Having the Heart of a Lion, Face of a Lamb inside your Service Company

How would you describe the way that your service technicians approach a sale?  Would you say that they have a very aggressive approach or a gentle approach?  The interesting thing is that most service technicians are either one of the extremes; they are overly aggressive and offend the customer or they are too meek in spirit and walk away without the service.  It’s a basic challenge that every technician must face.  “How do I have the heart of a lion and still have the face of a lamb?”

Today we are going to outline three keys that will help your technicians recognize this basic challenge and confront it successfully:

Key 1: Know your Personality Type

There are four basic personality types:  analytical, expressive, driver, and amiable.  Since we’re talking about technicians, we are going to focus on the most common technician personality types; which are the amiable and driver categories.  The first personality type is the character of the amiable person.  This person is very gentle in spirit.  They don’t do well with confrontation.  They’re very concerned about the opinions of others and they would never push anybody into doing anything uncomfortable.  These are obviously characteristics that we would not find at all offensive.  This also happens to be many of the same characteristics that the average service technician possesses.  While that’s not a bad thing, it can pose some challenges when it comes to closing the sale.  Think of this person as the gentle lamb.

The opposite of the gentle lamb is the aggressive lion.  The lion is also known as the driver personality.  There are a couple things that distinguish the driver from the amiable.  First of all, drivers are very assertive and they know what they want.  This means that they go for the sale and they can sometimes seem a little too pushy.  If this person takes it to extreme they may even offend the client.  Neither of these personality types are bad in their nature, it’s just that each one has distinct challenges as well as benefits.  Your job as a service technician, sales technician, or company team leader is to know how to best address your own personality type and the personality type of your client.  By learning these skills it will make interaction more productive and more comfortable for both parties.

Key 2:  Find the Power in your Personality Type

The highest producing service and sales people that I have ever met possess strong characteristics of both the driver as well as the amiable personality.  The reason that these people are so successful is that they know how to be empathetic and yet they know how to be assertive when it comes to closing.  If you find yourself naturally being more of a lion, then you know the power of the assertive beast inside you.  But you also know that this lion can get you in a lot of trouble.  If you find yourself to be more like the lamb, then you know the power of the relationship that you can build with your client.  But you also know that you can find yourself caving in when you really should have closed the sale.  So ultimately the key to success is creating a balance between having the strong heart of a lion and possessing the gentle face of a lamb.  To attain and maintain this balance means that you have to work at understanding the differences and react in the appropriate manner at the appropriate time.  When you do this, you will find great power as you “act like a lamb, and sell like a lion.” – Tom Hopkins.

Key 3: Know your Client’s Personality Type

Your client is also going to fall into one of the four major personality types, with a slight leaning to several of the other personality types.  If you get to know your client’s personality type, you’re going to discover the way in which they like to be served.  This makes for the perfect service excellence experience.  Here are a few tips:

-The driver personality loves to know that they are in control.  It’s important to let them know they have the power.  Don’t let their need for control offend you; it is what is built into their nature.  It is important to learn how to work with drivers because they are people that will want to do business with you and tend to have the means to do business with you.

-The amiable personality type hates conflict.  They would rather give you an excuse than tell you their real reason for not buying today.  Learn how to build a relationship that will allow them to feel comfortable telling you the reasons for not going ahead.  After building this relationship, furthering the sales presentation and attaining a close will be a more simplistic process.

-The analytical person loves the facts and figures.  You will invest a lot of time on going over the details and crunching the numbers.  Be familiar with your product and services.  Know how to work the numbers because you will then be more capable of gaining this customer’s respect and successfully prove the value of your company and product.

-The expressive person loves to have fun.  You’re going to need a sense of humor to work with this person.  Have fun as you work with the expressive, but keep in mind they have a tendency to get distracted.  You’ll need to make sure that you document and cover your bases in writing when you’re working with the expressive.

Learning to work with the different personality types is vitally important to increases sales, leads, and retention inside your independent contracting company.  Exploring these four main personality types and how to successfully work with each type is one of the most popular training sessions that we offer here at Service Excellence Training.  Here at Service Excellence Training, we turn learning into earning!

-Resource curated by Whitney Stewart of Service Excellence Training.