Some personalities fare well better than others in different industries including the personality it takes to sell online. Do you have what it takes?
If you’ve been contemplating leaving a nine-to-five job in favor of working at home and running your own business selling online, you’re to be commended. This approach offers a variety of advantages. Not only do you have the ability to make your own business decisions, you also set your own hours, write your own marketing plans and choose the products you want to sell.
That said, it takes a unique personality to sell online. You must be self-motivated, creative, objective and good at time management. You also need to be able to work well in a vacuum, something that sets online marketing apart from traditional retailing.
Conducting a DiSC personality assessment can help you determine whether or not you’re a good candidate for branching out on your own and starting your own online business. As attractive as it may seem, operating a home-based business isn’t the right career choice for everyone. See if you have what it takes to be successful in running an online store.
DiSC personality profiles
The DiSC personality assessment focuses on four aspects of one’s personality: dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness. It seeks to categorize individuals based on which factors are primary features of their personalities. Successful entrepreneurs virtually always have dominance as their primary or secondary trait. In DiSC terms, this means they have a “strong D.”
Do you have what it takes to sell online?
How does the DiSC profile translate into day-to-day work habits and personality traits that can help you succeed as an online entrepreneur? Below are a few examples of traits that most strong D’s possess:
- Self-motivation. Being able to work well on your own is essential to running a business from home. There are myriad distractions that can derail your productivity; everything from a dog that wants to go for a walk to a relative who thinks you’re available to run errands since you work at home. When you run your own business, you don’t have a boss looking over your shoulder and making sure you’re staying on track. It’s up to you to keep yourself focused on earning money and sustaining your business.
- Good time management. When you own your own business, you can’t spend the entire day on one project and exclude all of your other responsibilities. A good entrepreneur knows how to manage his or her time well, so that no task or customer gets neglected or deprioritized.
- Smart spending habits. It’s a given with a startup business that some months will be stronger than others. It’s important to be able to save a portion of your income during the boom months to take care of bills during the lean ones. This approach also comes into play when budgeting for online advertising. The months you need to advertise the most, such as those leading up to holiday season, are often not the ones that generate the most revenue. Planning carefully is essential.
- Objectivity. One of the most difficult things to do when you own a home-based business is to distance yourself from your own personal tastes. For example, just because you like orange, doesn’t mean that all of your customers will prefer that color. If you only follow your preferences, you can quickly end up with a website full of products that have limited mass appeal.
- Creative thinking. While creativity is not essential to being a successful online entrepreneur, it certainly helps. Being able to come up with savvy business ideas, unique marketing approaches and attractive web designs helps to set your company apart from the sea of other startups competing for your customers’ dollars.
Not everyone is cut out to sell online, just like some people wouldn’t make good teachers or plumbers or astronauts. However, if you’re self-motivated, good at time management and able to be objective, you might just have what it takes to create your own profitable online empire.
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