To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (8 page)

Most of all, what makes someone effective on this shifted terrain is different from the smooth-talking, backslapping, pocket-picking stereotype of the past. Darvish says the qualities she looks for most are persistence—and something for which a word never appeared in either of the word clouds: empathy.

“You can’t train someone to care,” she told me. To her the ideal salespeople are those who ask themselves, “What decision would I make if that were my own mom sitting there trying to get service or buy a car?” It sounds noble. And maybe it is. But today, it’s how you sell cars.

Joe Girard is a reason why we had to live by
caveat emptor
. Tammy Darvish survives—and thrives—because she lives by
caveat venditor
.

The decline of information asymmetry hasn’t ended all forms of lying, cheating, and other sleazebaggery. One glimpse of the latest financial shenanigans from Wall Street, the City, or Hong Kong confirms that unhappy fact. When the product is complicated—credit default swaps, anyone?—and the potential for lucre enormous, some people will strive to maintain information imbalances and others will opt for outright deception. That won’t change. As long as flawed and fallible human beings walk the planet,
caveat emptor
remains useful guidance. I heed this principle. So should you. But the fact that some people will take the low road doesn’t mean that lots of people will. When the seller no longer holds an information advantage and the buyer has the means and the opportunity to talk back, the low road is a perilous path.

Caveat venditor
extends well beyond car sales to refashion most encounters that involve moving others. Take travel. In the old days—that is, fifteen years ago—travel agents maintained an information monopoly that allowed the unscrupulous ones to overcharge and mistreat their customers. Not anymore. Today, a mom with a laptop has about the same access to airfares, hotel rates, and reviews as a professional. Or consider selling yourself for a job. You can no longer control all the information about yourself, some of which you selectively include in your sales document, the résumé. Today, a company might still look at that résumé but, as CNN notes, the company will also “browse your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, read the gory details in your blog and hit Google to find out more about you—good or bad—all in one sitting.”
⁹

The new rules of
caveat venditor
also govern the booming Ed-Med sector. Today, it’s possible for a motivated secondary school student with Internet access to know more about the causes of the Peloponnesian War or how to make a digital film than his teacher. Physicians, once viewed as imperial dispensers of specialized knowledge, now might see patients who’ve researched their ailment and arrive with a clutch of studies and a course of action. Today’s educators and health care professionals can no longer depend on the quasi-reverence that information asymmetry often afforded them. When the balance tilts in the opposite direction, what they do and how they do it must change. Ed-Med, beware.

A Tale of Two Saturdays

Steve Kemp is a man in a suit who sells used cars. His business, SK Motors (“Where everybody rides!”) in Lanham, Maryland, sits on a colorless patch of Maryland State Route 564, down the road from a roller rink and Grace Baptist Church. Kemp is an old-fashioned businessman—a cheerful fellow, ruddy and heavyset, who belongs to the local Rotary Club and whose service shop offers free detailing to the teacher of the month at a neighborhood school. And SK Motors is an old-fashioned place. Its inventory of about fifty used cars—from a Mercedes-Benz SL to a Hyundai Elantra—sits in an asphalt lot ringed with starter flags. At the edge is a compact one-story, five-room structure that serves as the office.

One sunny Saturday morning, two salesmen, Frank and Wayne, sip coffee in the front room, waiting for the first customer on what is always the busiest day of the week. Frank is a soft-spoken African-American man who’s seventy-four years old but looks fifty-five. He’s been selling cars since 1985. Wayne is about the same age, white and cantankerous, with a baseball cap and plaid shirt.

Onto the lot drives a chain-smoking man in a parka and his rail-thin twenty-something son, who sports a valiant attempt at a beard and a jacket that bears the name of the local electric utility. The younger man needs a car. He admires the three-year-old Nissan Altima but can’t afford its $16,500 price. So he goes for the 1993 Ford Escort with 117,000 miles. With Frank in the front seat, he takes the car for a test drive. Then they return to the front room to make a deal.

He fills out a credit application. Steve’s right-hand man, Jimmy, takes the application and heads to his office, which houses one of the company’s two computers, to do a credit check. Whammo. The report reads like a rap sheet. The young customer has had collection actions aplenty. He’s also had cars repossessed, including one he purchased from SK Motors. Frank summons Steve. They confer briefly and Steve enters the room.

“We’re now at the
woodyaiff
stage,” he whispers to me.

Huh?

“
Would you if
we did this?
Would you if
we did that?” he whispers again.

Steve is willing to offer a loan—at SK’s standard interest rate of 24 percent and with a tracking device attached to the car—if the young man makes a $1,500 down payment.
Woodyaiff
those were the terms? The man doesn’t have any money for a down payment. He leaves.

Two more customers come in, neither serious.

In the midst of lunch, a tall man wearing a cowboy hat and jacket emblazoned with Jack Daniel’s logos arrives. He’s looking for a cheap car—everyone who comes in is—and finds a burnt-orange Acura for $3,700. He and Frank do a test drive. When they return, he’s ready to buy. Frank doesn’t say much. He just doesn’t get in the way. They bargain the price down to $3,200—and the man in the cowboy hat drives off. It’s one
P.M.
and SK Motors has its first sale of the day.

By two
P.M.
, Wayne is asleep at his desk.

At about four
P.M.
, Steve sells a 2003 Dodge Stratus with 70,000 miles to a woman who needs a car for her teenage son. By the time we close up shop that evening, SK Motors has sold two cars.

On another Saturday, I head to another used-car lot—a CarMax auto superstore in Rockville, Maryland. It’s about thirty miles away from SK Motors in distance and light-years in form. This place has more cars in the
customer
parking lot than SK had for sale. Its collection of vehicles spans a block-sized stretch of asphalt that looks like an airport parking lot—complete with sections designated by letters to help people find their way. Inside the main office, the place is buzzing like a low-wattage stock market floor—two dozen desks, more than forty salespeople, customers galore.

But the biggest difference isn’t size or noise. It’s information. At SK Motors that Saturday, not a single customer seemed to have done even the most rudimentary research on prices, competing deals, or car quality in advance of the visit. Here about half the customers are clutching printouts they’ve brought from home. Others are pecking at their smartphones and iPads. And those who still need access can use a bank of computers CarMax has made available. SK Motors, which serves customers whose options are limited and whose credit is so compromised they’ll tolerate monitoring devices and sky-high interest rates, can still benefit from information asymmetry. CarMax has built its business model around the opposite.

The company launched in 1993 hoping to reinvent the way Americans bought used cars. Two decades later, CarMax is a Fortune 500 company that sells more than four hundred thousand vehicles each year and collects annual revenue of more than $9 billion.
¹⁰
From the start, it tried to undo the conventions that gave rise to that first word cloud. For instance, it established a set price for each car—no haggling necessary. That reduces a customer’s fear of being outbargained by a more informed seller. Also, CarMax salespeople—most of them decked in blue polo shirts with a company logo rather than a suit and tie—earn their pay entirely through commissions. But those commissions aren’t based on the price of the car. Selling a budget car earns the same commission as selling an expensive one. That mitigates the fear that a pushy salesman will press you to buy a vehicle that’s good for his wallet rather than yours. Finally, CarMax practically disgorges information. Since any customer on her own can find a report on the vehicle’s condition or history, CarMax gives that to customers for free. It offers warranties, certifications, and guarantees to address the quality concerns that Akerlof identified back in 1967.

But the sharpest example is in plain view when you walk into the store. Each salesperson sits at a small desk—him on one side, the customer on the other. Each desk also has a computer. In most settings, the seller would look at the computer screen and the buyer at the computer’s backside. But here the computer is positioned not in front of either party, but off to the side with its screen facing outward so both buyer and seller can see it at the same time. It’s the literal picture of information symmetry.

No haggling. Transparent commissions. Informed customers. Once again, it all sounds so enlightened. And maybe it is. But that’s not why this new approach exists.

This is why: On the Saturday I spent at SK Motors, a total of eight customers came in the entire day. On the Saturday at CarMax, more than that showed up in the first fifteen minutes.

—

A
s we’ve seen,
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.

Yet the idea that we’re all in sales still rests uneasily for some people, in part because of a few other myths I’ll quickly address here.

The first is the myth of the blockhead. “We do not seem to have gone much in for genius,” wrote Fuller Brush Company founder Alfred Fuller of his sales force.
¹¹
The way this myth has it, the smarties go off to become engineers and lawyers, while those consigned to the less favorable portions of the IQ bell curve distribution migrate toward sales, which requires far less cognitive horsepower.
*
Not quite. As you’ll see in Parts Two and Three of this book, when simple, transactional tasks can be automated, and when information parity displaces information asymmetry, moving people depends on more sophisticated skills and requires as much intellect and creativity as designing a house, reading a CT scan, or, say, writing a book.

The second erroneous belief, and a reason that some people disdain sales, is the myth of the moneygrubber: that being effective requires being greedy and that the best (and perhaps only) way to succeed is to become a coin-operated selling machine. Once again, not quite. For starters, non-sales selling, especially in domains such as Ed-Med, has nothing to do with cash. And considerable research has shown that money is not the driving force even for the majority of people in traditional sales.
¹²
What’s more, as you’ll read in the Sample Case at the end of Chapter 9, a number of companies have actually increased sales by
eliminating
commissions and
de-emphasizing
money.

Finally, many people—myself included until I began researching this book—believe the myth of the natural. Some people have sales chops. Others don’t. Some people are innately skilled at moving others. The rest of us are out of luck. Here we confront a paradox. 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. The rest of this book will show you how.

Part Two

How to Be

4.

Attunement

I
n 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.

In one of the epic scenes in the cinema of sales, Blake, played by a young Alec Baldwin, schools the middle-aged men on how to sell. His instruction begins with derision, as he questions their masculinity and pelts them with profanities. From there, he moves to fear. “We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest,” he says. “As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize?” He holds up a package. “Second prize’s a set of steak knives.” He pauses. “Third prize is you’re fired. You get the picture?”

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. Successful salespeople, like successful hunters of any species, never relent in pursuing their prey. Every utterance and each maneuver must serve a single goal: pushing the transaction to a conclusion—your conclusion—and getting the person across the table, as Blake says, “to sign on the line which is dotted.”

Always be closing. Its simplicity makes it understandable; its alphabeticality makes it memorable. And it can be constructive advice, keeping sellers focused on a deal’s end even during its beginning and middle. But the effectiveness of this advice is waning because the conditions on which it depends are fading. 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.