Factfile: making contact

Optimising Sales and Negotiations

We can construct an effective description of a person's behaviour using DISC, and that includes a broad assessment of such things as their motivations, goals, and dislikes. It doesn't take much to imagine how powerful that information could be in the context of a negotiation or sale.

Of course, it's not practical to present a normal DISC questionnaire in situations like that - but Discus solves that problem by introducing the 'Contact Profile'.

A typical Contact Profile. Each of the individual squares on this grid represents a different pattern of behaviour, and so can be used to describe a person's motivational factors and derive an optimal strategy and approach.

Contact Profiles work by using a simplified version of DISC to target exactly the information you need in a negotiation context. Using a specialised questionnaire, Discus can quickly create a Contact Profile, and use it to focus on the key issues relevant to negotiation: factors that will motivate a person, and factors that will demotivate them.

A Contact Profile report runs to seven sections of detailed analysis, all handily summed up in a Checklist, complete with a list of 'Dos' and 'Don'ts', and an overall success strategy tailored to the person's individual style.

Contact and DISC

If you're familiar with DISC, the coloured grid of the Contact Profile might not look much like the DISC profile shapes you're used to.

Nonetheless, Contact Profiles use exactly the same underlying theory as DISC to create their profiles. The results of the special simplified questionnaire are necessarily less precise than having a person complete a full DISC question set, and this is reflected in a simplified layout for the results.

Even so, Discus can still provide an astonishing amount of practical information from this basic source.

Because of their fundamental compatibility with DISC, Contact Profiles can even be converted into DISC profiles, and analysed in all the detail that implies.

Find out more

• DISC Reference Library
• Understanding DISC
• The Discus Profiler