To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (7 page)

Asymmetrical information creates all sorts of headaches. If the seller knows much more about the product than the buyer, the buyer understandably gets suspicious. What’s the seller concealing? Am I being hoodwinked? If the car is so great, why is he getting rid of it? As a result, the buyer might be willing to pay only very little—or perhaps forgo purchasing the car altogether. But Akerlof theorized that the problems could ripple further. Suppose I’ve got a used car that I know is a peach, and I decide to sell it. Buyers still treat me the same way they treat any seller—as a presumptive lemon peddler. What’s this guy Pink keeping secret? Is he bamboozling us? If the car is so peachy, why is he unloading it? One consequence is that as the seller, I settle for a price lower than the auto is worth. The other is that I give up and don’t even bother trying to sell my car. “Dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market,” Akerlof wrote. “The presence of people who wish to pawn bad wares as good wares tends to drive out the legitimate business.” And it’s not just autos, he said. The same reasoning applies to insurance, credit, or one’s own labor. When honest sellers opt out, the only ones who remain are the shysters and the charlatans—pushy guys in suits using sleazy tactics to stick you with a heap of junk.
Ick
.

Of course, individuals and institutions have devised ways to make Akerlof’s commercial landscape less forbidding. Sellers offer warranties on their goods. Brand names provide some assurance of quality. Legislatures pass “lemon laws” to protect consumers. But most important, prospective purchasers are on notice. When sellers know more than buyers, buyers must beware. It’s no accident that people in the Americas, Europe, and Asia today often know only two words of Latin. In a world of information asymmetry, the guiding principle is
caveat emptor
—buyer beware.

Akerlof’s provocative thought piece recast how economists and others reckoned with individual transactions and entire markets. So with this example as a model, let’s try another intellectual finger exercise. Imagine a world not of information asymmetry, but of something closer to information parity, where buyers and sellers have roughly equal access to relevant information. What would happen then? Actually, stop imagining that world. You’re living in it.

Go back to used cars. In the United States today, a prospective purchaser of, say, a used Nissan Maxima can arm herself with all manner of relevant information before even approaching a seller. She can go online and find most of the places offering that particular car within a certain radius of her home, thereby giving her a wider set of choices. She can tap her social network or visit websites to discover each dealer’s reputation and whether previous customers have been satisfied. For individual sellers, she can spend fifteen minutes on a search engine checking the person’s bona fides. She can visit online forums to see what current Maxima owners think of the car. She can check Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds, or AutoTrader.com to find out the price used Maximas are going for. And once she sees a car she likes, she can take the auto’s Vehicle Identification Number and, with a quick online search, find out whether it’s been in accidents or had major repairs. She’s not fully protected from unethical sellers, of course. But if she encounters any dirty dealing, or ends up dissatisfied, she can do more than simply gripe to a neighbor. She can tell a few hundred Facebook friends, all her Twitter followers, and the readers of her blog—some of whom may pass her story on to their own networks, undermining the seller’s ability to deceive again. Now extend the realities of the market for used cars to the market for just about anything else.

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. That’s why that first word cloud isn’t wrong. It’s just out of date. The belief that sales is slimy, slick, and sleazy has less to do with the nature of the activity itself than with the long-reigning but fast-fading conditions in which selling has often taken place.

The balance has shifted. If you’re a buyer and you’ve got just as much information as the seller, along with the means to talk back, you’re no longer the only one who needs to be on notice. In a world of information parity, the new guiding principle is
caveat venditor
—seller beware.

Finding Your Kowalskis

Joe Girard might as well have parachuted down from that second word cloud, ready to do whatever it takes to put you in a Chevy Malibu this afternoon. He is the world’s greatest salesman. I know because he told me. Then he sent me a few pages from
Guinness World Records
testifying to his achievement and confirmed by a major accounting firm. In one year, he sold 1,425 cars at Merollis Chevrolet in Detroit. These weren’t fleet sales either. These were one-at-a-time, belly-to-belly sales—several cars every day for an entire year. It’s a remarkable achievement.

So how did he do it?

His book,
How to Sell Anything to Anybody
—whose cover claims “2 million copies in print!”—reveals the secrets, which he also shares with live audiences around the world. “I guarantee you that my system will work for you, if you understand and follow it,” he promises.
⁴

The centerpiece is “Girard’s Rule of 250”—that each of us has 250 people in our lives we know well enough to invite to a wedding or a funeral. If you reach one person, and get her to like you and buy from you, she will connect you to others in her 250-person circle. Some of those people will do the same. And so on and so on in ever-widening cascades of influence. Girard advises us to “fill the seats on the Ferris wheel” with as many prospects as we can, to let them off the Ferris wheel for a while after they buy, and then to turn them into your “birddogs” by paying them $50 for every new sale they subsequently send you. “A Chevrolet sold by Joe Girard is not just a car,” he writes. “It is a whole relationship between me and the customer and his family and friends and the people he works with.”
⁵

Alas, many of the techniques Girard recommends to establish that relationship invite the unsavory adjectives of that first word cloud. For instance, if prospects mention they’ve recently been on vacation somewhere, Girard will say that he’s been there, too. “Because wherever that guy has been, I have been. Even if I never heard of the place,” he writes. “A lot of people out there, maybe millions, have heard of me. And thousands have bought from me. They think they know a lot about me, because I know a lot about them. They think I have been to Yellowstone National Park. They think I have fished for salmon near Traverse City, Michigan. They think I have an aunt who lives near Selfridge Air Force base.”
⁶
Take your pick: “dishonest,” “smarmy,” or “ugh.”

Girard also describes in three lengthy but glorious paragraphs one of his favorite tactics for cold-calling prospective customers. It begins by choosing a name from the phone book and placing a call.

Now a woman answers the phone. “Hello, Mrs. Kowalski. This is Joe Girard at Merollis Chevrolet. I just wanted to let you know that the car you ordered is ready,” I tell her. Now remember: this is a cold call, and all I know for sure from the phone book is the party’s name, address, and phone number. This Mrs. Kowalski doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number. We haven’t ordered a new car,” she tells me. “Are you sure?” I ask. “Pretty sure. My husband would have told me,” she says. “Just a minute,” I say. “Is this the home of Clarence J. Kowalski?” “No. My husband’s name is Steven.” . . . “Gee, Mrs. Kowalski, I’m very sorry to have disturbed you at this hour of the day. I’m sure you’re very busy.”

But Girard doesn’t let her go. He keeps her talking so he can bait the hook.

“Mrs. Kowalski, you don’t happen to be in the market for a new car, do you?” If she knows they are, she’ll probably say yes. But the typical answer will be: “I don’t think so, but you have to ask my husband.” There it is, what I’m looking for. “Oh, when can I reach him?” And she’ll say, “he’s usually home by 6.” Okay, I got what I wanted. “Well, fine, Mrs. Kowalski, I’ll call back then, if you’re sure I won’t be interrupting supper.” I wait for her to tell me they don’t eat until about six-thirty, and then I thank her.

From there, Girard moves to the next stage.

You know what I am going to be doing at six o’clock. That’s right. “Hello, Mr. Kowalski, this is Joe Girard at Merollis Chevrolet. I spoke to Mrs. Kowalski this morning and she suggested I call back at this time. I was wondering if you are in the market for a new Chevrolet?” “No,” he says, “not just yet.” So I ask, “Well, when do you think you might start looking at a new car?” I ask the question straight out, and he is going to think about it and give me an answer. Maybe he only wants to get rid of me. But whatever the reason what he says is probably going to be what he really means. It’s easier than trying to dream up a lie. “I guess I’ll be needing one in about 6 months,” he says, and I finish with: “Fine, Mr. Kowalski. I’ll be getting in touch with you then. Oh, by the way, what are you driving now?” He tells me, I thank him, and hang up.
⁷

Girard files Mr. Kowalski’s name, along with a reminder in his calendar to call him, and moves to the next name on this list. “After the easy ones,” Girard writes, “there are many Kowalskis, if you keep searching.”
⁸

That Girard found enough clueless Kowalskis to become the world’s greatest salesman—and that he remains out and about teaching sales skills—might seem to validate that information asymmetry and the ignoble tactics it allows are alive and well. But there’s one more thing you should know about Joe Girard. He hasn’t actually sold a car since 1977. He quit the business more than three decades ago to teach others how to sell. (The Deloitte & Touche audit his office sent me verifying his record is dated 1991 and covers a fifteen-year period beginning in 1963.) Girard’s techniques might have gleamed in the mid-1970s. But in the mid-2010s, they have the whiff of old boxes forgotten in the attic. After all, these days, Mrs. Kowalski is at work. Her household has caller ID to prevent telephonic intrusions. And if a salesman did circumvent her family’s defenses, she would dispatch him quickly, maybe Google his name afterward, and tell her Facebook friends about the creepy call she received that night.

When I reached Girard by phone one afternoon
*
to ask how the world of sales had changed since he last commanded the showroom, he insisted that it hadn’t. The effect of the Internet? “That is junk. I don’t need that crap,” he told me. Now that consumers have ample access to information, how does that alter the sales process? “Not at all. There’s only one way. My way.” Could he be as successful on today’s landscape as he was in the 1970s? “Give me nine months and I’ll rule the world.”

To be fair, much of what Girard advocates remains sensible and enduring. He’s a staunch advocate of service after the sale. “Service, service, service,” he told me during our conversation. He offers one of the clearest aphorisms on effective selling I’ve heard: “People want a fair deal from someone they like.” But more broadly, his worldview and his tactics resemble one of those old movies in which a soldier stuck on a remote island continues fighting because he hasn’t gotten word that the war has ended.

Contrast that to Tammy Darvish. When Girard was selling Chevys in Detroit, Darvish was in primary school. Now she’s vice president of DARCARS Automotive Group, one of the largest auto dealers on the East Coast. If her home is any indication, the car business has been very good to her. The fifteen-thousand-square-foot manor where I sat down with her one afternoon contains a foyer that could double as an awesome basketball court. Darvish has dark hair that falls just past her shoulders. She’s petite, friendly, and semi-intense, though the intense part seems natural and the semi- an effort. Nobody in the survey pictured
her
when they conjured an image of sales.

Darvish came to the industry the old-fashioned way: Her father owned automobile dealerships in the Washington, D.C., area. After graduating from Northwood University in Midland, Michigan, with a degree in automotive marketing, she began at the bottom, a junior sales consultant facing scorching skepticism. She was a twenty-year-old woman—the boss’s daughter, no less—in a heavily male field. In her first month, she outsold her peers and was named “salesman” of the month. Then she did it again in month two. A career was born.

Nearly thirty years later, she has watched the decline of information asymmetry reshape her business. In the old days, customers drove from dealership to dealership collecting what intelligence they could. “Today most of that is done before they show up. And in many cases they are more educated than we are,” she said. “When I graduated from college, the factory invoice of a car was locked in a safe. We didn’t know the cost [of the cars we were selling]. Today, the customer is telling me.”

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. “If a customer has any question at all,” Darvish told me, “I can say, ‘Let’s go to Chevy.com’” and figure out the answer together.

She acknowledges that “when you go into a car dealer, you expect a plaid jacket and polyester pants.” But just as those questionable fashion choices have become outmoded, so have the skeezy practices they conjure. Indeed, much of what we believe about sales derives not from the inherent nature of selling but from the information asymmetry that long defined the context in which people sold. Once that asymmetry diminishes, and the seesaw rebalances, everything gets upended. For example, DARCARS has an unusual policy of rarely hiring experienced salespeople, who might have learned bad habits or acquired old-school perspectives. Likewise, Darvish believes that many sales training programs are “a little mechanical,” that they risk turning people into selling robots who recite memorized scripts on cue and try to steamroll customers into decisions. “We bring them in and we put them in a one-week training course that’s not just about sales. We talk about customer service and social media.”