Why are soft skills important? Soft skills are important because they are the building blocks of every relationship with your colleagues and with your most valued customers.

Communications—verbal and non-verbal—sensitivity, tolerance, patience, teamwork, adaptability, listening, and time management. These soft skills come naturally to some of us. But there’s always room for improvement. And DiSC personality training is one of the best tools for soft skills development.

How DiSC boosts soft skills development?

Let’s face it, relationships take work! Fortunately, that workload is easier to bear when you understand who you’re dealing with! Not just their name, title, or rank on the food chain. DiSC identifies who they are based on their personality.

DiSC stands for “Dominance,” “Influential,” Steadfastness,” and “Conscientiousness.” These are personality styles that can help you understand what makes them tick.

Each DiSC personality type is a key to what motivates people. For example, I-styles are usually extroverts. They love being “in the mix” and setting the tone. “Quiet reserve”—that’s how lots of  S-styles are described. As you begin to understand each personality style, you’ll learn the soft skills that work best with that colleague.

And your team building goals can be based on your understanding of the personalities on your team. Obviously, none of us is 100 percent 1-personality style. According to a recent study, most of us are a combination of 3.

Why are soft skills important to your sales team?

Soft skills can help you make some hard decisions. How? By dictating your approach to everyone involved in those decisions. And by helping you communicate with them in a positive and constructive way.

These skills are based on your EQ, or emotional intelligence, more than your IQ. Your ability to empathize will help you communicate more earnestly and supportively. Patience and tolerance are also soft skills that can shape your leadership style. 

Anyone can use fear and intimidation to motivate subordinates. But more enlightened leaders know that modeling the kind of humane treatment they’d want for themselves. It’s a far more successful way to inspire a sales team to ramp up their level of production. And enlightened leadership requires a deeper understanding of each team member’s personality.

Why are soft skills important to your customers?

Old school hard sales tactics don’t work anymore. Today, both new business and repeat customers are based on relationships. And relational sales thrive on interaction.

Customers expect special attention, treatment, and consideration. They don’t just want customer service. They want personalized customer care. 

Teamwork and adaptability are soft skills that make it easier to customize responses to even the most high maintenance customers.

As your DiSC personality training progresses, your own soft skills will improve. You’ll develop a keener sense of which members of your sales team will work best with certain customers.

How do you combine DiSC and soft skills development?

Partnering a D-style sales rep with one who’s an S-style may be a winning combination for a special customer. Of course, the first thing you’ll need to do is to scrutinize their personality profiles to make sure that these 2 teammates are as compatible with each other as with that special customer.

D-styles are often fearless and absolutely love a challenge—as long as they are in charge. An S-style may focus so intently on getting all the facts right, that they make decisions too slowly for the D-style partner. But because they do such meticulous research, an S-style’s presentation is usually stellar.

As their leader, you may need to use soft skills like diplomacy and positive reinforcement to forge a strong partnership between the 2. Communicating directives and clearly delineating areas of responsibility will help everyone involved know what is expected of them—individually and as a team.

You may also need to meet with the D-style privately to make sure he or she understands how much their strengths are valued and to help them recognize weaknesses in their interpersonal skills.

The whole point of developing soft skills based on personality training is that as a manager, employees trust you as their advocate and not their adversary.

Knowing that you’re willing to work with them to become better at what they do will motivate them tremendously.