Reading This May Be Your Only Non-Sales Activity Today
Is there anything distinctive about how entrepreneurs sell?
The stakes are higher. You are putting yourself much more on the line. You can't hide behind the Xerox brand or the IBM brand. It is your brand. What that allows you to do, though, is open yourself up a little bit more and make these transactions a little more personal. There's not a lot of great teaching on this, so entrepreneurs may have to go in not well prepared, which is terrifying. The good news is that you have very rapid feedback loops. You come out of that pitch meeting saying, "OK, that didn't work. Let's go to plan B."
What sales traits are crucial for entrepreneurs?
This principle of clarity. Entrepreneurs are moving from a world of problem-solving to a world of problem-finding. The very best ones are able to uncover problems people didn't realize that they had. Today if the customer knows precisely what their problem is they will probably be able to find a solution on their own. The entrepreneur is more valuable in cases where [customers] don't know what their problem is or they are wrong about their problem. So surfacing latent problems, anticipating new problems, is really powerful for entrepreneurs. What entrepreneurs and artists have in common is that they give the world something it didn't know it was missing.
You talked about different kinds of pitches in the book. How should an entrepreneur choose a pitch?
When the facts are on your side there is huge power in pitching with questions. Because questions are active rather than passive. They necessitate a response. Even if people aren't enunciating the answer they will begin forming a response in their heads, looking for a way to agree with you. The ultimate example of this was Ronald Reagan in 1980, saying "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" That was far more effective than saying, "The economy has gone to hell in the last four years," or "Your economic situation has worsened in the last 48 months." The facts were very clear that people's economic situations were much worse in 1980 than in 1976. Asking the question got people thinking: "Are things better now? Let's see, four years ago I was…oh my god! They are a lot worse!" So people start summoning their own autonomous, intrinsically motivated reasons for agreeing with you. That's very, very powerful.
When the facts aren't on your side, however, pitching with a question is an unbelievably bad tactic. Because it gets people to reason through your proposition, and if that proposition is wobbly they will find reasons to disagree with you. Mitt Romney wheeled out the "are you better off" pitch for a few days in October, and wheeled it right back to the barn. Because people knew 2012 was bad. But when they looked back at 2008 they said, "Things were a little bit worse then. Maybe things are getting better."
I think Obama did a reasonably good job with the one-word pitch--what Maurice Saatchi called "one-word equity." In 2008, his one-word pitch was "hope." In 2012, his one-word pitch was "forward." If you look at McCain in 2008 or Romney in 2012, I defy you to tell me what their one-word pitches were. Or two-word pitches. Or three-word pitches.
Don Draper and his ilk are notably absent from the book. Why didn't you write about advertising?
I was trying to expand our notion of selling to more day-to-day interactions. The world of advertising is a very specialized world and so would not be part of the life experience of a lot of readers. That said, there are some great lessons in advertising. There's the legendary story of Rosser Reeves, the advertising executive who came up with "I like Ike." The story goes that one day Reeves was passing by a beggar who had a sign that said, "I am blind." And no one was giving him money. Reeves took the sign and added four words, so that it read: "It is springtime and I am blind." And the beggar started getting a lot of money. So there's a lesson there about the power of contrast.
What's the relationship between selling and leadership?
On some level, of course, leaders are always selling. But I think there's a very interesting analogy to servant leadership: Robert Greenleaf's notion from the 1970s that leaders should serve first and lead second. So servant salesmanship would be serve first, and sell second. When you go into an interaction--whether you are trying to get your daughter to clean her room or telling a customer across the counter about a new camera or trying to sell an airplane--don't ask yourself, "How can I make this exchange as quickly as possible?" Instead, ask, "How can I make this other person's life better? How can I be of service to him or her?" You're flipping the pyramid, just like Greenleaf did when he put the leader on the bottom, making him the servant of the rest. Put the seller on the bottom. If the seller thinks about ways to serve, then over time he may also sell.
A very interesting example of this is Perfetti Van Melle, the Italian company that makes Mentos. Their salespeople go into mom-and-pop shops and use their company data and more-limited data from the storekeepers themselves to recommend what products these small shops should carry. Sometimes they will recommend carrying four kinds of Mentos instead of six. Sometimes they suggest products from their competitors, which is heresy. That's another example of putting the other person's interests first. The salespeople will tell you, "We're not selling Mentos. We're selling insights about the confectionary business. And as a consequence of that we are going to sell plenty of Mentos." If they went in there and said, "How can I get the biggest Mentos order right now?" I think over the long-term it is less effective.
Did researching this book give you any new ideas about how to sell it?
Using the data I gathered about rhyming pitches, I considered naming it "To Sell Is Swell." But that didn't test very well.
