Historically, the most crucial sales, like real estate and automobiles, have been made face to face by salespeople who judge a customer’s reaction and tailor their approach accordingly.   A big part of successful selling involves assessing the dominant cognitive style of your prospect and refining your approach to suit that particular cognitive style.

Cognitive style refers to the different ways that people prefer to process information.  As described in a recent MIT Sloan Management Review¹ article titled “Morph the Web to Build Empathy, Trust, and Sales,” there are three primary cognitive dimensions: 

• Analytical vs. holistic
• Impulsive vs. deliberative
• Visual vs. verbal

Analytical people want to “pick things apart” to see all their pieces.  They understand and connect better that way.  On the contrary, when holistic people look at a message, they see it all at once as a complete statement.  They don’t look beyond the surface.

Some people consider things deliberatively, while others tend to make impulsive judgments based on gut feelings. 

Some people process the world visually, while others prefer to hear a message verbally. 

There are obviously many combinations of these traits and, therefore, many different cognitive styles. 

The trouble with personal selling is that you typically can reach only one person at a time — or at best, a few.  So the future of marketing will involve using the Internet to appeal to each customer’s cognitive style. 

Today, most Web sites are designed as if everyone who visits the site shares the same cognitive style.  For example, the main home page of The New York Times is a mass of confusion, with scores of headlines, lists, and blocks of text running in every direction.  It offers multiple tabs, drop-down menus, search boxes, and, if you scroll down, you find that it goes on — seemingly forever — ultimately offering the reader a bewildering array that encompasses hundreds and hundreds of possibilities. 

This design appeals to only one cognitive style:  that of someone who prefers to process information visually and is also analytical and deliberate enough...