How to Profit From Your Customers' Personality Traits

By Intronis Guest Blog 1

No matter what kind of prospect they are, your potential clients will be able to spot a sales pitch a mile away. So surprise them by doing more listening than talking. VARs, MSPs and IT service providers must invest time in talking to their prospects as if they were actual people, and not just a hand that can writes a check. The secret to success: Determine your prospects’ personality type, and tailor your message to their values. Here’s how.

Once you figure out what your prospect’s values, you can you can talk to them using their language. You’ll go miles further by walking in their shoes rather than trying to get them to stand in yours. Here are some of the most common prospect personality types:

The Old Schooler

They have what they want and they’re sticking to it. No need to hear about other options—what they have is just fine, thank you. Often the Old Schooler takes a rigid line, and he’ll break before he bends.

This type client may be uncomfortable with complicated technology. In the online backup and recovery space, sometimes these are the prospects who think tape backup works just fine. They have the attitude that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The problem is they won’t know that something is broken until it breaks.

So don’t get into the technical specifics—sell your services as a business advantage. Be sure that you leverage the value of proactive management: less downtime, regular updates and patches, and problems solved before the business owner even realizes there is one.

Position your incentive as keeping your clients’ businesses up and running with as little interruption as possible. And make sure that transition is fast and relatively painless.

The Do-IT-Yourselfer

Maybe the DIY-er already has in-house IT staff. May the DIY-er is the in-house IT staff. Either way, position your services as a complement to their work—not competition. You can provide a lot of value-added benefits (e.g., offsite storage with data encryption) that will free up their time to concentrate of strategic objectives.

Leave the routine maintenance to you and let them concentrate on business building activities and other high-value projects.

The Penny Pincher

The Penny Pincher doesn’t want to spend money on something she doesn’t see as a problem. Make sure you make the case that not implementing your solutions is significantly more expensive than not—both in terms of lost revenue and lost social capital.

It’s infinitely more expensive to fix an IT problem than to prevent one from happening. Plus, if you’re offering a recurring monthly fee, the Penny Pincher will be able to plan for those regular small expenses.

What are some of the other prospect personality types you’ve encountered?

Sam Gutmann is the president and CEO of Intronis. Find information about Intronis’ local backup here. Guest blogs such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship program. Read all of Gutmann’s guest blogs here.