Have you ever had this thought, This person thinks the same way as someone else?
If you have observed the people around you closely, especially when selling to your clients, you most likely realized that certain people have similar thoughts and actions.
This is the secret that most successful financial advisors and salespeople have learned, either unconsciously or consciously, and strategically applied different communication styles to suit the various customer classes, making their clients want to buy, stay loyal, and refer others.
And this is not an entirely new idea; you've probably heard of MBTI, DISC, Enneagram, Big 5 (OCEAN) and other personality models. What are their differences?
We will share our opinions on the different profiling systems and why we eventually went with the Temperament Sorter.
Differences Between MBTI, DISC, Enneagram and Big 5 (OCEAN)
There are many personality profiling systems. Each of them have their way of categorising people for different applications like self-understanding, teamwork, persuasion, and more. Not all are equally suited for everything.
For our use case, we studied them to identify the most effective tool in the context of high ticket sales and effective communication.
The MBTI is of intermediate complexity, and we found that the most useful application of this is in team dynamics — to understand how people work with one another in a team.
The Enneagram is best used for self-understanding, as well as understanding your own development and growth path. Getting a good grasp on the Enneagram as a whole needs proper study; if not, you might fall into the trap of oversimplifying this wonderful framework.
The DISC falls on the other spectrum. While DISC definitely can have a high level of complexity, most people’s understanding and application of it are rather basic. It has two dimensions and four behaviour types. DISC is most popular due to the simplicity of its application, but we found its application in profiling someone’s psyche to be lacking.
The Big 5 (OCEAN) is descriptive, not explanatory, meaning it provides little explanation for the underlying causes of personality traits. It also focuses on a continuum of traits without considering the potential for categorical differences in personality, which makes it challenging to translate these insights into practical sales recommendations.
Our tool of choice to build the Human Intelligence System (HIS) upon is the Temperament Sorter by David Keirsey. Among all these systems, David Keirsey’s work had a balance of simplicity (i.e., there are only four types) and depth that we were looking for.
Most of all, it has a great application in selling to uncover the hidden needs and objections of any client you are facing, making it a key component of AI-powered sales intelligence.
Why Human Intelligence System (Temperament Sorter) Over The Other Frameworks
The Human Intelligence System is a superior model compared to DISC and Enneagram for sales applications, primarily due to its simplicity of usage and meaningfulness of information.
Simplicity of Usage: The primary goal of salespeople is to sell to clients, not to become experts in personality theories. The Human Intelligence System is designed to help sales professionals learn and apply the insights quickly and integrate them into their sales process.
With only four temperament types ( Knight, Explorer, Healer and Wizard) the model is much easier to understand and implement than the Enneagram, which has nine types and does not offer a specific sales system for learners. The DISC model, with its four dimensions (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness), while being simple, has its challenges as illustrated in the next section.
Meaningfulness of Information: The Temperament Sorter Model's insights can be leveraged to craft a comprehensive sales strategy covering various aspects of the sales process, from lead generation and prospecting to closing the deal and following up. This helps sales teams leverage AI for sales teams and implement sales and marketing automation for maximum efficiency.
Classifying people into four types based on their unique motivations and values is more meaningful and actionable in a sales context compared to the DISC model, which measures observable behaviours, and the Enneagram, which delves into deeper psychological aspects without a clear connection to AI in sales and marketing.
The Human Intelligence System provides sales professionals with the necessary information to understand their clients, address their specific needs, and tailor their sales approach accordingly, ultimately increasing the chances of success.
In summary, The Human Intelligence System that leverages the Temperament Sorter Model by David Keirsey is a superior model for sales applications compared to DISC and Enneagram due to its simplicity of usage and meaningfulness of information.
By providing sales professionals with a straightforward and actionable framework to understand their clients' motivations and values, the Human Intelligence System enables them to craft effective sales strategies and close deals more successfully.
Background of The Temperament Sorter
David Keirsey discovered that the idea of people being born with fundamentally different dispositions was an ancient one. The idea was first proposed in an outline by Hippocrates around 370 B.C. The Roman physician Galen refined it in 190 A.D., and this idea was prevalent all the way from then up to the 19th century.
Then, there was a period in the early 1900s where many scholars believed this wasn’t the case. Ivan Pavlov, the scientist with the famous experiment with the dog and bells, asserted that behaviours were just a mechanical response to the environment.
John Watson, an American behaviourist, thought he could shape a child into any shape he wanted, provided he took charge of them from birth.
Sigmund Freud believed we were all driven from within by instinctual lust. In other words, these scholars believed that everyone was the same by nature, and any differences were purely shaped by our environment — i.e., we are all moulded by nurture.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, disagreed. In his famous book, Psychological Types, he described that people are different in fundamental ways and that these differences are not random but form a pattern. He believed that people have a range of instincts driving them from within, and these instincts could be categorized and studied.
Such scholarly knowledge did not reach the layperson on the street. Carl Jung’s studies, even though groundbreaking, were too complicated and inaccessible to read. Like many scientific journals and academic papers, they stayed within the boundaries of universities, where only scholars studied them.
The breakthrough to mainstream came when Isabel Myers and her mother, Katherine Briggs, took Psychological Types and created a questionnaire to help laypeople understand their personality type. That was when the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was born. Today, millions upon millions of people have taken this test, and the MBTI is one of the most famous profiling tests used by top companies throughout the world.
The MBTI, however, is too complex for what we want to achieve with the Human Intelligence System. There are 16 types in the MBTI, which is too multifaceted for the purposes of selling.
David Keirsey studied the origins of personality theory and then adapted the 16 types of MBTI, integrating them into the ancient system with four classifications.
He named them Guardians, Artisans, Idealists, and Rationals. Each had their unique sets of worldviews, intelligence, ego, and values. Understanding each of these types at that level meant not just understanding their preferred behaviours but also the undercurrents that drive them. In other words, David Keirsey was able to share what made people tick from his framework.
Birth of The Human Intelligence System
We found these four classifications to have a great balance of depth in understanding someone’s psychology and simplicity, and have since integrated and adapted this system and created a selling framework from it, called the Human Intelligence System.
In this system, we categorized the four different customer classes: Knights, Explorers, Healers, and Wizards.
Have you identified which class you belong to yet? Login to take our quiz!