Work Your Brain

By Dana Ray

If you were to ask Marlane Miller how to improve yourself, she would likely tell you you’re fine the way you are. Miller, author of BrainStyles: Change Your Life Without Changing Who You Are (Simon & Schuster, 1997), contends that people try to change who they are instead of making the most of how they operate. Confused? It’s really simple. According to Miller, people often think – erroneously – that there’s something wrong with them and that’s why they can never achieve their full potential. They think that to do better they have to change the way they think. Not so, says Miller, who bases her opinion about the way brains function on some hard scientific evidence.

Pure science
In 1978, a seminar outlining different behavioral “social styles” spurred Miller’s husband David Cherry to form hypotheses about how to make the most of the way your brain works, based in part on the work of Nobel Prize-winning psychobiologist Roger Sperry. Sperry defined specific functions for each brain hemisphere. Subsequently, David Cherry proposed that human behavior stemmed from the brain’s timing in the decision-making process, an idea that led to BrainStyles’ initial hypothesis: Your natural strengths reflect the area of the brain that you can access the fastest.

By 1990, with the help of test development and testing by Professors H. Thomas Hurt, Ph.D., of the University of North Texas and Lawrence Peters, Ph.D., of Texas Christian University, Miller’s and Cherry’s ideas gave birth to the BrainStyle Inventory, a 24-question test designed to predict the strengths of the person taking it. The test achieved 90 percent face validity, meaning that nine out of 10 people who used it were content with the match between the identified brainstyle and its description of their own self-described strengths.

What’s right
Miller contends that in our efforts to fix what’s wrong with us we often minimize what’s right. She emphasizes that only by doing what comes naturally can we put our best foot forward in life and in sales. In her book, Miller outlines four basic “brainstyles” or personality types: knowers, conciliators, conceptors and deliberators. Identify your type and, more importantly, your buyer’s type, and you’ll know better what makes you tick and what makes your buyer tick – and that knowledge can help you sell, relate to customers and communicate better than ever.

Nobody’s perfect, says Miller, nor should they try to be. Yet in sales, where success and failure are easily measured in dollars and cents, the pressure’s on to pinpoint where you fall short and to eliminate those weaknesses swiftly and forever. Even with the best intentions, however, Miller says, focusing on shortcomings only masks your strengths.

“In the popular notion of change,” says Miller, “we try to do things that are not our natural strengths, because those strengths are so effortless that they are invisible to us. So we work on the things that are hard because we’re more aware of achieving in those areas, but they never really lead to the kind of effectiveness, the kind of mastery, that working with our natural strengths does.”

When the question arises of how to reveal and capitalize on your hidden talents, Miller maintains that BrainStyles is the answer.

Use your head
Few professions place the premium on relationships that sales does, so salespeople who can relate easily and effectively to different personalities enjoy a definite advantage. At the same time that BrainStyle teaches you more about why you think, act and react the way you do, it also teaches you the same things about your prospects and customers. The benefits, as salespeople can guess and Miller explains, are legion.

“BrainStyles helps salespeople understand much more deeply who the customer is,” says Miller, “and more importantly, I believe, it helps them understand who they themselves are – and who they are not. It will help you understand what will make a relationship work between you and the particular customer, and the improvements that you can expect are ease in relationships, more confidence and an appreciation for people who you once thought were difficult. That in turn helps expand your customer base, because the number of people you can work well with will increase.”

Perhaps even more important, BrainStyles offers greater insight into the one process that determines whether you and your buyer will ever have a buyer/seller relationship at all: the decision-making process. Once you pinpoint a prospect’s brainstyle, you can draw conclusions about how that prospect prefers to make decisions – and say and do just the right things at just the right times to encourage them to do what you want.

“Every salesperson knows that the key to the sale is the decision,” Miller notes. “Using BrainStyles gives you a whole lot of information about how your prospect’s brain works to make those decisions. You build a strategy based specifically on the decision-making preferences and strengths of your prospect.”

BrainStyling and profiling
BrainStyles breaks down the population’s innumerable unique, complex and multifaceted personalities into four categories. Chances are, you fit into one of them.

If your emotion never gets in the way of sound decision making, you may be a knower. For knowers, order is the order of the day – along with a genuine concern for fact and love of logic – not personal warmth or bonding. When you need simple solutions to complex problems, turn to a knower to provide them.

“The gift of the very left-brained knower is quick, unemotional decisions that bring focus out of clutter, even in new areas where that person has little or no knowledge or experience,” Miller says. “They are the most left-brained of the brainstyles. Their other gift is that they are fabulous at setting boundaries, saying no and seeing things in black and white. So it’s very easy for them to say no and mean it.”

In opposition to seemingly cold knowers are the conciliators, who are likely to wear their hearts on their sleeves. With ready access to the emotive and imaginative right brain, conciliators enjoy talking about their feelings, are natural team builders and make friends easily with almost anyone. More women fall into the conciliator category than into any other brainstyle.

“Conciliators access the right brain first,” explains Miller, “so their gift is to be spontaneous, quick, emotion- or intuitive-based decision makers. What they do best is work with people. Because of the way the right brain works, they bond with people easily. That’s why sales is such a perfect fit for conciliators. The biggest issue for them is that feelings change and so do their decisions; consequently, conciliator customers can be very high maintenance.”

Next come the idea people. Conceptors process information between their left and right brains quickly, making them creative, inventive and almost always entrepreneurial. Conceptors generate and capitalize on ideas and would rather make the rules than follow them.

“Conceptors are hard to spot,” Miller says, “but what is unique about them is that receiving information and being quiet allow them to use their gift, which is to take pieces of information and begin to make a whole concept about how the thing will work. Conceptor customers like to be the ones figuring out ways to apply your product. So you have to plan the call by anticipating ways they could use the product, then offer the information that will point in those directions. They are also very tough negotiators, so planning will make the difference.”

On average, more people fit into the deliberator category than any other. The often multitalented deliberator excels at processing and analyzing information carefully before taking action. Deliberators walk the line between logic and emotion to make decisions that take both into consideration. They hold themselves to a high standard and aim to please.

“Because they excel at processing and analyzing, they like to be in control of information,” Miller says. “These are the clients and salespeople who are very good at proof – either wanting it or offering it. What they’re not as good at is making decisions: reaching the point where they have enough proof, analysis and data to say, ‘We’re ready to go.’ The best thing you can do to help a deliberator speed up the process is give them small decisions they’ll feel comfortable with making, each step of the way.”

By answering the questions in the BrainStyles Inventory honestly (see questionnaire at www.brainstyles.com), salespeople can quickly and easily reveal their best brainstyle. Of course, you can’t put all of your prospects and customers to the same test. But by learning the defining characteristics of each brainstyle for yourself, you’ll know which category your buyers fall into and can adapt your strategy to suit.

BrainStyles applied
Those who know best how to put Miller’s ideas into practice will get the most out of them. For the BrainStyles beginner, she offers some tips to help you apply the system to best advantage. For starters, Miller says, salespeople may want to reevaluate the way they feel about the benefits of competition.

“You can get off-target with competition,” she claims, “when you compare yourself to others. To get back on track, realize that you can’t do things the way anyone else does, and no one else can do it like you. Everybody has highs and lows. For example, the man who saved the company from which BrainStyles developed was right brained, but he was a very high-powered, athletic guy trying to look left brained. The more he honored his natural, fun, relational abilities, the better he got. When you find your gift and you love it, then it’s more and more effortless.”

Tip number two: recognize your limitations. Miller says that team-selling environments, for example, bring together people with a wide variety of special abilities so that one person’s limitations don’t have to be liabilities. Instead, for every customer type or need, the team can supply the person who is best equipped mentally to meet that need.

“A number of insurance companies I’ve heard about assess whose gifts might apply most easily and best to which customers,” says Miller, “and they actually assign people based on their natural compatibility with the customer. If you don’t have the luxury of doing that, go to a colleague with the same brainstyle as your customer and consult with that person. Try out your sales call on that person for insight into the timing, the decision-making process, the preferences they have.”

Finally, says Miller, be yourself and don’t apologize for it. Don’t be shy about sharing with buyers what you can and can’t do well. Salespeople who are forthright from the beginning are more likely to earn admiration for their honesty than to be discounted or degraded for any shortcomings they reveal.

“Honestly, the thing that works is being authentic, being natural,” Miller insists. “People who do that are so disarming, you want to work with them because they’re straight. So the idea is that you tell your customer who you are and who you’re not, and it sets the whole tone for honesty and openness and give and take in the relationship – and you can’t put a price on that.”

Set your shortcomings aside, urges Miller – it’s your long suit that counts. Showcasing your talents makes you feel good, drawing out your buyers’ talents makes them feel good, and BrainStyles gives you the tools you need to do both. By working and selling in accordance with your type and your buyer’s, you can capitalize on your assets instead of struggling to overcome your liabilities – ultimately succeeding beyond your wildest dreams and helping your buyers do the same.