How do you prefer to sell: through email & the web, by phone, or face-to-face?

How do your prospects like to buy?

What happens when these preferences conflict?

Famed management guru and my professor, Peter F. Drucker, was fond of pointing out that there are at least three kinds of customers:

(1) Readers
(2) Listeners, and
(3) Writers.
To his list, we can also probably add
(4) Talkers and
(5) Viewers.

These are the main modalities through which people like to get their information.

The general idea is we should respect customer preferences, communicating through media that are appropriate to each individual.

But is this the way we should sell? Should we defer to apparent customer preferences, or assert our own?

For instance, let