The Art Of Adaptation

It is so important to mould yourself differently around every type of customer. An area where salesmen sometimes fall down is not knowing how to adapt to different personalities and attitudes of customers.

Major example: the more 'well-to-do' type of customer requires a calmer, smarter spoken (pronouncing your T's etc!) approach. You have to show that your going to be on the same wave length as the customer, there's no point going into a posher customers house being broad and roughly spoken i.e. being yourself! There's a degree of acting required in this job to get you a sale. This works the other way also. For the broader, more DIY/builder type customer who has worked a manual labour job e.g. mining, going in too well spoken, too smartly dressed and too pompous could immediately intimidate or make the customer feel uneasy.

One of the major attributes needed in this job is knowing how to very quickly adapt to each customer as they come.