Introduction
I show that the obituaries declaring the death of the salesman in today’s digital world are woefully mistaken. In the United States alone, some 1 in 9 workers still earns a living trying to get others to make a purchase.
More startling, though, is what’s happened to the other 8 in 9. They’re in sales, too. They’re not stalking customers in a furniture showroom, but they — make that we — are engaged in what I call “non-sales selling.” We’re persuading, convincing, and influencing others to give up something they’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got.
The new ABCs — Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity.
Rebirth of a Salesman
We’re All in Sales Now
Norman Hall shouldn’t exist. But here he is. Norman Hall is a Fuller Brush salesman. And not just any Fuller Brush salesman. He is . . . The. Last. One.
If you’re younger than forty or never spent much time in the United States, you might not recognize the Fuller Brush Man. But if you’re an American of a certain age, you know that once you couldn’t avoid him.
It all began in 1903, when an eighteen-year-old Nova Scotia farm boy named Alfred Fuller arrived in Boston to begin his career.
In February 2012, the Fuller Brush Company filed for reorganization under the U.S. bankruptcy law’s Chapter 11.
People don’t have time for a salesman. They want to order things online.
The song, almost always invoking Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, goes something like this: In a world where anybody can find anything with just a few keystrokes, intermediaries like salespeople are superfluous. They merely muck up the gears of commerce and make transactions slower and more expensive.
One out of every nine American workers works in sales. The United States has far more salespeople than factory workers.
The data show that rather than decline in relevance and size, sales has remained a stalwart part of labor markets around the world. Even as advanced economies have transformed — from hard goods and heavy lifting to skilled services and conceptual thinking — the need for salespeople has not abated.
People are now spending about 40 percent of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling — persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase. People consider this aspect of their work crucial to their professional success.
Many people are spending a decent amount of time trying to move others — but for some, moving others is the mainstay of their jobs. Most of us are movers; some of us are super-movers.
How did that happen? How did so many of us end up in the moving business?
Entrepreneurship, Elasticity, and Ed-Med
When we think of the differences between very large enterprises and very small ones, we often focus on differences in degree.
But equally important are differences in kind. What people actually do inside tiny operations is often fundamentally different from what they do within massive ones. In particular, large organizations tend to rely on specialization.
In bigger companies, selling is often a specialized function — a department, a division, a task that some people do so that others can specialize in something else. But proprietors of small operations don’t have that luxury.
Whether we call them artisans, non-employer businesses, free agents, or micro-entrepreneurs, these women and men are selling all the time.
One essential — and ultimately ironic — reason for this development: The technologies that were supposed to make salespeople obsolete in fact have transformed more people into sellers.
As Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist who in the early 1990s created the first Web browser, has said, “The smartphone revolution is underhyped.”
These handheld minicomputers certainly can destroy certain aspects of sales. Consumers can use them to conduct research, comparison-shop, and bypass salespeople altogether. But once again, the net effect is more creative than destructive. The same technology that renders certain types of salespeople obsolete has turned even more people into potential sellers. For instance, the existence of smartphones has birthed an entire app economy that didn’t exist before 2007, when Apple shipped its first iPhone.
A world of entrepreneurs is a world of salespeople.
Atlassian collected that entire amount — $ 100,000,000.00 in sales — without a single salesperson. Selling without a sales force sounds like confirmation of the “death of a salesman” meme. But Cannon-Brookes, the company’s CEO, sees it differently. “We have no salespeople,” he told me, “because in a weird way, everyone is a salesperson.”
The second reason we’re all in sales now: Elasticity — the new breadth of skills demanded by established companies.
At Atlassian, sales — in this case, traditional sales — isn’t anyone’s job. It’s everyone’s job. And that paradoxical arrangement is becoming more common.
Palantir is an even larger company.
Although Palantir sells more than a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of its software each year, it doesn’t have any salespeople either. Instead, it relies on what it calls “forward-deployed engineers.” These techies don’t create the company’s products — at least not at first. They’re out in the field, interacting directly with customers and making sure the product is meeting their needs.
When organizations were highly segmented, skills tended to be fixed.
A decade of intense competition has forced most organizations to transform from segmented to flat (or at least, flatter). A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions — and that’s our world — punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones. Elasticity of skills has even begun reshaping job titles.
Education and health care are realms we often associate with caring, helping, and other softer virtues, but they have more in common with the sharp-edged world of selling than we realize. To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources — not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.
Ferlazzo makes a distinction between “irritation” and “agitation.” Irritation, he says, is “challenging people to do something that we want them to do.” By contrast, “agitation is challenging them to do something that they want to do.”
Health care and education both revolve around non – sales selling: the ability to influence, to persuade, and to change behavior while striking a balance between what others want and what you can provide them. And the rising prominence of this dual sector is potentially transformative.
From Caveat Emptor to Caveat Venditor
When you think of “sales” or “selling,” what’s the first word that comes to mind? The most common answer was money, and the ten most frequent responses included words like “pitch,” “marketing,” and “persuasion.”
The emotions elicited by “sales” or “selling” carry an unmistakable flavor. Of the twenty-five most offered words, only five have a positive valence (“necessary,” “challenging,” “fun,” “essential,” and “important”). The remainder are all negative.
When you think of “sales” or “selling,” what’s the first picture that comes to mind?
To my surprise, the responses — in overwhelming numbers — took a distinct form. They involved a man in a suit selling a car, generally a used one.
In 1967, George Akerlof, a first-year economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a thirteen-page paper that used economic theory and a handful of equations to examine a corner of the commercial world where few economists had dared to tread: the used-car market.
Finally, two years after he’d completed the paper, The Quarterly Journal of Economics accepted it and in 1970 published “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.”
In the paper, Akerlof identified a weakness in traditional economic reasoning. Most analyses in economics began by assuming that the parties to any transaction were fully informed actors making rational decisions in their own self-interest. The burgeoning field of behavioral economics has since called into question the second part of that assumption — that we’re all making rational decisions in our own self-interest. Akerlof took aim at the first part — that we’re fully informed.
Cars for sale — he said, oversimplifying in the name of clarifying — fall into two categories: good and bad. Bad cars, what Americans call “lemons,” are obviously less desirable and therefore ought to be cheaper. Trouble is, with used cars, only the seller knows whether the vehicle is a lemon or a peach. The two parties confront “an asymmetry in available information.” One side is fully informed; the other is at least partially in the dark.
Buyers today aren’t “fully informed” in the idealized way that many economic models assume. But neither are they the hapless victims of asymmetrical information they once were.
In a world of information parity, the new guiding principle is caveat venditor — seller beware.
When buyers can know more than sellers, sellers are no longer protectors and purveyors of information. They’re the curators and clarifiers of it — helping to make sense of the blizzard of facts, data, and options.
The decline of information asymmetry hasn’t ended all forms of lying, cheating, and other sleazebaggery.
Caveat venditor has become just as important as caveat emptor. Whether you’re in traditional sales or non-sales selling, the low road is now harder to pass and the high road — honesty, directness, and transparency — has become the better, more pragmatic, long-term route.
There are no “natural” salespeople, in part because we’re all naturally salespeople. Each of us — because we’re human — has a selling instinct, which means that anyone can master the basics of moving others.
How to Be
Attunement
In the 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross, based on David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize – and Tony Award – winning play of the same name, four small-time salesmen inhabit the seedy Chicago office of a real estate company called Mitch and Murray. They’ve been struggling lately, these salesmen. So, on a gloomy, rain-soaked night, the downtown bosses dispatch Blake, a cold-blooded predator in a well-tailored suit, to kick them into higher gear.
Blake then concludes his harangue with some old-fashioned sales training, flipping over a green chalkboard and pointing to where he’s written the first three letters of the alphabet. “A-B-C,” he explains. “A — always. B — be. C — closing. Always be closing. Always be closing.” “Always be closing” is a cornerstone of the sales cathedral.
When only some of us are in sales — and when buyers face minimal choices and information asymmetry — “Always be closing” is sensible counsel. But when all of us are in sales, and none of us has much of an information edge, Blake’s prescription seems as dated as the electric typewriters and Rolodex cards that dot Mitch and Murray’s office.
The new ABCs of moving others: A — Attunement B — Buoyancy C — Clarity
Perspective – taking is at the heart of our first essential quality in moving others today. Attunement is the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you’re in.
The research shows that effective perspective-taking, attuning yourself with others, hinges on three principles.
- Increase your power by reducing it. In a fascinating study a few years ago, a team of social scientists led by Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management probed the relationship between perspective-taking and power. The results of these studies, part of a larger body of research, point to a single conclusion: an inverse relationship between power and perspective-taking. As that information advantage has withered, so has the power it once conferred. As a result, the ability to move people now depends on power’s inverse: understanding another person’s perspective, getting inside his head, and seeing the world through his eyes. Assume that you’re not the one with power.
- Use your head as much as your heart. Perspective-taking is a cognitive capacity; it’s mostly about thinking. Empathy is an emotional response; it’s mostly about feeling. Both are crucial. Empathy can help build enduring relationships and defuse conflicts. And empathy is valuable and virtuous in its own right. But when it comes to moving others, perspective-taking is the more effective of these fraternal twins. As the researchers say, ultimately, it’s “more beneficial to get inside their heads than to have them inside one’s own heart.”
- Mimic strategically. Human beings are natural mimickers. “Strategic mimicry” proved to be effective. The reasons, Galinsky explains, go to our very roots as a species. Our brains evolved at a time when most of the people around us were those we were related to and therefore could trust. But “as the size of groups increased, it required more sophisticated understandings and interactions with people,” he told an interviewer. People therefore looked to cues in the environment to determine whom they could trust. “One of those cues is the unconscious awareness of whether we are in synch with other people, and a way to do that is to match their behavioral patterns with our own.” And much as perspective – taking and empathy are fraternal twins, mimicry has a first cousin: touching. Of course, mimicry, like the other attunement behaviors, requires deftness. When people know they’re being mimicked, it can have the opposite effect, turning people against you.
Martin also said that top salespeople have strong emotional intelligence but don’t let their emotional connection sweep them away. They are curious and ask questions that drive to the core of what the other person is thinking. That’s getting into their heads and not just their hearts, attunement rule number two.
“Salespeople represent the prototypical extraverts in our culture,” many analysts say, the very embodiment of “the extravert ideal” that shapes Western society.
The notion that extraverts are the finest salespeople is so obvious that we’ve overlooked one teensy flaw. There’s almost no evidence that it’s actually true.
According to a large study of European and American customers, the “most destructive” behavior of salespeople wasn’t being ill-informed. It was an excess of assertiveness and zeal that led to contacting customers too frequently.
As some have noted, introverts are “geared to inspect,” while extraverts are “geared to respond.”
Everything good in life — a cool business, a great romance, a powerful social movement — begins with a conversation. Talking with each other, one to one, is human beings’ most powerful form of attunement.
Practice strategic mimicry.
The three key steps are Watch, Wait, and Wane:
- Watch. Observe what the other person is doing.
- Wait. Once you’ve observed, don’t spring immediately into action.
- Wane. After you’ve mimicked a little, try to be less conscious of what you’re doing.
Wharton’s Adam Grant has discovered that the most effective salespeople are ambiverts, those who fall somewhere in the middle of the introversion-extraversion scale.
Walking a mile in another’s shoes sometimes requires a map. Here are two new varieties that can provide a picture of where people are coming from and where they might be going.
Discussion Map – In your next meeting, cut through the clutter of comments with a map that can help reveal the group’s social cartography.
Mood Map – To gain a clear sense of a particular context, try mapping how it changes over time.
Buoyancy
Anyone who sells — whether they’re trying to convince customers to make a purchase or colleagues to make a change — must contend with wave after wave of rebuffs, refusals, and repudiations. How to stay afloat amid that ocean of rejection is the second essential quality in moving others. I call this quality “buoyancy.”
And if you understand buoyancy’s three components — which apply before, during, and after any effort to move others — you can use it effectively in your own life.
Before: Interrogative Self-Talk The hardest part of selling, Norman Hall says, occurs before his well-polished shoes even touch the streets of San Francisco. “Just getting myself out of the house and facing people” is the stiffest challenge.
From Anthony Robbins in the United States to Paul McKenna in the United Kingdom to any sales training course anywhere in the world, the advice arrives with remarkable sameness: Tell yourself you can do it. Declaring an unshakable belief in your inherent awesomeness inflates a sturdy raft that can keep you bobbing in an ocean of rejection.
Yes, positive self – talk is generally more effective than negative self-talk. But the most effective self-talk of all doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions.
The reasons are twofold. First, the interrogative, by its very form, elicits answers — and within those answers are strategies for actually carrying out the task.
The second reason is related. Interrogative self-talk, the researchers say, “may inspire thoughts about autonomous or intrinsically motivated reasons to pursue a goal.”
To help get us out of the door, then, the first component in buoyancy is interrogative self-talk.
During: Positivity Ratios
“Positivity” is one of those words that make many of us roll our eyes, gather our belongings, and look for the nearest exit. A host of recent research testifies to its importance in many realms of life, including how we move others.
Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina is the leading researcher on positivity — her catchall term for a basket of emotions including amusement, appreciation, joy, interest, gratitude, and inspiration.
Positive emotions. They broaden people’s ideas about possible actions, opening our awareness to a wider range of thoughts and… making us more receptive and more creative. The broadening effect of positive emotions has important consequences for moving others.
Positivity has one other important dimension when it comes to moving others. “You have to believe in the product you’re selling — and that has to show.”
Once positive emotions outnumbered negative emotions by 3 to 1 — that is, for every three instances of feeling gratitude, interest, or contentment, they experienced only one instance of anger, guilt, or embarrassment — people generally flourished.
But Fredrickson and Losada also found that positivity had an upper limit. Too much can be as unproductive as too little. Once the ratio hit about 11 to 1, positive emotions began doing more harm than good.
After: Explanatory Style
At the end of each day, Norman Hall boards a Golden Gate Transit bus and rides back home. Many afternoons he just thinks.
How he thinks about his day — in particular how he explains its worst aspects — can go a long way in determining whether he succeeds. This is the third component in buoyancy.
One of the towering figures in contemporary psychological science is Martin Seligman. One of Seligman’s signal contributions has been to deepen our understanding of optimism.
In human beings, Seligman observed, learned helplessness was usually a function of people’s “explanatory style” — their habit of explaining negative events to themselves. Think of explanatory style as a form of self-talk that occurs after (rather than before) an experience.
In other words, the salespeople with an optimistic explanatory style — who saw rejections as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than universal, and external rather than personal — sold more insurance and survived in their jobs much longer.
When something bad occurs, ask yourself three questions — and come up with an intelligent way to answer each one “no”:
- Is this permanent?
- Is this pervasive?
- Is this personal?
The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity.
One way to remain buoyant is to acquire a more realistic sense of what can actually sink you. You can do that by counting your rejections — and then celebrating them. It’s a strategy I call “enumerate and embrace.”
Enumerate. Try actually counting the nos you get during a week.
Embrace.
Buoyancy, whether positivity ratios or explanatory style, isn’t about banishing the negative. Negativity and negative emotions are crucial for our survival. They prevent unproductive behaviors from cementing into habits.
Clarity
It’s not entirely our fault. Partly because our brains evolved at a time when the future itself was perilous, we human beings are notoriously bad at wrapping our minds around far-off events. Our biases point us toward the present.
Hal Hershfield, a social psychologist at New York University. Hershfield and his colleagues discovered that trying to solve an existing problem — getting people to better balance short-term and long-term rewards — was insufficient because it wasn’t the problem that most needed solving. The researchers’ breakthrough was to identify a new, and previously unknown, problem: that we think of ourselves today and ourselves in the future as different people.
Good salespeople, we’ve long been told, are skilled problem solvers. They can assess prospects’ needs, analyze their predicaments, and deliver the optimal solutions. This ability to solve problems still matters. But today, when information is abundant and democratic rather than limited and privileged, it matters relatively less.
The services of others are far more valuable when I’m mistaken, confused, or completely clueless about my true problem. In those situations, the ability to move others hinges less on problem solving than on problem finding.
This transformation from problem solving to problem finding as a central attribute in moving others reaches wide.
Identifying problems as a way to move others takes two long – standing skills and turns them upside down.
- First, in the past, the best salespeople were adept at accessing information. Today, they must be skilled at curating it.
- Second, in the past, the best salespeople were skilled at answering questions. Today, they must be good at asking questions.
Rosser Reeves, an American advertising executive from the middle of the twentieth century, has three claims to fame.
- First, he coined the term “unique selling proposition.”
- Second, he was among the first ad men to produce television spots for American presidential campaigns.
- Third, Reeves is the protagonist in one of the most famous stories in advertising, one that exemplifies the enduring power of clarity.
One afternoon, Reeves and a colleague were having lunch in Central Park. On the way back to their Madison Avenue office, they encountered a man sitting in the park, begging for money. He had a cup for donations and beside it was a sign, handwritten on cardboard, that read: I AM BLIND.
His attempts to move others to donate money were coming up short. Reeves thought he knew why. He told his colleague something to the effect of: “I bet I can dramatically increase the amount of money that guy is raising simply by adding four words to his sign.”
The sign now read: It is springtime and I am blind. Reeves won his bet. And we learned a lesson. Clarity depends on contrast.
We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation.
That’s why the most essential question you can ask is this: Compared to what?
The following five frames can be useful in providing clarity to those you hope to move.
- The less frame. Everybody loves choices. Yet ample research has shown that too much of a good thing can mutate into a bad thing.
- The experience frame. Economists categorize what people buy in the marketplace by the attributes of what they’ve purchased. Several researchers have shown that people derive much greater satisfaction from purchasing experiences than they do from purchasing goods.
- The label frame.
- The blemished frame. Can a negative ever be a positive when it comes to moving others? That’s what three marketing professors investigated in a 2012 study. In many cases the people who’d gotten that small dose of negative information were more likely to purchase the boots than those who’d received the exclusively positive information. The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “blemishing effect” — where “adding a minor negative detail in an otherwise positive description of a target can give that description a more positive impact.” But the blemishing effect seems to operate only under two circumstances. First, the people processing the information must be in what the researchers call a “low effort” state. Second, the negative information must follow the positive information, not the reverse.
- The potential frame. What we really should do, they say, is emphasize our potential. People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argue.
Once you’ve found the problem and the proper frame, you have one more step. You need to give people an off-ramp.
The lesson: Clarity on how to think without clarity on how to act can leave people unmoved.
In the old days, our challenge was accessing information. These days, our challenge is curating it.
Beth Kanter — an expert in nonprofits, technology, and social media — has created a three – step process for curation newbies.
- Seek. Once you’ve defined the area in which you’d like to curate, put together a list of the best sources of information.
- Sense. Here’s where you add the real value, by creating meaning out of the material you’ve assembled.
- Once you’ve collected the good stuff and organized it in a meaningful way, you’re ready to share it with your colleagues, your prospects, or your entire social network.
RQI’s step-by-step Question Formulation Technique
- Produce your questions. Generate a list of questions by writing down as many as you can think of.
- Improve your questions. Go through your list of questions and categorize each one as either “closed-ended”or “open-ended”.
- Prioritize your questions. Choose your three most important questions.
What to Do
Pitch
At the epicenter of the entertainment business is the pitch.
Kimberly Elsbach of the University of California, Davis, and Roderick Kramer of Stanford University spent five years in the thick of the Hollywood pitch process.
Their central finding was that the success of a pitch depends as much on the catcher as on the pitcher.
In the most successful pitches, the pitcher didn’t push her idea on the catcher until she extracted a yes. Instead, she invited in her counterpart as a collaborator. The more the executives — often derided by their supposedly more artistic counterparts as “suits” — were able to contribute, the better the idea often became, and the more likely it was to be green-lighted. The most valuable sessions were those in which the catcher “becomes so fully engaged by a pitcher that the process resembles a mutual collaboration,” the researchers found.
The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.
We need to broaden our repertoire of pitches for an age of limited attention and caveat venditor. Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting pitches anywhere I could find them. Based on my research, here are six promising successors to the elevator pitch — what they are, why they work, and how you can use them to begin a conversation that leads to moving others.
- The one-word pitch. The one-word pitch derives in part from Maurice Saatchi, who, with his brother Charles, founded the advertising agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and M & C Saatchi. Attention spans aren’t merely shrinking, he says. They’re nearly disappearing. “In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind,” Saatchi writes.
- The question pitch. By making people work just a little harder, question pitches prompt people to come up with their own reasons for agreeing (or not). And when people summon their own reasons for believing something, they endorse the belief more strongly and become more likely to act on it.
- The rhyming pitch. Rhymes boost what linguists and cognitive scientists call “processing fluency,” the ease with which our minds slice, dice, and make sense of stimuli. Rhymes taste great and go down easily and we equate that smoothness with accuracy. In this way, rhyme can enhance reason.
- The subject-line pitch. Every e-mail we send is a pitch. It’s a plea for someone’s attention and an invitation to engage. Your e-mail subject line should be either obviously useful (Found the best & cheapest photocopier) or mysteriously intriguing (A photocopy breakthrough!), but probably not both (The Canon IR2545 is a photocopy breakthrough). Along with utility and curiosity is a third principle: specificity.
- The Twitter pitch.
- The Pixar pitch.
The One – Word Pitch Pro tip: Write a fifty-word pitch. Reduce it to twenty-five words. Then to six words. One of those remaining half-dozen is almost certainly your one-word pitch.
The Question Pitch Pro tip: Use this if your arguments are strong. If they’re weak, make a statement. Or better yet, find some new arguments.
The Twitter Pitch Pro tip: Even though Twitter allows 140 characters, limit your pitch to 120 characters so that others can pass it on. Remember: The best pitches are short, sweet, and easy to retweet.
PowerPoint is like the weather or reality TV: Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it.
Three cheers, then, to Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, Tokyo-based architects who’ve brewed an antidote to awful PowerPoint presentations. They call their creation pecha-kucha, which is Japanese for “chatter.” A pecha-kucha presentation contains twenty slides, each of which appears on the screen for twenty seconds. That’s it. The rules are rigid, which is the point. It’s not nineteen slides or twenty-one seconds. It’s 20 x 20. Presenters make their pitch in six minutes and forty seconds of perfectly timed words and images.
The social science literature is full of interesting (and sometimes contradictory) findings about how sequence and numbers affect pitches.
Go first if you’re the incumbent, last if you’re the challenger.
Granular numbers are more credible than coarse numbers.
We don’t always realize it, but what we do and how we do it are themselves pitches. We’re conveying a message about ourselves, our work, or our organization — and other people are interpreting it.
What is my company about? What is my product or service about? What am I about?
Improvise
Sales and theater have much in common. Both take guts. Salespeople pick up the phone and call strangers; actors walk onto the stage in front of them.
The NCR way — carefully scripted mini – dramas leading to a happy ending for the seller — dominated sales around the world for most of the twentieth century.
Scripts perform nicely in stable and predictable environments — when buyers have minimal choices and sellers have maximal information. But those circumstances, as we’ve seen, have become rarer.
Sales and non-sales selling are developing along a similar path — because the stable, simple, and certain conditions that favored scripts have now given way to the dynamic, complex, and unpredictable conditions that favor improvisation.
Most experts haven’t looked at improv in the realm of sales, even though, as one young scholar says, salespeople adept at improvising “can generate ideas, incorporate changes quickly and easily, and communicate effectively and convincingly during sales presentations.” One reason for the oversight might be a legacy of a hundred-plus years of sales training. Since the days of NCR’s carefully plotted scripts, salespeople have been taught to “overcome objections.”
Overcoming objections is a stage in every formal sales process, one that usually follows “prospecting for leads,” “qualifying leads,” and “making the presentation” — and that stands just before “closing.”
For many of us, the opposite of talking isn’t listening. It’s waiting. When others speak, we typically divide our attention between what they’re saying now and what we’re going to say next — and end up doing a mediocre job at both.
Listening without some degree of intimacy isn’t really listening. It’s passive and transactional rather than active and engaged. Genuine listening is a bit like driving on a rain-slicked highway. Speed kills.
The “ocean of rejection” that we face every day in sales and non-sales selling delivers plenty of nos to our shores. But we also send many back out with the tide, saying “No” ourselves more often than we realize. Improvisational theater urges actors to check this behavior — and say “Yes and” instead.
There are certainly plenty of times in life to say “No.” When it comes to moving others, however, the best default position is this second principle of improv. And its benefits stretch further than sales and non-sales selling. “‘Yes and’ isn’t a technique,” Salit says. “It’s a way of life.”
In the summer of 2012, two giants in the field of moving others passed away. Roger Fisher. In 1981 he coauthored Getting to Yes, the most influential book ever written about negotiation. Fisher’s signal contribution was the concept of “principled negotiation,” which proposed that the aim of negotiating shouldn’t be to make the other side lose but, where possible, to help it win.
The second giant, who died just six weeks before Fisher at the age of seventy-nine, took the core of Fisher’s idea to an even larger audience. In 1989, Stephen R. Covey wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Because of Fisher’s and Covey’s influence, “win-win” has become a fixture in organizations around the world, though often more in parlance than in practice.
“In improv, you never try to get someone to do something. That’s coercion, not creativity,” Salit says. “You make offers, you accept offers — and a conversation, a relationship, a scene, and other possibilities emerge.” As goes improv, so go sales and non-sales selling. If you train your ears to hear offers, if you respond to others with “Yes and,” and if you always try to make your counterpart look good, possibilities will emerge.
One of the simplest ways to do that — to reduce your ratio of talking to listening — is simply to slow down.
Serve
Sales and non-sales selling are ultimately about service. But “service” isn’t just smiling at customers when they enter your boutique or delivering a pizza in thirty minutes or less, though both are important in the commercial realm. Instead, it’s a broader, deeper, and more transcendent definition of service — improving others’ lives and, in turn, improving the world. At its best, moving people can achieve something greater and more enduring than merely an exchange of resources. And that’s more likely to happen if we follow the two underlying lessons.
Make it personal and make it purposeful.
Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant. Instead, we should recalibrate our approach so that it’s concrete and personal — and not for softhearted reasons but for hardheaded ones.
In both traditional sales and non-sales selling, we do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person.
While we often assume that human beings are motivated mainly by self-interest, a stack of research has shown that all of us also do things for what social scientists call “prosocial” or “self-transcending” reasons.
The stories made the work personal; their contents made it purposeful. This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world. That’s the lifeblood of service and the final secret to moving others.
In 1970, an obscure sixty-six-year-old former mid-level AT & T executive named Robert Greenleaf wrote an essay that launched a movement. He titled it “Servant as Leader”
“Becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.”
Greenleaf’s way of leading was more difficult, but it was also more transformative.
The time is ripe for the sales version of Greenleaf’s philosophy. Call it servant selling. It begins with the idea that those who move others aren’t manipulators but servants. They serve first and sell later.
Servant selling is the essence of moving others today. But in some sense, it has always been present in those who’ve granted sales its proper respect.
Sadly, many traditional sales training programs still teach people to upsell. But if they were smarter, they’d banish both the concept and the word — and replace it with a far friendlier, and demonstrably more effective, alternative. Upserve. Upserving means doing more for the other person than he expects or you initially intended, taking the extra steps that transform a mundane interaction into a memorable experience.
Microchip’s vice president of sales told me: “Salespeople are no different from engineers, architects, or accountants. Really good salespeople want to solve problems and serve customers. They want to be part of something larger than themselves.”
Seth Godin – We categorize our sales and non-sales selling transactions. We divide them, he says, into three categories. We think, “I’m doing you a favor, bud.” Or “Hey, this guy is doing me a favor.” Or “This is a favorless transaction.”
“Emotionally intelligent signage”. Most signs typically have two functions: They provide information to help people find their way or they announce rules. But emotionally intelligent signage goes deeper. It achieves those same ends by enlisting the principles of “make it personal” and “make it purposeful.”
If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? If the answer to either of these questions is no, you’re doing something wrong.
