Three ways humans process the world
People take in the world through three primary channels:
- Visual. They see. Their brain builds pictures. When they want to understand something, they want to look at it.
- Auditory. They hear. Their brain runs on sound. When they want to understand something, they want to talk about it.
- Kinesthetic. They feel / touch. Their brain runs on sensation and physical experience. When they want to understand something, they want to do it, or be in it.
Everybody has all three. But everybody has a primary — the channel their brain defaults to when they're actually processing something important. If you communicate in their primary channel, the message lands. If you communicate in a different channel, the message is still technically received but a layer of effort is required for them to translate. Over hours and days and years of selling, that tiny layer of translation adds up. The seller who matches the channel wins more deals without knowing why.
Industry terms this page covers
| What you might call it | What I call it |
|---|---|
| Learning styles | VAK |
| Primary sensory dominance | VAK |
| "Some people like email, some like the phone" | VAK preferences |
| Figuring out how to communicate with someone | Match their VAK |
How to spot VAK — just listen to the words they use
People leak their VAK in every sentence they speak. You just have to tune your ear.
Visual language: - "I see what you're saying." - "Show me." - "Let me look at it." - "Let me picture that." - "I can see that working." - "That looks good to me." - "The outlook is..."
Auditory language: - "I hear you." - "Sounds good." - "Let me listen to it." - "That rings true." - "Tell me more." - "Can we hop on a call?" - "It doesn't sound right."
Kinesthetic language: - "I get it." - "I like the vibe of this place." - "That feels right." - "Let me get my hands on it." - "I'm not connecting with that." - "That resonates / that grabs me." - "It just clicked."
Once you start listening for these, you cannot un-hear them. You'll catch yourself doing it too. I respond to emails with "sounds good to me" — I didn't hear anything, I'm auditory. When someone writes "let me know how it looks," they're visual. The language tells you the channel.
How each VAK prefers to be sold to
Visual customers: - Love emails, PDFs, pictures, spec sheets, diagrams, spreadsheets, charts. - Want to see the quote in writing before they talk about it. - Want data and images to look at. - Bad channel for them: a quick phone call with no follow-up email.
Auditory customers: - Love phone calls, voice memos, conversations. - Want to talk through the decision, not read about it. - Will happily let you spend 40 minutes on the phone. Hate walls of text. - Bad channel for them: sending a 4-page spec and expecting them to read it.
Kinesthetic customers: - Love in-person visits, site walk-throughs, doing things together. - Want to handle the sample. Want to see your truck. Want to walk the jobsite. - Not email people. Not phone people. In-person people. - Bad channel for them: a detailed email pitch they never open.
A ton of friction in sales — "I keep sending him quotes and he doesn't respond" — is actually VAK mismatch. You're sending emails (visual) to a kinesthetic guy who would actually engage if you stopped by his jobsite and handed him the number.
Why construction skews kinesthetic
Here's a specific observation I've earned from coaching in the ready-mix space for years.
"A lot of the people in your industry came out of operations. They make concrete. They give it to people who put concrete on the earth. It's a very kinesthetic industry."
This is important. Construction-industry buyers skew kinesthetic as a demographic. They're hands-on people. They got into the business because they like being out in the field. They're not in accounting staring at spreadsheets — they're on a jobsite in steel-toed boots.
Which means: a visual-first email strategy, or an auditory phone-bomb strategy, is going to be a structurally weaker fit for a large share of your customers than an in-person jobsite-visit strategy.
That doesn't mean email and phone don't work — they do, for specific customers, at specific moments. But if your whole approach is email-heavy and you're wondering why your response rates are mediocre, there's a decent chance you're running the wrong channel for the industry you're in.
Get in the truck. Go see them. More of them are kinesthetic than visual or auditory.
The before-and-after book story
When I was starting out in sales, I was in a different industry — I sold garage cleanup. I had a box truck. Inside it, I built a one-car garage demo — a mini staged garage in the back of the truck so I could open the doors at someone's house and show them what the finished product looked like. I also carried a thick physical before-and-after book with photos of every job I'd done.
Watch what happened at every sales call:
- Visual people would flip through the before-and-after book. "Oh, they had a red bike — we've got a blue one." They wanted pictures. The book sold them.
- Auditory people ignored the book and said "tell me about that one, what's this thing, how does that work?" They wanted me to talk them through it. The conversation sold them.
- Kinesthetic people climbed into the box truck and walked around the demo garage. "This is cool, I can see this, I can touch it." The physical mock-up sold them.
Same product, three different sales motions — and if I'd only had one of the three tools, I'd have lost a third of my potential customers. The point isn't to do all three every time. The point is to notice what channel the customer is preferring and match it.
Most sellers only have one motion. They default to whatever is most comfortable for them — and then wonder why some customers aren't responding. The answer is always: you're selling in your own channel, not theirs.
The direct-ask move
If you don't want to guess — just ask. Cleanly, once, early in the relationship:
"Hey — how do you like to stay in touch? Phone, email, or me just swinging by your office every few weeks? What works best for you?"
Nine out of ten customers will tell you. "Oh, email's fine." / "Honestly just stop by, I never read email." / "Call me, I hate email."
That's the VAK, delivered to you as a gift. Use it. Stop running the default.
VAK and DISC — how they stack
A common question: is VAK the same as DISC? No. They're different slices of the same person.
- DISC tells you how someone makes decisions — fast vs. slow, task vs. relationship.
- VAK tells you what channel their brain prefers — picture, sound, feel.
A high-D customer could be visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. A high-S customer could also be any of the three. You need to read both to really adapt your approach.
Practically: DISC drives your pacing and warmth. VAK drives your medium. Match both and you're running a custom sales motion for each customer. Most sellers run one motion for everybody, which is why most sellers are average.
Homework — the VAK tuning week
This week:
- For five customer interactions this week, write down the one or two VAK words or phrases the customer used that gave away their channel. ("I see what you're saying" → visual. "Sounds good" → auditory. "I'm not connecting with that" → kinesthetic.)
- For each one, make a note of what channel you've been defaulting to with them. Is it matching?
- For two customers where you think you've been mismatching — intentionally switch channels the next time you contact them. (If you've been emailing a kinesthetic, drop by. If you've been phone-bombing a visual, send a clean PDF with the key info.)
- Notice whether engagement changes.
Most sellers, once they run this for a month, start unconsciously matching without thinking about it. That's the end state you're going for.
Where to go next
- Communication Pie — words vs. tonality vs. body language, another cut of how humans communicate
- DISC — the decision-style dimension, complementary to VAK
- Style Matching — how to dial pace, warmth, and detail by style
- DISC Voicemail — a specific application, adapted per style
- Clark Kent — the posture that lets you observe VAK cleanly in the first place
Source: drawn from 48 moments across the live-coaching corpus — including the visual/auditory/kinesthetic word-cue catalog, the box-truck before-and-after-book story, the "construction is kinesthetic" industry observation, and the direct-ask script. Voice preserved.