The 48 personality types

Certainly, our personality traits impact our approach to our job, our willingness to learn new skills and our ability to build successful relationships. But just how important are those traits as predictors of sales success?

Okay, so gone are the days when we believed every sales person was suited to any sales role. In fact, we now know that very few ‘all-rounder’ sales people actually exist. However, taking it a big step further, would it surprise you to hear there are a (total of) are 48 sales personality types? 

How do psychometric assessments help navigate the many sales personalities?

The key characteristics of your team’s profile traits can impact their approach in carrying out given tasks, and their willingness to learn new skills and build successful relationships. 

Further more, utilising sales specific psychometric assessments and the 48 personality profiles enable managers to play to their sales team’s individual strengths and make the most of their unique potential. By identifying strengths, managers can steer team members towards the use of their skills and understand the difficulties they might have in certain areas. Better still, utilising these tools at the hiring stage can save a lot of time and energy later down the line, by ensuring right skillset, right fit. In short, understanding a current or potential team member’s natural sales style is essential to avoid them working in a way that is totally incompatible with their personality.

Why understanding your team’s driving factors matter

The key driving factors of your team is important to understand too. As an example some profiles are motivated by competition and others by stability. There’s the sales people whose key incentive is working in an autonomous environment, and those that thrive on being managed and praised; The proactive and goal-oriented, those who have a natural determination to ‘hard’–close a sale, or the personalities who offer an innate natural ability to build rapport and relationships.

The variety of sales role opportunities also needs to be taken into consideration when looking at profiles. The trick is to match profiles and then fit the right person to the right position and environment. For example, as sales people, there are New Business Generators, Closing Professionals, Customer Relationship Managers, Key Account Managers, Technical Support Sales Professionals, Specialists such as IFAs (who advise clients, based on the clients’ best interest, to invest in their product offering), Product Specialists, who are also in an advisory role, Sales Coordinators, Sales Administrators, Retail Sales Specialists and NGO Donors etc

To help sales managers navigate the mix of personalities of their team and provide a more targeted strategy for individual improvement, psychometric assessments can be highly effective tools in hiring, developing and indeed retaining sales staff members. A more positive relationship with employees can be formed, based on a heightened degree of understanding and knowledge.

To summarise, there’s no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ in the sales environment. Utilising a sales specific psychometric assessment and gaining a full understanding of which of the 48 profiles your sales team members comprise of – May help the sustained success of your team and your company as a whole