It’s a truism that we vote for people, not policies – and similarly, we buy from people, not products. Do your salespeople understand this insight and know how to apply it to their selling strategy? Do your hiring managers know how to look for this in recruitment?

Why Personality Matters

What many of us have long suspected has been confirmed by studies; likeable, approachable salespeople tend to be more successful. Why? The answer is likely a combination of factors, , but most importantly, likeable salespeople are usually better at understanding their customers, and that inspires trust and loyalty.

In many ways, that makes sense. Someone who listens to us, asks intelligent questions and who takes the time to get to know our priorities and values is usually better equipped to make relevant and trustworthy recommendations for our needs. In sales – a people business if ever there was one – that kind of personal insight usually translates into more frequent and/or larger sales, and increased loyalty from customers who reward the salespeople that take the time to understand their perspective.

The Best Salespeople Have Antennae

That’s why it’s crucial for your salespeople to build relationships with clients and potential clients as part of their sales process. They need to get to know them and their priorities in order to appropriately tailor their pitch and product recommendations to satisfy and anticipate your customers’ concerns.

To do so, salespeople need what I like to call “antennae” – the emotional intelligence to very quickly tune into a client’s personality and mood. It’s also the capacity to walk into a room and instantly read the mood and relationships such that you know whom to target in your approach, and how best to interact with them.

Salespeople Need a Throttle

In addition to an acute sense of how to read a room, salespeople also need to know when to push and when to hold back in meetings with clients. They need to be sensitive to the mood music and temperature of a situation to know when they can take the initiative to make a bold statement, and when they should go along with the tone that the client is setting. Understanding the customer’s personality isn’t enough. In other words; salespeople also need to know how best to respond in a given interaction, and be confident and assertive enough to pull it off.

Those two assets – the antennae and the throttle– are qualities that you will find as very acute capabilities within the most successful salespeople. For the most part, they’re innate; they just have them. They’re also both abilities that, while teachable, are often much easier to find than to foster. It’s thus critical for hiring managers to be able to identify these traits in candidates, right at the start, in order to build a sales team that understands the critical importance of understanding your customers.

For those not gifted by nature, these are skills that can be honed, developed, enhanced and perfected with the right coaching and mentorship. Look for a sales coach with a genuine interest in people, employing personality testing or incorporating elements of psychology into their training; they’ll provide you with the tools to better read, gauge and respond – in other words, to sell – to your clients.