To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (15 page)

But Hal Hershfield, a social psychologist at New York University, thought the barrier to moving people to save for retirement might be something else altogether. Working with six far-flung colleagues, he conducted a series of studies to test a different hypothesis. In one experiment, Hershfield and team had each of their participants strap on a virtual reality headset. Half the participants saw a digital representation of themselves—an avatar—for about a minute and then had a brief conversation with a digital representation of a researcher. The other half also saw an avatar of themselves through the headset. But for this group, researchers used a computer software package that ages faces to create an avatar that showed what the participant would look like at age seventy. This group gazed at the seventy-year-old version of themselves for about a minute and then had the same brief conversation with the researcher’s avatar.

Afterward, the experimenters gave both groups a money allocation task. Imagine, they told the participants, that you’ve just received an unexpected $1,000. How would you allocate the money among the following four options?

• “Use it to buy something nice for someone special.”
  
• “Invest it in a retirement fund.”
  
• “Plan a fun and extravagant occasion.”
  
• “Put it in a checking account.”
  

Those who saw images of their current selves (call them the “Me Now” group) directed an average of $80 into the retirement account. Those who saw images of their future selves (the “Me Later” group) allocated more than twice that amount—$172.
³

To determine more precisely what was driving the discrepancy in response—whether it was the sight of their own aging face or the reminder of aging in general—the researchers tried a similar experiment with a different set of participants. This time, half the participants saw an age-morphed image of themselves (“Me Later”) and half saw an age-morphed image of someone else (“You Later”). The results weren’t even close. Those who saw the image of themselves at age seventy saved more than those who’d simply seen a picture of a seventy-year-old. When researchers conducted similar experiments using equipment less complicated than an immersive virtual reality environment, the pattern held. The “Me Later” group always saved more.
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The problem we have saving for retirement, these studies showed, isn’t only our meager ability to weigh present rewards against future ones. It is also the connection—or rather, the disconnection—between our present and future selves. Other research has shown that “thinking about the future self elicits neural activation patterns that are similar to neural activation patterns elicited by thinking about a stranger.”
⁵
Envisioning ourselves far into the future is extremely difficult—so difficult, in fact, that we often think of that future self as an entirely different person. “To people estranged from their future selves, saving is like a choice between spending money today and giving it to a stranger years from now.”
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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. Once they identified that alternative problem, they were able to fashion a solution: Show people an image of themselves getting old. And that, in turn, addressed the broader concern—namely, encouraging people to save more money for retirement.

This conceptual shift demonstrates the third quality necessary in moving others today: clarity—the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identify problems they didn’t realize they had.

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. After all, if I know precisely what my problem is—whether I’m hoping to buy a particular camera or I want to take a three-day beach vacation—I can often find the information I need to make my decision without any assistance. 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
.

Finding the Right Problems to Solve

In the mid-1960s, two soon-to-be-legendary University of Chicago social scientists—Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—began studying the elusive subject of creativity. For one of his first investigations, in 1964, Csikszentmihalyi went to the nearby School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recruited about three dozen fourth-year art students for an experiment. He brought them into a studio that had two large tables. On one table were twenty-seven objects, exotic and mundane, that the school often used in its drawing classes. Csikszentmihalyi asked the students to select one or more objects from the first table, arrange a still life on the second table, and produce a drawing of the result. The young artists approached their task in two distinct ways. Some examined relatively few objects, outlined their idea swiftly, and moved quickly to draw their still life. Others took their time. They handled more objects, turned them this way and that, rearranged them several times, and needed much longer to complete the drawing. As Csikszentmihalyi saw it, the first group was trying to
solve
a problem: How can I produce a good drawing? The second was trying to
find
a problem: What good drawing can I produce?

Then Csikszentmihalyi conducted a mini art show of the student creations and asked a panel of art experts to evaluate the works. (These experts didn’t know what Csikszentmihalyi was studying, nor did they know the source of the art.) When he tabulated the ratings, Csikszentmihalyi discovered that the experts deemed the problem finders’ works far more creative than the problem solvers’. In 1970, Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels tracked down these same artists, now out of school and working for a living, to see how they were faring. About half the students had left the art world altogether. The other half was working, and often succeeding, as professional artists. The composition of that second group? Nearly all were problem finders back in their school days. When Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels followed up again in the early 1980s, they discovered that the problem finders “were 18 years later significantly more successful—by the standards of the artistic community—than their peers” who had approached their still-life drawings as more craftsmanlike problem solvers.
⁷
“The quality of the problem that is found is a forerunner of the quality of the solution that is attained . . .” Getzels concluded. “It is in fact the discovery and creation of problems rather than any superior knowledge, technical skill, or craftsmanship that often sets the creative person apart from others in his field.”
⁸

Although a few academics took issue with the Csikszentmihalyi–Getzels distinction between solving and finding,
⁹
the duo’s research influenced both the modern understanding and the academic study of creativity. In subsequent research, they and other scholars found that people most disposed to creative breakthroughs in art, science, or any endeavor tend to be problem finders. These people sort through vast amounts of information and inputs, often from multiple disciplines; experiment with a variety of different approaches; are willing to switch directions in the course of a project; and often take longer than their counterparts to complete their work.

This more compelling view of the nature of problems has enormous implications for the new world of selling. Today, both sales and non-sales selling depend more on the creative, heuristic, problem-finding skills of artists than on the reductive, algorithmic, problem-solving skills of technicians. The reasons go back to the sea change described in Chapter 3. Only a short time ago, buyers faced several obstacles to solving problems on their own. So they relied on sellers, because sellers had access to information that the buyers did not. But today, the same move from information asymmetry to something approaching information equality that gave rise to the principle of
caveat venditor
is also reshaping what buyers can do for themselves and therefore what sellers must do to avoid irrelevance.

For instance, suppose I’m in the market for a new vacuum cleaner. Ten or fifteen years ago, I’d have had to go into a store, talk to a salesman who was much better informed than I ever could be, and then rely on him to provide the product I needed at a price that was fair. Today, I can solve the vacuum cleaner problem myself. I can go online and check out specs and ratings of various models. I can post a question on my Facebook page and seek recommendations from my friends and my “friends.” Once I’ve settled on a few possibilities, I can compare prices with a few keystrokes. And I can order my choice from the vendor offering the best deal. I don’t need a salesman at all.

Unless I’ve gotten my problem wrong.

After all, my ultimate aim isn’t to acquire a vacuum cleaner. It’s to have clean floors. Maybe my real problem is that the screens on my windows aren’t sufficient to keep out dust, and replacing them with better screens will keep my entire house cleaner when the windows are open. Maybe my problem is that my carpet collects dirt too easily, and a new carpet will obviate the need for me to always be vacuuming. Maybe I shouldn’t
buy
a vacuum cleaner but instead join a neighborhood cooperative that shares home appliances. Maybe there’s an inexpensive cleaning service with its own equipment that serves my area. Someone who can help me achieve my main goal—clean floors—in a smarter, cheaper way is someone I’ll listen to and perhaps even buy from. If I know my problem, I can likely solve it. If I don’t know my problem, I might need some help finding it.

This theme eventually arises in almost any conversation about traditional sales. Take, for example, Ralph Chauvin, vice president of sales at Perfetti Van Melle, the Italian company that makes Mentos mints, AirHead fruit chews, and other delicacies. His sales force sells products to retailers who then stock their shelves and hope customers will buy. In the past few years he says he’s seen a shift. Retailers are less interested in figuring out how many rolls of Mentos to order than in learning how to improve all facets of their operation. “They’re looking for unbiased business partners,” Chauvin told me. And that changes which salespeople are most highly prized. It isn’t necessarily the “closers,” those who can offer an immediate solution and secure the signature on the contract, he says. It’s those “who can brainstorm with the retailers, who uncover new opportunities for them, and who realize that it doesn’t matter if they close at that moment.” Using a mix of number crunching and their own knowledge and expertise, the Perfetti salespeople tell retailers “what assortment of candy is the best for them to make the most money.” That could mean offering five flavors of Mentos rather than seven. And it almost always means including products from competitors. In a sense, Chauvin says, his best salespeople think of their jobs not so much as selling candy but as selling insights about the confectionery business.

It’s similar in other places and industries. In Tokyo, I sat down with Koji Takagi in a plush conference room across the street from the city’s central Tokyo Station. Takagi is one of Japan’s top sales gurus, president of the sales consultancy Celebrain and the author of several books. He told me that when he first started, having access to information and being able to wield it was what often determined sales success. Today, when information is ubiquitous, he said the premium is now on “the ability to hypothesize,” to clarify what’s going to happen next. Or take Shyam Sankar, the fellow from Chapter 2 who oversees Palantir Technologies’ “forward-deployed engineers” who sell but who aren’t salespeople. “The most important thing they do,” he told me, “is find the right problems to solve.”

This transformation from problem solving to problem finding as a central attribute in moving others reaches wide. For instance, the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, now offers a course called “Problem Finding, Problem Solving” because, as its instructor says, “part of being an innovative leader is being able to frame a problem in interesting ways and . . . to see what the problem really is before you jump in to solve it.” And a few years ago, the Conference Board, the well-regarded U.S. business group, gave 155 public school superintendents and eighty-nine private employers a list of cognitive capacities and asked their respondents to rate these capacities according to which are most important in today’s workforce. The superintendents ranked “problem solving” number one. But the employers ranked it number eight. Their top-ranked ability: “problem identification.”
¹⁰

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—sorting through the massive troves of data and presenting to others the most relevant and clarifying pieces. Second, in the past, the best salespeople were skilled at
answering
questions (in part because they had information their prospects lacked). Today, they must be good at
asking
questions—uncovering possibilities, surfacing latent issues, and finding unexpected problems. And one question in particular sits at the top of the list.