Pilot
«Let's get to the point.»
Decides quickly and wants to see where this is going. A long warm-up loses them: if the point isn't clear in the first two minutes, they have already concluded it wasn't worth it. With them brevity isn't politeness, it's competence.
How you recognise them
- They interrupt to finish your point for you, and usually get it right.
- They ask the price or the impact before they have understood the product.
- Their emails are two lines, with no pleasantries, and they reply in three minutes.
- If the meeting is booked for an hour, they check the clock at minute forty.
How to open
«Three minutes on why I asked for this meeting, then you decide whether it's worth the other twenty.»
«The problem we solve is the gap between your best salesperson and your fifth. I'll tell you how, and where it doesn't work.»
The proof they weigh most
One attributable result, said in a single line, at a company they recognise. Not the methodology that produced it: they ask for that only if the result convinced them. The reverse order — method first, result after — is the fastest way to lose them.
The vocabulary
- «in short…»
- «the decision to make is…»
- «it costs you X, it returns Y»
- «if it doesn't work, here's how you get out»
- «it takes two weeks, not two months»
- long preambles and opening thank-yous
- «it's a journey», «it's a path we walk together»
- context slides before the proposal
- rapid-fire discovery questions with no sign of where they lead
- answers that start with «it depends» and stop there
The classic trap
Mistaking their speed for commitment. A Pilot says «fine, let's go ahead» long before they have actually decided, because closing the conversation is one way of controlling it. The yes that counts is the one where they give you a date and a name, not the one where they agree with you.
If you're one too
Two Pilots get to the point in four minutes and end the meeting with a handshake and nothing verifiable agreed. It moves fast and goes nowhere: slow down deliberately on one thing only, which is what happens next — who does what, by when.
And then there are the Regulators
The archetype sets the course, not the volume. Two people of the same archetype with opposite Security prepare differently: one wants guarantees and ways out, the other tolerates uncertainty when the opportunity is good. The same goes for Openness and Method. They're the three sliders that turn four categories into a prescription for one person.
How the TANDEM method worksThe other three archetypes
- Promoter
«Let me tell you something.»
- Architect
«Could you send me the documentation?»
- Builder
«How would my team experience this?»
An archetype is a hypothesis about communication style, not a judgement on the person and not a diagnosis. It exists for someone who has to prepare a conversation, and it should be dropped the moment the conversation says it was wrong.