Typing People You Haven\’t Met

This is \”Customer Secret #8\” – Playing the Percentages

The reason to type a prospect’s personality temperament, is because it leads directly to why they buy, or why they don’t. That’s useful right?

This puts some importance on being able to type other people. If you get good at it, you have a huge advantage wherever and whenever you find yourself needing to persuade others.

What is the process of typing? I typically use a 5 step process that can be gone through in just a few seconds. The first step is today’s customer secret.

There are four personality temperaments, but the percentage of the population in each temperament is not equal. 

When other people talk about the four personality temperaments, such as the D.I.S.C. system, they leave the impression that each temperament contains an equal number of people. In other words, 25% in each of the categories. You’ve seen how they draw the four temperaments, in a grid chart that has four equal sections.

However, this is not the case. Two of the categories contain more than 75% of the population, and the other two contain only about 12% each.

Here is the approximate breakdown by temperament category:

• Warriors – 38%
• Logisticals – 38%
• Strategists – 12%
• Morale Officers – 12%

Incidentally, if you want to cross reference my names for the personality temperaments to other systems like D.I.S.C. here they are:

• D – Logisticals
• I – Warriors
• S – Morale Officers
• C – Strategists

Why is this secret important? Because it makes the process of typing people a lot easier because you have an excellent starting point.

If you have to purely “guess” someones personality type, you’d start by guessing your prospect is either in the Warrior or Logistical personality temperaments. The odds are highly in your favor if you do so.

Don’t automatically assume you’re starting from a blank slate, and have no information at your disposal. This is a huge indicator, because it helps you get off with a good first guess. Once you do make that first guess, then the next part is to start verifying that guess. You are already quickly moving down the checklist items without getting bogged down by trying to figure out which cognitive function a person is trying to display. 

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About the author:

Tim Van Milligan is an expert in using personality theory in persuasion and sales. He’s written several books including:   “Selling By Personality Type: The Values Fears and Anger Triggers that Cause People to Buy”, “Emotional Copywriting Revealed,” and “Selling Yourself: Advanced Strategies for Landing Your Dream Job.” He makes his living as a rocket scientist and entrepreneur, and on the side teaches other sales people a step-by-step approach on how to change the way they persuade by really understanding customers with the principles of personality.