[Extract from a Harvard Business School article]
The Psychology of Sales People - HBS Review
Archetypes in business
Cultural archetypes appear in religions, dreams, and the arts. They drive our myths and epics as well as basic rituals such as cleaning and eating habits. Not surprisingly, many cultural archetypes cut across different societies. The Hero is a common one, as are the Seductress and the Witch. Typically, archetypes are so deeply embedded in a culture that people are unaware of them.
Each culture has a pool of shared archetypes that guide the behaviors of its members—a collective unconscious. An attempt to decipher the collective unconscious of your customers, employees, and stakeholders is essential for success.
What have archetypes got to do with sales?
They are the essence of sales. The art of selling is complicated in every nation, but it is always influenced by collective experience.
For instance, for the Japanese, aesthetics is an archetype of quality and, ultimately, of soul. Just look at their calligraphy, the exquisite ceremony that they put into pouring a pot of tea, the care they put into presenting food. To NTT, the ugliness of American cables was an indication of how little soul AT&T had put into its work.
The people at Nike captured the American archetype of quality perfectly with the slogan “Just Do It”—and look at its success.
They’re both—like language, to which archetypes are closely related. Language is innate; it is hardwired. To be human is to speak. But think about the fact that there is no word for “intimacy” in Japanese. This is cultural, not biological, and it has centuries of history behind it. Japan is a very small and dense country; people are forced to live close together. Because privacy is very rare, so is intimacy, and the language reflects this fact.
lLanguage is not only a means of communication but also a way of defining realities. It’s not insignificant, I think, that the Japanese also have many ways to say “I,” depending on whether the speaker is talking to a spouse, a child, or a boss. In a hierarchical culture where space is so limited, the language reflects the need for everyone to know his or her place.
Is there a universal archetype of the salesperson?
All archetypes differ according to culture, but some aspects of the archetype are universal. Consider, for example, the Warrior. This archetype may manifest itself in Japan as a samurai and in the United States as a cowboy, but in both cultures, the Warrior is a fighter who takes on society and wins.
Similarly, although manifestations of the Salesperson archetype vary from culture to culture, there is an “ur-archetype,” if you will. Salespeople are Happy Losers. Whether they know it or not, they are like addicted gamblers; they are after the thrill. On some level, addicted gamblers know that they are going to lose most of the time, but they are excited by the outside chance of winning. Salespeople share that temperament. They are pros at losing. They are rejected at least 90% of the time.
How does a manager handle these Happy Losers?
It’s all connected to the excitement of losing so much of the time. Managers can’t “sell” salespeople on the idea that they will always win. The way to manage your sales reps is to show them that you understand how hard it is to lose. You want them to be happy—otherwise, they’d be Unhappy Losers, and that’s the last thing you need. Obviously, money is not an unimportant factor in managing a sales force. In the right industry, salespeople can make a million dollars in a single year. But my research shows that money is not what really drives them to get back in there and keep trying. It’s the value they place on the struggle.
To motivate your sales reps, therefore, you have to find better and more ways for them to struggle. Give them bigger projects where they can have even bigger losses. Hold huge company meetings where you give a salesperson the gold medal of rejection: Jonathan sold 500,000 computers last month, but he was rejected 5 million times!
Can you give an example of how cultural interpretations of the archetype affect sales?
Just look at the differences between American and French attitudes toward selling. In America, salesmanship is a game and a pleasure; it’s respected. In France, being a salesman is low class; it’s crass. You’ve got to remember that the very concept of work is beneath the French. What is one of the most popular books in France? Bonjour paresse [Hello Laziness], by Corinne Maier. It’s about how to pretend to be working while in fact you are doing nothing. Only the French could invent something like that. In America, you’re nobody if you do not work. In France, you have to beg merchants to take your money, and even then they may not take it.
Are there archetype differences across industries?
Very much so. With beauty products, for example, it often helps to understand the archetype of the Great Mother, the nurturer of children. So P&G sells one of its most successful hair care lines, Pantene, by promoting nutrition. Women have to feed their hair, nurture it. Pantene, in other words, appeals to the maternal instinct in women. But to sell perfume, you have to appeal to the Seductress. You have to understand women’s desire to be attractive, their need to be wanted, their fear of aging. Salespeople who appreciate this archetype can get women to pay $3,000 for three bottles of perfume that you can make for $3.
In pharmaceutical companies, the key archetype is different again. Sales reps have to persuade doctors to prescribe certain drugs. The Internet has made this task more complicated because patients these days often know more than the doctor. Physicians hate this, and it’s by playing on that feeling that good salespeople can win the hearts and souls of doctors. Obviously, they must give doctors more information so that the physicians can display their greater intelligence to their patients, but the real challenge is to understand the doctors’ pain. Medical doctors today feel that they cannot be doctors anymore. It’s not only the Internet; it’s the government, too. Medicine has become one great bureaucracy, and doctors hate that as well. So the good sales rep treats the doctor as the Wise Old Man who saves lives, not the bureaucrat he has in fact become.
How do you decode archetypes?
Use the same process - get together a cross section of consumers from various cultures and backgrounds for a very nontraditional experience. Ask the consumers what they think of salespeople. Next, ask people to tell me short stories about salespeople. This allows them to connect with their feelings and sets the mood for the third hour, which is the most productive. Then, ask people to jot down memories of salespeople that are evoked by the music. Most people record their mental imprints of salespeople.
What is a mental imprint, and how is it related to an archetype?
The mental imprint is the result of a learning process that takes place early in life and establishes an unconscious behavior pattern.
First experiences are very powerful. Each one creates a mental highway in the nervous system, and afterward, we use this pathway or chain of neurons in the brain. I try to get people to go back to their first experience of a salesperson because the imprints point to the archetype. The mental imprints are like a pair of sunglasses that you put on to let you look at the sun without damaging your vision. It’s mental imprints that led me to the archetype of salespeople as Happy Losers.
How can you verify whether your archetypes are right?
When I’m speaking about America, for example, I’ll point out that it is a country that is intensely mobile and yet one that invests highly in the concept of “home.” America is the only country in the world where people buy mobile homes that never move. When people laugh again and again, this pattern of repetition becomes, in its own right, verification.
Comentarios