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The Art of Adaptation

Written by: John Brennan

Article Overview: Your selling style is your habitual, non-verbal communication with customers, determined by your personality and your sales experiences. Your customer’s buying style is his or her habitual, non-verbal communication with sales people, similarly determined by his or her personality and buying experiences. Adapting to customer buying styles is a technique in selling which calls for you to anticipate and adapt your selling style to your customer’s buying style in order to maximize sales effectiveness.

The Art of Adaptation

Adapting to customer buying styles is a practice that you should embed in all your sales practices. Whether opening the call or closing the deal, how you interact with the customer on the non-verbal social style level influences the outcome. It applies to all stages of the sales process; converting suspects to prospects, prospects to customers, customers to friends, and friends to advocates.

Adapt your message to the business viewpoints of buyers, end-users, technical experts and senior managers. You must be able to see the business world through the eyes of each of these functions, and respond with the appropriate information and sales techniques. But that is not all; you must also be able to adapt to the personality, buying preferences, cultural nuances and emotional needs of each of the individuals playing the functional roles. By making this connection with the customer, you enhance your chances of winning the business.

The purpose of developing this practice is to build a trusting relationship with your customer, which is necessary to winning the business. When customers trust you, they readily surrender to you the critical information you need to win their business. When they trust you, they share with you their pain. And when you understand their pain, you can create a solution to ease it. Adapting to the customer’s way of buying also reduces the likelihood of misunderstandings that often derail a sales effort.

Buyers may reject your sales approach if they perceive you as too aggressive, or not aggressive enough; if you get bogged down in details, or if you don’t pay enough attention to detail; if you are too passionate, or if you are not passionate enough; if you are too rigid, or if you are too loose. Understand their buying styles and adapt to them. Do not ignore the cues. Monitor your responses to your customer and adjust them accordingly.

If you can successfully master the art of adaptation, you will have a competitive edge in any sales situations. There is no perfect, charismatic style that wins the customer over. There are just adaptive salespeople.

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Article Tags: adaptation, nonverbal communication, personality, sales effectiveness



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