Now, if the act of accepting social contracts is driven by emotions, and if we imagine emotions as buttons, then how would we know which button to push?
Experienced sales people possess one vital skill, the ability to size-up a prospective client. This simply means perceiving the personality of the prospect. This is critical because the sales presentation will depend on the sales person's perception of the prospect.
A sales person has many tricks in his tool box that could help him size-up a prospect like survey forms, reading body language, small talk, humor, and others. However, the one tool that I am going to discuss here is familiarity of personality types.
Psychologists refer to this as the
MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). While Psychologists study this framework for categorizing personalities in its true form, sales people are made aware of this framework in a watered-down version designed for laymen.
The watered down version indicates that there are four major personality types:
Dominant DriverThese people are highly opinionated and very demonstrative of their feelings. They think highly of themselves and they like giving orders. They like to be in control and they like making decisions. Usually impatient and demanding, they do not like their ideas to be challenged and they will vigorously argue with anyone who does. They tend to be brash and unmindful if they hurt the feelings of the people around them. They get furious just as easily as they forgive and forget quarrels. They are quick to speak their mind and they act on impulse even if they tend to regret their actions later. They value family relationships.
ResearcherThese people are the detail oriented type and they like to see proof to believe. They do not believe things very easily and they will question and study the source of the information carefully. They are very cautious, they delay or take time as far as decision making, and they do not like to be rushed. These people value recognition for their hard work and they will take any form of reprimand seriously and personally. They are not very sociable and they often keep few friends. These people are not demonstrative of their feelings very much and they find people who are emotional as unstable.
SociableThese are the people who like to be lavished with attention. They like being the center of the conversation or even the party. They love talking about themselves and what they have experienced. They are fond of playing with ideas and are quite creative although they tend to be short on details. They are poor at work that is repetitive and requires much attention and they prefer tasks that are exciting or creative in nature. These people like trying out new things and are driven by being the first and the best in anything they fancy. Needless to say, they enjoy mingling with a lot of people.
CaringThese people are very nurturing. They tend to find happiness and fulfillment in helping others. They could easily give grieving people a shoulder to cry on. They like pleasant surprises. They easily get disappointed and are quite timid. They would also be the last to try something new. They prefer things that are tried and tested and they would rather work with things that they are familiar with. They are willing to sacrifice if it means helping others. They also want emotional reassurance.
Considering the description above we could already think of certain occupations that would best fit people with these personalities. However, to make things more interesting there are the cross-over personalities.
These cross-over personalities are mixtures of these four major ones. Although we could all be any of these personalities at one point or the other it is understood that it is possible to have personalities that are, say, predominantly sociable but partly caring; predominantly dominant driver and partly researcher; and so on.
This is why the MBTI framework is consisted of 16 personalities in all. The link below will provide a more clinical description of the 16 personalities:
http://www.personalitypage.com/high-level.htmlNext, we will discuss how the personality type relate to the emotional drives.