Unless you’re relatively new to the business world, chances are you’ve done your fair share of ideal client profiles. I’ve even written about the topic  of customer profiles twice. But when I started to focus on customer personalities, it added a whole new layer to understanding your ideal client.

I started to see a pattern emerge in my own perfectly aligned clients and how they tended to lean towards one particular personality. It was the people with this personality I was able to achieve the greatest level of success for. This was because of my own personality profiling.

Knowing this doesn’t just help refine who you’re targeting in your business, but the way you develop your services and products, and the copy you write. I’ll elaborate on this in a minute.

It’s not to say I only work with one type of person. However, what it has allowed is to speak more deeply to my ideal client through my marketing, so I attract them far more easily.

Why use personality profiling?

In the early days of my journalism career, I did a leadership development program, where we learned the DISC personality profiling system. 

Each of the letters of DISC stand for a different personality type. From here, we were able to see why we viewed different people with different personalities in different ways. It helped to better understand people, how you communicate with them, how they view us, and what’s most important to them.

For example, I’m a high S personality type. You can also have a secondary type, which for me is a high C.  As an S, I’m nurturing, people focused and like to please others. I may take more words than is necessary to explain something (but you probably guessed that from the length of my blog posts).

One of my previous editors was a D. He was task-orientated and results-driven. He wanted me to get to the point quickly and didn’t care too much about how I felt. He just wanted to see the job done and done well.

Before doing DISC, I viewed him as a bit arrogant and someone who expected everything to go his own way. Now, understanding more about the D personality type, I realise that our goals are the same, but our approach to get there was different.

When it comes to your customers, if you can understand what they care about, you can better tailor your language and the way you deliver your offers.

What are the 4 customer personality types?

So, there are a heap of different personality profiling tools. I’ll go into more of those soon. But for now, I’m going to focus on the one I learned and best understand.

There are different strengths to a personality – from low to high – and you can even have a secondary personality to support your core personality type. Like I do with having an S as my core profile and a C as the secondary.

You’ll need to visit the DISC site to do the full personality test to figure out which of the four personality types you are. But for now, this snapshot of each of the profiles is a good way to start to learn about yourself and your clients through the customer personality types.

D Personality = Dominance

This goal-driven person is often confident and generally quite direct in the way they speak. There’s no beating around the bush. They know how to make things happen and place an emphasis on accomplishing bottom-line results. If your ideal client falls into this category, you’ll need to understand that building relationships with this person will look a little different. Your sales process would need to be simple and to the point, without fluff.

I Personality = Influence

The I Personality thrives in the social scene. I always see them as the person who walks into the room and everyone’s eyes divert to them. They tend to be more open, expressive and place an emphasis on relationships and influencing or persuading others. They know how to create a tribe or following. What I’ve seen is that they have great big visions and are amazing idea generators, but they’re not always good at focusing on the details and implementing those ideas.

S Personality = Stable

This personality is dependable and places the emphasis on cooperation and sincerity. They’re very nurturing in the way they relate to people, and they truly want the best for everyone around them. They like to build networks and are often incredibly loyal to the people they do business with. So you’ll need to make sure they feel they belong and relate to a group before they’ll ever come on board. But once they do, if you give them great service, they will become one of your top referrers.

C Personality = Conscientiousness

When it comes to detail and the analytical, the C has this in spades. They tend to think before they speak – in fact, they think a lot, which can make them slower than most to make decisions. But they have an emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency. They want the facts and figures, and will do their homework to make sure the answers are accurate. So if you’re into content creation, this person will eat your content up before making a decision. 

What are the different personality profiling tools?

If you know a different personality profile tool, you can adapt the above to suit that tool. Most of the different types of personality tests drill down to the same four types – they just tend to have different names.

Other ways to find types of personality traits include:

• REACH profile
• Gallup Strengths Finder
• Myer-Briggs Type Indicator
• Truity
• 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire
• Eysenck Personality Questionnaire

While these tools are for analysing your own personality, you can easily adapt them to use for customer personality types.

What are the advantages of understanding these customer types? An example.

I want to now share how I use profiling in my business. This doesn’t mean I don’t still go through a traditional ideal client profiling process. Because I do. This just adds another layer to that.

OK, here’s what I identified. My ideal clients tend to be the I personality type. That makes perfect sense, because they’re big vision people. They are great with people skills and love coming up with ideas, but tend to struggle actually implementing and finishing the idea. In fact, they’ll start multiple ideas at once but never quite get to marketing them. Or they’ll try and launch multiple things at once and end up in a state of chaos.

That’s where I come in.

My personality is great at seeing someone’s big picture vision but being able to drill it down into actionable steps. I help clients focus on the highest priorities first, and then actually follow through and get it done.

One of my opt-in offers is a 12-month marketing plan, because I know they need structure around their free-flowing ideas to help them launch into the world.

The other element of the S personality is being able to create calm, which is something I hear a lot from clients who always feel stressed about their marketing. After a session they walk away with greater clarity and calm around what they’re doing.

In fact, one client once said “if I was caught in a tsunami, I’d want you beside me to keep me calm”.

How can you use personality profiling in your business?

Looking at your own personality, which of the 4 business personality types are you? What are your strengths? Now take a look at the top 10 clients you have. Do they tend to fall into one or maybe even two personality types? Once you know the answer to these two, then ask:

• Why are they attracted to you? 
• What is the gap they have that you fill?
• How are you able to help them based on that gap?
• How are you using your personality in marketing your business?
• How do you communicate with them during a sales conversation?
• Are they an S or C and require detail or a D and I and need to see the highlights?
• How do you structure your services, products and programs to tailor to this?

Profiling can go beyond consumer personality types too. Look at the people on your team and see what mix you have. One of my clients, leadership expert Shirley Dalton, always says every team should have a Driver to make sure you’re moving your business forward. Don’t end up employing people who are all the same personality type or your business may suffer.

I’ve seen two examples in the past month of partnership businesses where both partners were different. One was either a D or C personality, who was good at either driving the business or getting things done. The other person was either an S or I personality, who were more people focused and able to build relationships with key people.

Once you know your customer’s personality profile, what’s next?

After you know your customer personality types and where they might fit in each of the four categories, you can start to discover how to find and connect with the right people.

To do that, download a copy of the free workbook to guide you through each step.

To learn more about your own personality and how to determine where your ideal client fits, book a time to chat.