Careers for INFJ personality types: Sales or Promotion

Here’s a question from a YouTube subscriber, Maria, who wonders if an INFJ like her can pursue a career path that involves “selling” or promoting herself. She asks:

“I’m an INFJ; all my life I’ve been very active through dancing and the arts. I’ve always had an interest for health and wellness and have been contemplating on making a career change to personal training. I’m not sure about it sometimes because I tend to come off as very soft spoken, but I believe I’m good at connecting one on one with people. I know as a trainer you also have to “sell” yourself to build clients. Any thoughts about this career path for an INFJ?”

Selling as an Introvert – My thoughts about this

First of all, this is a great question. Because I think a lot of people hold themselves back from pursuing the career or business they really want, because they’re worried about one small aspect of that and one of the most common, if not the most common aspect of that is having to sell yourself. First of all, I have a great (I like to think great) 20-minute video on selling as an introvert or someone who doesn’t like to pressure others. You can watch it now or save for later.

I would highly encourage you to watch that video, I will walk you through the actual strategy of selling if you don’t want to hard sell, and it’s actually more effective than hard selling.

Careers for INFJ personality types – Advice: Establish a connection with people

This brings me to my point here – Your traditional image of a personal trainer, or a gym salesman, may be something like this, “Hey, bro, 20 sessions, 20 sessions two-year contract, I’ll give you a good price…”

That doesn’t, well, it does work but that is not the best way to sell. It is not the most effective way and it’s becoming dated and people are very aware of that. If you think of a traditional salesperson like the gym owner, or used car salesman or whatever, that is not what good sales is about. Good sales is about connecting with people, it’s about perhaps being quiet, soft-spoken, listening to them, learning about your client and figuring out how you can help them with that really good connection.

As a personal trainer, you’d organize meetings with people and you would ask them questions about their goals, you would learn about what they’re trying to achieve. You might occasionally share stories of your past clients or offer a little insight. But primarily, you would just listen to them and take notes, learn about what they’re trying to do and then from there, you would eventually put forward a proposal or your thoughts on working together. That is going to be a lot more effective than putting pressure on someone.

Imagine this: You are your own future client. So you’re going and looking at gyms and personal trainers, and you go to a place and they come up to you and they’re just like, “Hey, you’re trying to get buff. Right? Okay, cool. Let me tell you about the weight….” and the truth is you’re not trying to get buff, you have some back pain and you’ve been trying to learn about flexibility and all that not build muscle, but they don’t listen. They show you all the weights, they show you all the equipment, they tell you about how late they’re open, but you don’t really care because you’re an early morning person and then at the end of this conversation, they just say, “Alright, here’s a 12-month contract, sign here, let’s do it.” How keen are you going to be on that?

Some people will join because they wanted a gym anyhow or they just don’t say no, they have trouble with pressure unfortunately. But that’s your first experience. Now imagine you go in another gym and they sit down and they say, “Hey, when are you thinking of working out? What are the best hours for you? What are you trying to achieve? Why have you decided to come?” You tell them about your back and then they show you the stretching area and they talk about their own experience, you know, stretching and the different exercises you do, working together with them as your trainer etc. What person are you more likely to sign up with?

Of course, it’s the person who listens to you who gets to know you that you’re going to actually want to work with. That is my way of saying DO NOT let sales or promotion hold you back in terms of a business. There are many different strategies in my Free Freelancer Program. We teach three different marketing techniques / Big picture strategies. Each of those have a dozen strategies in them. But three different approaches that involve NO PROMOTION, basically, in terms of old fashioned hard promotion and the selling technique that I mentioned I go through in the other video requires very little if any kind of pushy or aggressive sales. It’s all about listening and asking questions and then occasionally at the end, you do have to say, “Hey, do you want to hire me?” But that’s not too hard to do at that point.

I’m sure you can manage that. So definitely pursue this career. If you have an interest in the topic and you think you’d be great at it, do not worry about the sales aspect that will be no problem at all.