Comment by 40four | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 40four | Hacker News Reader

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I had never heard of this book, or color system before, but it makes me think of my time working in car sales. Our senior sales managers trained us to identify personalities, and they used similar groupings.

There were four 'buckets' and they are very close to this color system. They are dominant driver, complacent, ego driven, and analytical. The idea is to, as quickly as possible, identify the customer's type, and adapt your sales approach to that. You learn to use a communication style for each bucket. Different types of questions to ask, different speed/ energy, different body language.

I was a terrible salesperson, but I watched the managers and top salespeople use this approach with much success. They would match their style of communication with the customer's, in an attempt to earn their favor and make them feel more comfortable. The hypothesis is this increases the likelihood of closing the sale.

I understand these buckets (colors) aren't scientific, and it sounds like some folks in Sweden might have taken it too far or been misled. But the article says

"Erikson has repeatedly claimed that the benefit of his colour approach is that it helps us understand ourselves and others and, as a result, improves our communication and reduces conflicts."

So I'm not sure that the idea of learning different ways people communicate, and in turn, how you yourself can communicate in different ways is a 'fraud'. To be fair, I haven't read the book so I don't know how or what ideas are presented.

I think the 4 buckets/colors can just be a loose 'framework'. As long as you understand it's not the end all - be all of personality. In fact it's not really 'personality' at all. It's just a quick and dirty way of grouping common characteristics of people.

Maybe it's not useful in all situations, but for some applications (like sales), there is certainly value in communicating with people in a way that is compatible with their style. In the case of car sales, it's very tangible value, a larger paycheck :)

I think one issue with the colour approach is, that multiple dimensions of character traits are thrown into one pot (one colour) even though, they might be independent traits. Also, saying, someone is one/two/three colours is quite an all or nothing approach, that does not reflect reality, as character traits are non-binary (see for example the scientifically more grounded “Big Five”).

Over all, when a good salesman closes a deal, with the knowledge of this approach that you have been taught, it does not say, that the approach works. A good salesman uses common sense and experience in talking with people and of course adapts to the customer, but that does not mean, that he uses this special theory. (Maybe, you did perform bad, because you used the theory )

I would say, if we did a study with a control group, one group has been taught the theory, you have been taught, and the control group is not (but maybe, we tell them, take notice of the other person and try to adapt to their character), and if we notice, that the theory trained salesmen actually perform better, then we can say this framework is of any use. We still don’t know, of course, if not a different form of training could outperform this framework. Until then, it is just anecdotal evidence.

>I was a terrible salesperson, but I watched the managers and top salespeople use this approach with much success. They would match their style of communication with the customer's, in an attempt to earn their favor and make them feel more comfortable. The hypothesis is this increases the likelihood of closing the sale.

Yes. People are less "unique" than they think, and some scientists (or non scientists) can come up with useful pattern matching/abstractions over people types (like in the book), while others study subtlety and small differences at another level, and are sometimes deluded that higher level personality types don't exist.

That doesn't mean that this or that theory of types is fool-proof and always applicable. But it also doesn't have to be, to be scientific (which just needs it to be falsifiable, empirical based on observation, testable, and useful for predictions).

A scientific theory != a law of nature. The former doesn't have to always hold. It could still create very useful models for predicting people behavior with success.

Well said. This is the right way to look at it I think. It’s a loose model, or abstraction. For some applications it provides utility/ value. Others, not so much.

It’s not a universal definition of personality, but more a rough set of patterns of communication style, where in really many different personalities might fall under.

So there is one big distinction in how these systems are used in corporate culture vs sales culture. That is, in the Sales culture the system is trying to describe a personality type based in one context, buying a car, not trying to generalize people across every context.

Someone may be generally very detail oriented yet when they buy a car, they may be very complacent. In fact you could think that a 'more ideal' color system would look like some 4 colored Piet Mondrian painting.

You say that 1) the framework was encouraged at your work place, 2) you were a terrible salesperson, 3) great salespeople were great at sales (implying that they were helped by the framework).

If the framework were even a tiny bit useful, wouldn’t it have made you at least an okay salesman?

Conversely, wouldn’t the great salesmen be great regardless of how valid a framework is?

Well for me, it didn’t work because I wasn’t able to execute it. I understood the concepts I was taught well enough, but don’t really possess the tools needed to make it work. I’m not a people person, I talk very monotone, quite frankly I don’t have the personality for it! (Why I tried to learn sales at all is a whole other story) Haha, that’s why into programming, which is perfectly suited for my personality.

Also, the ‘personality’ piece is a small (but important) part of the larger framework that is car sales. We literally had a physical ‘playbook’ to follow. A very well defined ‘road’ to walk the customer down, and if you skipped any of the steps, it would jeopardize the whole process. Sales really is a solved puzzle, every step & technique is there for a reason, because it is proven to close people down.

So no, a great salesperson won’t be great regardless, they will be great because they follow the rules of sales. Natural charisma & like-ability go a long way, but I saw numerous guys who were terrible when they started, work hard at the system and perfect the process, end up selling 20 cars a month.

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