by Judith McCrackin   You interact with a wide range of people in what is the most important investment decision many will ever make. Insight about the nature of your clients’ and customers’ individual characteristics can help you better understand how they will communicate their interests, how to best work with them, and how to effectively close the deal.

Recognizing an individual’s characteristics is key
From practical experience, you know that not all clients are the same. They have varied interests, perspectives, and styles. Knowing how to identify each client’s unique characteristics can help you quickly establish effective communication–an essential element of the sales process.

This skill can serve you well in ways you may not have considered. Think about how industrial shifts in your area could impact the nature of the real estate market. For example, growth in various sectors of the technology industry in Austin creates greater possibilities of dealing with a more analytically oriented client as well as those who are extremely creative and entrepreneurial. If you can recognize these types of clients, you will work better with them.

Successful agents practice sales as a four-step process: 1) Clearly identifying client needs and interests; 2) Identifying a range of possibilities to satisfy those needs; 3) Determining the possibility that best fits; 4) Closing the deal.

You might recognize this process as a basic problem-solving model. Most clients have a natural degree of interest–and therefore higher involvement–at different steps in the process. Your own individual characteristics will influence how you approach each step.

Different people think and act...well, differently
There are several ways to think about individual characteristics and their influence upon communication and which parts of the sales process might be more interesting and stimulate higher involvement. A self-assessment that helps create meaningful distinctions is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Based on years of research and the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, the MBTI sorts individual characteristics into 16 different types based on preferences on four different scales:

Extroversion or Introversion: whether a person is primarily oriented to the outer world of people, activities, and things or the inner world of ideas, emotions, or impressions.

Sensing or Intuition: whether a person pays more attention to the present, facts, and practical details or the future, big picture, and possibilities.

Thinking or Feeling: whether a person makes decisions according to objective facts and logic or by a sense of personal value and a consideration for unity and cohesiveness.

Judging or Perceiving: whether a person tends to be organized and planful or flexible and spontaneous in the way they carry out their day-to-day activities.

Understanding the preferences of individuals
Each of us has all of these characteristics as a part of our makeup, and most of us have a dominant preference for one of the opposites on each of the MBTI scales. Understanding a client’s preferences as an orientation to their communication style can be extremely helpful in building initial rapport.

Clients who have an extroverted preference will probably be quick to express their needs and interests, be very engaging and easy to get to know, and have a readiness to "think out loud." Conversely, clients with an introverted preference may prefer to reflect on their ideas before communicating with others. Sensitivity during initial meetings with a new client will give you important information about how to appropriately customize your approach to communication.

Because there is usually a high degree of natural rapport among those with similar characteristics and preferences, you will need to pay more attention to adjusting your style when your client has an opposite preference. For example, if you are extremely extroverted, you may tend not to elicit important information gained through listening to a client who is more introverted, and you may make inaccurate assumptions about the client’s needs and interests.

Highly extroverted personality types frequently make the assumption that their introverted counterparts do not know their own interests simply because they are not quick to communicate them. Extroverted types can easily violate both the time and space of their introverted clients. The best tool for working effectively with a highly introverted client is a good set of questions complimented by good listening skills and a willingness to invest a little more time in building an effective relationship.

If you have an introverted preference, you may need to work to extend your natural communication style to meet the needs of a highly extroverted client. You need to be aware that you can sometimes give the appearance you are filtering information or are not willing to completely share your thoughts or be influenced by the thoughts or needs of others, which is not helpful to establishing effective communication with clients.

Those with an introverted preference can lose patience quickly with a highly extroverted client who may process their ideas by thinking out loud, giving the impression that they are not focused or are not clear about their interests and needs. If you have an introverted preference, you may need to work to provide responses that mirror what clients have communicated, so they know that their needs and interests have been recognized.

Schedule it or wing it?
Clients who have a judging preference will tend to be fairly well-organized and want to manage their activities by a defined schedule, preferring to plan things in advance. In contrast, a client who has a perceiving preference may be more flexible and spontaneous. Sensitivity to early cues will help you know how to best manage your own natural tendencies for coordinating the viewing of properties.

If you have an extremely flexible method for showing properties and work by a loosely defined schedule, making numerous spontaneous changes, you may need to be more sensitive to clients who respond more favorably to schedules coordinated well in advance. This type of client may react negatively to last-minute changes in plan.

Set your strategy based on information-processing and decision-making

The middle two preferences in combination, either sensing or intuition and thinking or feeling, are important because they influence how a person processes information and makes decisions. Awareness can help you customize your sales strategies. For example, the client who has a sensing "information processor" will have a natural inclination toward clearly defining their specific needs and interests. Later in the sales process, they will be attentive to information that conveys detailed, factual, practical information about the property.

The client with an intuitive processor may not initially define specific details about their ideal property and will probably be more general in their descriptions of their needs and interests. They may need your help getting more focused and specific. Their interest and involvement will usually peak as you begin to move to the second step of the sales process, which is the time to generate a range of possibilities. As you show them properties, they may be more interested in general information and want to consider and explore a wide range of options.

If you have an intuitive preference, you should pay closer attention to both identifying specific client interests and reinforcing how the specific property meets their near-term practical needs. This is especially true for a client with a dominant sensing information-processing preference, who will probably prefer to focus on concrete details and how their needs match to specific properties.

The client with a thinking orientation to decision-making will tend to be more analytical, using logic and rationality as you help them narrow down options. The client with a feeling orientation may use a values-oriented decision-making framework that gives more consideration to the features of the property that they like and how the purchase might support their personal goals.

If you know your client is analytical with a strong thinking preference, you will increase your effectiveness by realizing the significance of summarizing specific points of logic. Emphasize costs and benefits in helping them narrow options and make decisions. Focus on being concise, well organized, and prepared to provide relevant supporting detail in the closing process.

Two clients, two different styles
At some point, you will certainly face the challenge of dealing with distinctively different personalities who share decision-making about the purchase of a property. Sensitivity to individual characteristics will help you present information in a way that appeals to a range of information-processing and decision-making styles and helps minimize potential deal-breaking stress and conflict. For example, if you know that one of the clients is thinking-dominant and the other is feeling-dominant, you need to summarize both aspects of the property in the closing proposal–the rational reasons that support the purchase as well as the property features that the client values.

They won’t always tell you in words
Nonverbal behaviors are sometimes overlooked in establishing effective communication. For example, introverted personalities often give subtle nonverbal signals that they have tuned out when they are experiencing communication overload with an extroverted person. If you don’t note these important signals, it may make a highly introverted type even more inaccessible.

Those with feeling type preferences may be more sensitive to nonverbal behaviors in general than those with thinking type preferences. This is especially the case in decision-making scenarios, where those with feeling type preferences will tend to be more sensitive to maintaining the relationship and cohesiveness.

The translation of specific body language to a precise meaning is sometimes misguided; however, attending and appropriately responding to subtle nonverbal messages that convey either connection or disconnection in communication is always a good idea. The guiding principle is to expect congruence in verbal and nonverbal messages. When there is incongruence, most of us attend more strongly to what we perceive to be the nonverbal message.

Agents who have successful track records have a good understanding of communication factors that make a difference in closing the deal. They know how to be responsive to the client’s individual characteristics by both customizing their focus and communication throughout each step of the sales process and being sensitive to nonverbal cues as feedback about the clarity of content and intended meaning.

Judith McCrackin is the president of THOUGHTSPACE, Inc., an Austin-based firm that provides individual and organizational performance development consulting to a wide range of clients, with a focus on the development of interactive capability.

Editor’s Note: For additional information on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and it’s helpfulness in optimizing the sales process, see www.thoughtspaceinc.com.

home   current issue    top 10    resources 

discussions   contact us   search

Buyers & sellers, visit www.texasrealestate.com.
REALTORS®, visit www.tar.org.