Let’s face it: Drama sells.
Drama fuels blockbusters, drives ratings, attracts eyeballs, keeps people glued to screens of all shapes and sizes, and turns human frailty into spectacle. Humans are hardwired to watch drama as it unfolds, especially when it’s messy and emotional. How do you not look at a train wreck that you know is about to happen? Yet drama – which we can define as a predictable pattern of dysfunctional role-playing that replaces integrity and accountability with short-term self-protection games – as entertaining as it may be when we approach it as consumers of popular media, has its downsides. Most important for sales professionals, perhaps, is the way drama has of degrading and even destroying the performance potential of salespeople and sales teams.
That’s the bad news. The good news is: once we take just a few moments to understand what drama really is, what perpetuates it, and how it distorts communication, erodes trust, and sabotages relationships, we can learn how to keep it out of our workplace -- and out of our sales cycle.
Drama doesn’t merely distract; it eats away at trust, accountability, and results. Conversations with prospects, colleagues, and team leaders get muddy, expectations go unspoken, important issues get sidelined, and people stop telling each other the truth.
So how does drama show up, exactly? Sandler spotlights the drama problem using a classic psychological framework known as the Drama Triangle. You don’t need a background in psychology to understand this model. You only need to recognize the roles people fall into and the speed with which those roles rotate.
The Drama Triangle is a game. Players of this game may adopt one of three roles: the Victim, the Rescuer, and the Persecutor.
- The Victim believes bad things are happening to them. They don’t believe they are the cause of anything occurring in the situation.
- The Rescuer believes it is their responsibility to save the situation. The “save” typically is temporary, and typically precludes growth and accountability on the part of the Victim.
- The Persecutor assigns blame and applies pressure. They often do this under the banner of “accountability” or “fairness/justice.”
Those are the three roles. Only one person can occupy each role at a time. However, people may move between roles with amazing rapidity, sometimes within a span of minutes or even seconds. When three people are involved in a game of Drama Triangle, the triangle often spins continuously, and players play multiple roles in quick succession. Here’s an example of how that might play out.
Juanita, a salesperson, asks her boss Devon for help with a call. She is overbooked, distracted, and dealing with personal issues bleeding into her workday. She frames the request with urgency and optimism, emphasizing how close the deal is to closing and what it will mean for their ability to hit their quarterly number. The subtext for the message she sends to Devon is clear: I need help, because life has really messed me up this week. But if you step in, you can save my quarter. Juanita is operating out of Victim.
Devon say yes. In that moment, he becomes the Rescuer. He may not realize it, but he is now playing the Drama Triangle game. Life has really messed Juanita up this week! Now it’s his job to close the deal. Devon’s choice feels helpful, responsible, and team-oriented. But it’s robbing Juanita of agency.
Background materials are exchanged, calendars are reshuffled. The call happens. The deal does not close. In fact, it becomes clear it was never going to close on this call.
She stays in the Victim position. She expresses frustration and disbelief, insisting the deal was ready and implying it slipped away due to Devon’s actions and/or failures to act.
Devon, meanwhile, is recast as the Persecutor, defending his judgment and pushing back, from a blaming position, on Juanita’s unrealistic expectations. In fact, Devon argues, Juanita’s whole diagnosis of the situation was off – which means she wasn’t paying attention during training and wasn’t executing the sales process properly! Not only that, her organization skills are subpar! That’s what the problem is!
Frustration sharpens into finger-pointing and the self-protection cycle deepens. Expect the triangle to spin again. Expect everyone involved to feel wronged, defensive, and exhausted.
This dynamic is not limited to sales leaders. Salespeople, SDRs, account managers, sales engineers, and support staff all get pulled into the same loop. In fact, high performers and empathetic professionals are often the most vulnerable to the Drama Triangle game. The more capable you are, the more likely it is that someone will try to recruit you as their Rescuer.
Here’s the point: The only way to win this game is not to play. If you do not step into the Triangle in the first place, the game cannot begin. That does not mean you never offer to help or instantly withdraw support. It means refusing to participate in emotional games that replace adult-to-adult communication.
Before agreeing to help, true professionals slow the moment down. They clarify expectations, define outcomes, and acknowledge risks to both sides. They ask what success actually looks like and what happens if a given outcome is not achieved. If those questions, or the answers they uncover, feel uncomfortable to the professionals, that discomfort is not drama—it is information.
As a general rule, adults can handle information, even unexpected or unwelcome information. If you think about it, you’ll realize that that’s basically the definition of an adult! Victims, Rescuers, and Persecutors, on the other hand, tend to have more of a problem processing facts and situations that they did not design or predict.
Drama never fully disappears. Humans carry the potential for drama with them just about everywhere they go. Even so, professionalism is a choice we can learn to make repeatedly, even under pressure.
