What Is Adaptive Selling, and How Can It Help You Close More Deals?

Adaptive selling is all about changing your sales strategy to suit different customers and situations. You must sell how your customers want to buy. When interacting with prospects, you should assess their needs and behavior and change your selling style accordingly.

In this article, we’ll discuss how adaptive selling can attract more customers by strengthening your sales arm. We’ll also share three simple steps to master adaptive selling.

Also called customized selling, adaptive selling matches your selling style to the customer’s communication style and the sales situation. You take a consultative approach and put your customers’ needs at the center of the sales process.

Adaptive selling techniques are geared toward creating long-term personal relationships with prospects, which helps enhance the customer experience.

You and your sales staff stand to gain much from adaptive selling. Let’s check out the key benefits of using an adaptive selling process.

Overcome objections

Overcoming objections is a key benefit of adaptive selling. This approach allows sales professionals to remain flexible toward customers’ concerns and questions. For example, if a customer has concerns about pricing, an adaptive sales rep can adjust their approach by offering discounts or creating a customized package that meets the customer’s budget.

Close more deals

Leads are likely to convert better when your sales approach matches the “wavelength” of customers’ thoughts and actions. Understand the needs and preferences of individual buyers, and adapt your sales strategy accordingly. For instance, some buyers prefer closing deals fast, while others take time to build a relationship before finalizing a deal. The more accurately you assess your prospects, the easier it will be to convert them.

Get more upselling and cross-selling opportunities 

Ask the right questions to learn which products customers have and what else they want or need. Also, understand their social and personality traits to start a conversation and gain trust. Use this connection to suggest product upgrades, premium offerings, or related services.

Build customer trust and loyalty 

When you build a personal relationship with customers by adapting to their buying approach, you boost their trust. As a result, higher customer trust means more brand loyalty. Studies suggest strong customer relationships increase the likelihood of sales and a loyal repeat customer base. [1] Thus, a large number of sales leaders now focus on relationship building.

Adaptive selling encompasses many strategies. Each tailors its approach, effectively responding to various sales situations and customer needs.

• Script-based selling: Uses set scripts for consistency. This strategy is suitable for simple sales that don’t change much.

• Needs-based selling: This style is about figuring out and meeting the customer’s specific needs, offering solutions to their problems.

• Consultative selling: Goes in-depth into a customer’s situation to offer tailored solutions. It focuses on being a sales detective to find the best fit.

• Strategic-partner selling: Aims to build long-lasting customer relationships, often becoming part of their long-term planning.

Each approach works for different sales and customer needs, from simple transactions to complex and strategic partnerships.

Adaptive selling is a skill your sales staff need in their repertoire. Some may be instinctively using this approach, while others will need coaching. Here are three simple steps your team should follow to achieve adaptive selling.

Step 1: Match the customer’s communication style

Speak in a language and tone that’s familiar to customers. Adapting to customers’ communication styles helps build connections and makes it easier for customers to trust you.

The table below highlights examples of customers’ different communication styles and how you can adapt your selling strategy accordingly.

Step 2: Understand the customer’s social style

Understanding a customer’s social style is also important for building rapport. The social style matrix helps identify the approach customers tend to take in their interactions. If you fail to match your selling strategy with your customer’s social style, you reduce the chances for successful business relationships.

Here are the four different social styles customers have and how you can tweak your adaptive selling strategy for each.

Step 3: Adapt to the sales situation

You’ll also need to adjust your sales technique to the situations in which you’ll meet your customers.

For instance, how you sell to a manufacturing client seeking a new machine differs from how you’ll pitch if the same client wants replacement equipment after a critical unit catches fire. In the latter situation, the client is tense and wants a quick solution. In the former, the client is more relaxed and has time to evaluate options closely.

Segmentation plays a pivotal role in scaling adaptive selling. By grouping customers based on shared characteristics or behaviors, businesses can efficiently tailor their sales strategies to meet diverse needs. [2] A focused approach allows for more personalized interactions, even with a large customer base.

Effective segmentation can also help sales teams apply adaptive selling techniques more strategically. This ensures each customer feels understood and valued, without overwhelming the sales process with a one-size-fits-all approach.

One example of adaptive selling in action is Amazon's use of customer data, such as previous purchases and browsing behavior, to suggest products to customers.

Other companies known for using adaptive selling include:

• Domino's Pizza

• American Express

• Unilever

• Ford

Domino's Pizza has mixed customization with innovative technology with its interactive New Pizza Chef feature. [3] Found in the app, New Pizza Chef uses augmented reality (AR) to give customers a sneak peek at their pizza. It also includes full control over mixing and matching different menu options.

The global pizza chain also provides many vegetarian options in countries like India, where many people are vegetarian. Plus, in 2016, Domino's went all-vegetarian for the Hindu festival Navaratri in approximately half of their stores. [4]

Individual sales skills, intuition, and experience are important in adaptive selling, but so is leveraging data insights. You may not always accurately read a customer’s behavior and style. That’s where data can help!

Analyzing your customer data can help identify what buyers like or dislike. It can also reveal their interests, strengths, and weaknesses. The data can come from multiple sources, including social media, your customer relationship management (CRM) system, loyalty program, and shopping carts.

Data insights are especially beneficial for salespeople who have a hard time understanding customer behaviors. Today, businesses increasingly rely on data insights to power their marketing and operations decisions and improve their sales performance.

Besides leveraging customer data insights and your sales knowledge and experience, invest in technology to improve your adaptive selling capabilities. You can try various software tools such as CRM and sales enablement solutions.

CRM software stores customer details at a centralized location, automatically builds customer profiles, and predicts customer preferences to help you sell better. On the other hand, sales enablement software automates sales communication, sales asset creation, and cross-functional communication. It also acts as a centralized repository for your sales collateral.

Sales force automation, sales forecasting and analytics, and collaboration software solutions are other tools to automate tasks, improve performance, communicate with teammates, and get relevant data to boost your sales pitch.