The Poetry of Sales: An Exquisite Exercise

Picture it: 1925, in the parlor of a slightly run-down house on the left bank of Paris, and you’re hanging out late into the night with your friends. Your crew happens to be composed of fellow novelists, poets, and painters—specifically, all part of the Surrealist movement, which celebrates depicting the odd and illogical in pursuit of expressing what Sigmund Freud would call the “unconscious mind.” The wine is running low, and even Marcel Duchamp has tired of smoking, yet you’re looking to keep each other’s artistic fires stoked for another hour or two.

Card games exist for such evenings, but no one has money to bet. One go-to game that doesn’t require anyone to open their wallets is “Consequences,” a practice of crowd-sourcing a story, one key word at a time, around a predetermined topic; decades later, American audiences will play a variation of this known as “Mad Libs.” As usual, André Breton has his pen and paper ready. But even that feels a little too fussy and rule-bound at this point in the evening. What’s a looser, wilder way to take advantage of all these brilliant minds sharing one room?

These are the circumstances that invented “Exquisite Corpse”: a challenge that produces neither winners nor losers, only co-creators. Using a convention for each line such as “Adjective_ Noun_ Verb_ Adjective_ Noun_,” each participant contributes one word to a shared piece of paper, stringing together a poem. No participant can see the words written before their own. The funky name comes from poet Jacques Prévert’s inaugural contribution, which helped create the line, translated from French, “The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine.”

The premise of this month’s blog series is to find the poetry in sales, so you may be wondering why we’re imagining ourselves playing games on a stinky couch in early-20th-Century Montparnasse. Sales happen because you trust the team you work with, and you develop that trust one project at a time. This post explores the power of collaboration.

RECLAIM YOUR WEIRD

Remember how creative you were as a kid? The worlds you could build in a single day? Your mind was open to the universe’s possibilities. No one had told you to curb your beautiful weirdness yet. In 2016, a child’s poem from an anthology produced by 826DC—a nonprofit devoted to young writers ages 6–18, and based in my city of Washington, D.C.—went viral precisely because the words so perfectly embodied the power of childhood’s unfettered imagination. Here is the full text of “The Tiger,” by six-year-old Nael:

The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out

The Exquisite Corpse process unleashes our inner tigers; by which I mean, the game’s constraint frees us from feeling responsibility for the outcome, which lets us volunteer untamed ideas. We don’t have to worry about what comes before—in the sales world, this might be akin to the budget—or what comes after, akin to the timeline. Our job in the moment is only to dream big.

Anyone who has ever led a brainstorming initiative will agree that the most important shaping ideas rarely come from inside the box or, metaphorically, the tiger’s cage. This brings us back to the importance of believing in the combined powers of your team. What may feel like a figment of one person’s fancy can become, catalyzed by another person’s expertise, an executable strategy. We only discover these opportunities if we feel liberated to share. Sometimes that looks like writing something down, folding to hide your words, and passing the paper along.

HOW IT WORKS

An Exquisite Corpse can be constructed over a number of timelines. I once attended an art exhibit that featured a vintage typewriter, parked on a pedestal at standing-height. The typewriter was loaded with a roll of paper that fed back into a box, obscuring previous typed lines from view. “Add to our community poem,” the instructions invited passers-by, with the intent to compose a single poem over the course of a month. I’ve taken part in Exquisite Corpses assembled over the length of open mics, neighborhood dinners, and—one time—a wedding.

An Exquisite Corpse can also vary in media. Some Surrealists adapted the technique to yield drawings, typically ordered in terms of “head,” folded over to hide most of the drawing; “torso,” folded over; then “legs”; finally, “feet.” When Frida Kahlo joined in, she was notorious for introducing erotic elements; I don’t advise you to bring that part into the workplace. But for teams that think visually, this is a playful variation that gets away from language entirely. If looking for a longer shape to accommodate more participants, try a snake or a dragon.   

The non-negotiable element is the way that previous contributions are obscured. In physically shared spaces, this looks like folding paper or feeding it out of sight; in virtual spaces, participants can introduce page-breaks in a shared document to create buffers of blank screen. For sales-world participants who are used to having the authority to steer projects, and accustomed to aiming for excellence, there may be a surprising amount of organic resistance to surrendering executive overview. That’s the whole point here: valuing teamwork over ego.

EVOLVING THE MODEL

If you’re bringing the Exquisite Corpse to a conference or sales training as an icebreaker activity, you can make practical tweaks. Got an event planner cringing at putting the word “Corpse” on the agenda? Fair. Name it a “Franken-poem” or, if you want to avoid intimidating anyone with the loftiness of verse, make it a “Franken-story” instead. If a higher degree of formality is required, call it a “Collaborative Storytelling Exercise.” You might relate the Exquisite Corpse’s origin story once in person, though—couches, cognac, and cigars strictly optional.

If you’re worried about warming people up, consider creating a social contract in the form of a word bank. Before you’ve even explained the game, ask people for favorite words, encouraging a mix of verbs, nouns, and adjectives; accumulate as many words as there are people in the room. This becomes a set of words that must be used somehow, some way, one word per line. People can “claim” any word that they themselves did not contribute. If in person, claiming might look like erasing the word from a whiteboard; if online, striking through on a shared document.

There’s no guarantee that an Exquisite Corpse poem is going to be a polished literary masterpiece. In fact, that’s highly unlikely. But if the resulting poem is evidence of spontaneity, wildness, and problem-solving even when given incomplete information? If the colleagues putting together the poem laughed together, and groaned together, and wondered how on earth they were going to collectively incorporate “orange,” “pirouette,” and “anvil” into their text? That sounds even better. That sounds like the roar of a tiger bounding out from his cage.

We can help your team with both the science and the art of sales. Reach us at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, coaching, and consulting.