The New Rules of Engagement (For Humans)
If you follow this blog, you’ve noticed a long time gap between my last post (The Killer Rabbit of Caarbannog) and this one. I wasn’t loafing (much). Creating a framework to navigate a transformed world — as Dr. Teich and the rest of our soon to be unveiled team believe we’ve done — takes a while.
My prior post (Part 1) introduced archetypes, a cornerstone of Carl Jung’s psychological theories. Jung’s long-time collaborator, Sigmund Freud, is considered the father of psychoanalysis and is universally respected, while (continuing with the Part 1 metaphor) Jung is like Monty Python and truffles: some revere him, other think he’s nuts, and most people neither have — nor care to have — an opinion.
If Jung seems a bit “out there,” somehow his work dominates corporate America: the Myers-Briggs Personality Index, and dozens of similar assessments now ubiquitous in hiring, are based on Jung’s theories. Even if you haven’t taken these tests, you’ve been targeted by the same Jungian framework: Advertising, particularly the Madison Avenue $10 Million-a-minute Super Bowl kind, draws heavily on Jung. The Hero and the Outlaw, written in 2001, became like the Physicians Desk Reference for Mad-Men, codifying twelve archetypes — shown below — for firms to anchor their brands to:
These twelve characters represent inner drives and their outward behaviors. There are also archetypal stories, with include their own evolving archetypal characters. The Quest for the Holy Grail is one such story, including the chivalrous Knight, who values loyalty and honor above all. The Knight is a common archetypal character, and The Quest is one of seven archetypal plots along with Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Voyage and Return, Comedy, and Tragedy and Rebirth.
Our 2018 technology would confuse and confound Plato. Yet — assuming he understood the language— he’d relate, psychologically, to the plots on Netflix. He might not get British humor, but the Holy Grail story would resonate deeply: the archetypal Quest — aka Hero’s Journey — is history’s most universal plot.
Plato might have originated the concept of archetypes. Or not. It’s a contentious subject amongst the historians, psychologists and philosophers who care to debate such things. Jung was clear that Plato’s writings, along with ancient mythology and Eastern philosophies, overlaid his psychological research to advance his theory that activated archetypes underpin fundamental human behaviors. After the First World War, Katharine Cook Briggs, soon joined by her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, after studying Jung’s then-new work, set out to create a practical guide to personality types. It took until the Second World War to complete the initial version. Seventy years later, their MBTI assessment is used by 88% of the Fortune 500.
After a century in psychology, and a couple of decades in marketing, archetypes found their way into sales. The 2012 book, The Challenger Sale, introduced a set of archetypes specific to salespeople:
The Challenger sales methodology, while excellent, isn’t groundbreaking — mostly it relabels and refreshes “solution sales” which, with various spins (including SPIN), dominated Enterprise selling since the the mainframe era. Yet The Challenger Sale book became an instant best-seller, and CEB’s consulting around it an overnight sensation. Their refresh resonated with vendors frustrated by buyers increasing tendency to independently evaluate new solutions below the radar before calling sales. It also oriented on the new reality that when prospects did call, salespeople typically found them with buyers decisions mostly made, and buying teams armed to the teeth with competitive information. And — perhaps most importantly — it added a hard (for sales managers) to resist twist by analyzing successful reps, bucketing them into the personas pictured above, and quantitatively ranking their effectiveness. Sales archetypes.
Neither the Challenger Sale — nor a follow-on book: The Challenger Customer, which applied this same approach to the other side of the table — actually used the word archetype. They called their buckets profiles (with buyers, they identified seven: Go-Getter, Friend, Skeptic, Teacher, Guide, Climber and Blocker). The distinction is semantic — anyone who’s sold recognizes the Challenger profiles as archetypal sales behaviors, just as the customer profiles are common and easily identifiable buying team behaviors.
In interviews and articles discussing the books, the authors made a key point: their profiles aren’t mutually exclusive. This is critical and largely misunderstood aspect of archetypes. Quoting author Matt Dixon:
They’re definitely not mutually exclusive profiles, since most salespeople have a bit of all of these qualities. Think of it as being like your major in college. These profiles are primary spikes in how sales reps engage with a customer.
And in making that point, Dixon uses what’s become a profound word: engage.
In a sales and marketing context, engaging is the process of getting and occupying someone’s attention on the way to a purchase decision. As 3IR transitioned to 4IR, the concept of engagement gained buzzword status, and has become a key marketing goal — spoken of reverently, and often quantified for automated marketing and sales forecasting via an algorithmic engagement score. In Enterprise sales, it includes the entire series of interactions during a purchase cycle.
As we’ve seen in prior posts, us human’s crave labels and rankings. And since Enterprise sales is a challenging business, The Challenger Sale’s success isn’t surprising. When it hit the scene in 2011, the world — and complex sales in particular— had already shifted to the vendor-frustrating paradigm described above. In his sales book To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink summed up buyers behavioral shift as Caveat Venditor —”seller beware.” The Challenger Sale archetypes — like those for branding and personalities — offer a semblance of order to the chaotic interplay of human feelings with subconscious instincts, rational thought, and the sensory input that together combine to create emotions and behaviors.
In the blip in evolutionary time that humans have been around, our brain hasn’t changed. Yet there is one impactful and constantly evolving arc of change from ancient times through the era of Jung, then Myers-Briggs, and the relatively recent world of the Hero and the Outlaw: the way we engage and interact. The Challenger archetypes attempted — for the first time — to apply the archetypal model to engagement: in this case, Enterprise sales. It was a fine initial step. Like any initial step on an important topic, it inspired deeper analysis and refinement.
That analysis requires a deep exploration into the evolution of interaction. In the world of Jung and Myers-Briggs, people conversed — perhaps more deeply than todays world of sound bytes, and at a slower-pace, and in societies tightly constrained by both communication media and social norms. Over the coming decades the pace quickened, societal constraints loosened, and technology gave us broadcasting— the world of the Hero and the Outlaw. Finally, in the early days of 4IR, The Challenger addressed the way salespeople and buyers conducted their specialized genre of engagement.
Branding archetypes, the Challenger, Myers Briggs, and even Jung archetypes like the Wise Old Man are nouns. Static archetypes that helped manage meaning, conversing, messaging, and even collaborating in a world of thoughtful longhand letters written in flowery language, time-honed print ad copy, lavishly produced TV commercials, and a limited number of carefully curated and mostly one-way media.
That world is gone.
In its’ place is — finally — the world described at the dawn of the Internet era in the Cluetrain Manifesto where: …”markets are getting smarter, …and getting smarter faster than most companies…These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”
Describing Cluetrain, the Wall Street Journal wrote:
The idea that business, at bottom, is fundamentally human. That engineering remains second-rate without aesthetics. That natural, human conversation is the true language of commerce. That corporations work best when the people on the inside have the fullest contact possible with the people on the outside.
Now that we’re living in Cluetrain’s conversation world, we need new understanding in the field of archetypal study and practice. Interaction has become too dynamic for the fixed notion of static, “imaged” archetypes that are ubiquitous in Western mythology, psychology, branding and — since The Challenger Sale — selling.
And so, we’ve developed an archetypal framework for today’s “dynamic “natural, human conversation that is the true language of commerce.”
This framework — Engagement Archetypes — is transformative. It’s a framework to relate — to navigate complexity and the unknown — to have the genuine conversations that are the key to authentic relationships.
It took us years to get here. And it will only be one more week till I introduce this framework that we believe will be the standard for conversational commerce — the cornerstone of 4IR.
