Social Styles · Handling Different Customer Types
Social Styles
What are Social Styles?
- Based on outwardly visible behavior, not personality
- Four styles built on two axes: assertiveness and responsiveness
- The point is not classification but adaptability: adjusting your own approach
When people hear “style assessment,” they picture answering a questionnaire and finding out their type. Social Styles starts from a different place. It is based not on inner thoughts or personality but on behavior that others can see. That is why it is so useful in sales. You cannot ask a customer to take a test, but you can observe speech pace, the ratio of questions to assertions, and facial expressions and gestures in a first meeting. The goal of this model is not to classify customers but to adjust how you speak to suit them.
There are two axes. Assertiveness looks at whether a person is more of a teller or an asker when sharing ideas, and responsiveness looks at whether they show or restrain their emotions. High assertiveness with restrained emotion is the Driver, who wants conclusions and options. High assertiveness with visible emotion is the Expressive, who responds to the big picture and recognition. An asking style with visible emotion is the Amiable, who looks for relationships and security. An asking style with restrained emotion is the Analytical, who looks for evidence and process. None of the four is better than the others.
Handling each style comes down to matching pace and focus. With Drivers, lead with the conclusion and offer two or three options. With Analyticals, send materials ahead of time and give them room to review. With Expressives, share the big picture before the details and put whatever you agree on in writing. With Amiables, do not rush the decision, and explain concretely how you will support them after adoption. The model adds versatility, meaning how well you adjust your own approach to the other person. For training design, the key point is that what drives results is this versatility, not the style itself.
Where this goes wrong in the field is labeling. If remarks like "That director is a Driver, so it won't work" start circulating after training, the model becomes an excuse. A style is a hypothesis built from one or two observations, and the same person behaves differently depending on role and situation. B2B purchases are also decided by several people, so a proposal tailored to one person’s style will not suit the other decision makers. It is safer to put the summary of conclusions, the supporting data, and the support plan in a single document. Training that ends as a style-guessing game is fun but changes little, so it needs an exercise where you take one real customer and rewrite the first 3 minutes of your next meeting.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jaehyuk ParkHands-on instructor in B2B technical sales and AI-driven sales strategy| Category | Social Styles | DISC Behavioral Styles |
|---|---|---|
| Background | Merrill and Reid’s research on observed behavior | William Marston’s behavioral theory |
| Four styles | Driver · Expressive · Amiable · Analytical | Driver · Sociable · Steady · Cautious |
| Two axes | Assertiveness and responsiveness | Pace and task vs. people focus |
| Assessment method | Based on behavior observed by others | Self-report questionnaires are typical |
| Main uses | Adjusting your communication to the other person (versatility) | Self-awareness and team communication |
| Sales applications | Applicable through customer observation alone | Customer type relies on inference |
This model comes from research begun in the 1960s by American industrial psychologists David W. Merrill and Roger H. Reid. Rather than relying on self-assessment, it uses the behavior that people around an individual observe to identify two axes, assertiveness and responsiveness, and sorts people into four styles. It became widely known through their book Personal Styles & Effective Performance. Sources give the publication year as either 1981 or 1984.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A sells lab equipment, and its 18 salespeople work with research labs and quality departments. Looking at why last year’s 96 proposals were lost, 'poor fit with the contact person' accounted for 31, second only to price.
- In November, a training manager ran a one-day course. Participants watched four real customer-meeting videos and plotted each person as a point on the two axes, based on speech pace, question ratio, and changes in expression.
- A sales manager with seven years of experience thought of a senior researcher at a research institute who had not replied in three months. The researcher asked many questions and showed little change in expression, which suggested an Analytical, yet the manager had pushed every time with "Just try it and you’ll see."
- The manager rewrote the first 3 minutes of the next meeting. After the greeting, the manager would say right away that the 12-page comparison test data had been sent in advance, then ask "how many days you will need to review it."
- Nine days after receiving the materials, the senior researcher emailed 14 questions. When the manager answered them item by item within 24 hours, the reply came back: "You are the first vendor to organize things this way."
- The purchasing manager at the same client was a Driver who asks for the conclusion first. The manager put a three-line summary of price, lead time, and warranty on the first page of the proposal and moved the detailed data to an appendix.
- In the six months after the course, only 3 of 52 proposals were lost to 'communication mismatch,' and the win rate on proposals rose from 24% to 33%.