by Susan Fox, CH, CBT, AA

                        (C) 2009 SUSAN FOX TRUST

The 4 Basic Types of Customers

The people who feel interested in buying your specific products or services think about your offerings in a certain way.  From birth, they follow instructions in their DNA and simply seek to live their lives according to 4 basic ways of life.  That's what eventually brings them to you.

These 4 basic ways to live life are like programs in our brains.  We feel driven and sometimes compelled to live according to them. Understanding what these 4 basic thinking preferences about life are helps you identify the specific types of "thinkers."  Identifying those who will most likely feel interested in your particular products or services can increase your sales.

Once you understand the 4 basic thinking preferences, use this information in your marketing copy.  These same words and concepts conveyed in your promotional materials will click with your prospects.  Using language that sounds familiar to your ideal prospect, you increase the chances of helping people already looking for your specific offerings.

For example, a man most likely will be interested in doing man things.  You've got to talk to a man as if you understand what is interesting to a man.  Find out what he likes to do.  The same is true for a woman.  Talk about what interests a woman and you make a connection with her. 

In your marketing copy, actively talk about enjoying the interests your customers enjoy.  When prospects read your marketing material, and you sound like you enjoy what your prospects enjoy doing, they will develop a connection to you, a rapport and trust.  We like to buy from people we trust.  We trust people with whom we have things in common.  So, keep this idea in mind to help promote your solutions to their unfulfilled challenges.

Writing Marketing Copy From Another Brain Side

Writing marketing copy as if you are your customer may seem unnatural to you.  If you sell motorcycles and you do not like to ride motorcycles, getting a motorcycle enthusiast's input will be invaluable when writing your marketing copy. 

Trust your market research and write words in a way meaningful to your market.  What is important to your market?  Ask them.  From the way the brain processes the information, there are 4 basic intentions.  

The brain's 4 preferences can be divided into 4 simple predominant desires, namely:

From the left brain

Accuracy

Efficiency

From the right brain

Feeling feelings and developing relationships

Feeling appreciated and acknowledged as valuable for creative contributions

For business, to reach all customers, genuinely care to help your customer achieve a task- or people-oriented goal.  Respectfully acknowledge each type of customer as deserving of help to achieve their goals by offering your specific product/service solutions.  When you respect your customers, your marketing materials reflect your respect for them.  Those materials show your genuine desire to help them improve their lives by providing solutions to their challenges.

Left Brain Example

People who prefer to do things in an accurate, efficient way think from the left brain.  They feel fulfilled when you say things in your marketing copy that show how accuracy and efficiency will be fulfilled and satisfied via your product or service solution.

These types of customers prefer to know the costs, details, plans, strategies, techniques and facts about how your solutions help them accurately and efficiently complete tasks.  And speaking in brief, succinct, clear details to get the job done perfectly and quickly gets you preferred above competitors who don't promote their offerings this way.

In your sales presentations, ask technically-minded prospects what goals they seek to achieve rather than tell them all about how great your company is or how great your products are.  These types of thinkers are driven to get tasks done.  Show them a plan, with time schedules and costs analyses, about how your product or service solutions help them satisfy their precision and efficiency goals.  Get the sale by providing successful perfection and efficiency track records from past customers.  Those statistics help educate and inform this type of prospect so he or she can feel strongly about using your solution out of all those available.

Typically, left brained-thinkers are interested in provable topics about how your solutions save them time or money or make them money.  Use this information in your marketing copy for them.

Right Brain Example

Relationship-oriented people feel most fulfilled when reading advertising about the benefits to them or their family, or their business in a caring way.  So, write copy about how your offerings result in developing and maintaining happy, meaningful relationships.  When you make relationships, and feeling appreciated and noticed by others for your contributions, marketing copy priorities, your right-brained readers feel like you can really relate to what's important to them.

These types of customers prefer and strongly desire to feel accepted, approved of, supported, valued, inspired, spiritually elevated, encouraged, etc., during life.  Talking extensively about how the family or business team gets credit and develops a meaningful relationships with others appeals to this type of client. In the right-brain thinkers' example, you can see the mirror opposite here to the left-brain thinker's views.

Right brain thinkers experience a huge challenge planning, staying focused and organizing to accurately and efficiently complete a task, though they desire to do just that.  So, if you have a product or service that helps them stay focused on getting desired tasks done while making them look good to others, you'll appeal to this type of client.  Relationship-oriented people desire feeling accepted, approved of and appreciated by others.  Make sure your copy describes how your solution does this for them.  That's what makes the difference in a sale or a no sale.

Tell each customer the truth as you promote your offerings.  Simply treat each customer with respect and genuinely desire to help them improve their lives and you'll do well in your business.