“Morphing” online
In my professional sales class I present the social styles approach that creates four categories of prospect styles (driver, analytical, amiable and expressive) from two scales, assertiveness and responsiveness (Merrill and Reid 1981). The social styles matrix approch provide ways to quickly categorize potential customers and adapt the presentation to their style. A JPSSM article made the case that such adaptive practices improve sales performance (Sujan, Weitz and Sujan 1988).
The sales textbooks I am familar with include the social styles approach (and sometimes the NLP learning styles) to adaptive selling.
A forthcoming Marketing Science article (Hauser, Urban, Liberali, and Braun, forthcoming) provides compelling evidence that the use of partially observable customer categories based on simple binary scales can increase sales.
In an experiment on a website selling broadband services, “morphing” the website — changing the way data is presented — based on assumptions projected from a few customer clicks produced a 20% increase in intent to buy.
To limit fatigue from too many probing questions, potential customers were classified into 16 “cognitive categories” using four constructs after 10 clicks. The four “cognitive” scales used in the experiment were:
- Leader vs. Follower
- Analytial/visual vs. holistic/verbal
- Implusive vs. deliberative
- (Active) reader vs. (passive) listener
#1 closely approximates the assertiveness scale from the social styles matrix. In any case, this paper presents evidence that changing the presentation of data to fit a quickly estimated customer categorization can lead to significantly increased purchase intentions.
(If you have access, see Marketing Science, articles in advance.)
October 30, 2009 at 6:57 pm |
I agree that adapting to different social styles can significantly increase sales. We have studied the four social styles and I firmly believe that in order to be successful in selling you must be aware of these various styles in order to present to a prospect with a style different than your own. A salesman talked about how he deals with highly assertive and/or responsive people, as well as low assertive/responsive people. I think that knowing how to deal with people in general, is a valuable skill in life. Be honest in what you do, but at the same time, especially in sales, know how you would deal with a customer who is a driver, analytical, expressive, or amiable. Knowing this matrix and these social styles is an important part in closing that sale!!!