decisions, and don’t address pricing until they are ready. But don’t underestimate them – enter conversations expecting a tough negotiation.
Sales Training that Includes Pitching to DiSC Personality Types
Sales can feel like a game of inches, and leveraging DiSC insights is essential to giving your team a competitive edge. Success hinges on strategy, and learning about DiSC personality types ensures your team will have a winning strategy at the negotiating table. By understanding what motivates prospects and how to capitalize on their defining characteristics, you will enjoy an advantage over the competition and close more sales.
What would you do with a 23% sales increase? Visit our free DiSC Assessment page to take this test, learn more about how we use DiSC assessments in sales training, and find out
