To Sell is Human

2: ENTREPRENEURSHIP, ELASTICITY, AND ED-MED

“As elasticity of skills becomes more common, one particular category of skill it seems always to encompass is moving others.

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.” What he has discovered throughout his career is that “irritation doesn’t work.” It might be effective in the short term. But to move people fully and deeply requires something more—not looking at the student or the patient as a pawn on a chessboard but as a full participant in the game.

Ferlazzo says he “used agitation to challenge him on the idea of graduating from high school and I used my ears knowing that he was interested in football.” Ferlazzo’s aim wasn’t to force John to write about natural disasters but to help him develop writing skills. He convinced John to give up resources—ego and effort—and that helped John move himself.

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.

Of the twenty-five most offered words, only five have a positive valence (“necessary,” “challenging,” “fun,” “essential,” and “important”). The remainder are all negative.

This word cloud, a linguistic MRI of our brains contemplating sales, captures a common view. Selling makes many of us uncomfortable and even a bit disgusted.

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. The first two academic journals where young Akerlof submitted his paper rejected it because they “did not publish papers on topics of such triviality.” The third journal also turned down Akerlof’s study, but on different grounds. Its reviewers didn’t say his analysis was trivial; they said it was mistaken. 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.” Akerlof’s article went on to become one of the most cited economics papers of the last fifty years. In 2001, it earned him a Nobel Prize.

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.

1. Increase your power by reducing it…

As the researchers conclude, “power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspective.”

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. Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more subtle ones…

2. 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…

This second principle of attunement also means recognizing that individuals don’t exist as atomistic units, disconnected from groups, situations, and contexts. And that requires training one’s perspective-taking powers not only on people themselves but also on their relationships and connections to others…

3. Mimic strategically…

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.” Synching our mannerisms and vocal patterns to someone else so that we both understand and can be understood is fundamental to attunement…

The key is to be strategic and human—to be strategic by being human.

As some have noted, introverts are “geared to inspect,” while extraverts are “geared to respond.” Selling of any sort—whether traditional sales or non-sales selling—requires a delicate balance of inspecting and responding. Ambiverts can find that balance. They know when to speak up and when to shut up. Their wider repertoires allow them to achieve

harmony with a broader range of people and a more varied set of circumstances. Ambiverts are the best movers because they’re the most skilled attuners.

Finding similarities can help you attune yourself to others and help them attune themselves to you. Here’s an exercise that works well in teams and yields some insights individuals can later deploy on their own.

Assemble a group of three or four people and pose this question: What do we have in common, either with another person or with everyone?

Similarity—the genuine, not the manufactured, variety—is a key form of human connection.

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.” Hall exemplifies it. Recent social science explains it. 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 …

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.

Alas, the social science shows something different and more nuanced…

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…

On average, the self-questioning group solved nearly 50 percent more puzzles than the self-affirming group…

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.”...

During: Positivity Ratios …

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. Negative emotions, she says, evolved to narrow people’s vision and propel their behavior toward survival in the moment (I’m frightened, so I’ll flee. I’m angry, so I’ll fight). By contrast, “Positive emotions do the opposite: 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,” she writes.

The broadening effect of positive emotions has important consequences for moving others. Consider both sides of a typical transaction. For the seller, positive emotions can widen her view of her counterpart and his situation. Where negative emotions help us see trees, positive ones reveal forests. And that, in turn, can aid in devising unexpected solutions to the buyer’s problem. Other studies show that positive emotions can expand our behavioral repertoires and heighten intuition and creativity, all of which enhance our effectiveness…

Fredrickson and Losada round up to 3. 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. Those below that ratio usually did not. 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. Beyond that balance of positive-to-negative, life becomes a festival of Panglossian cluelessness, where self-delusion suffocates self-improvement. Some negativity—what Fredrickson and Losada call “appropriate negativity”—is essential. Without it, “behavior patterns calcify.” Negative emotions offer us feedback on our performance, information on what’s working and what’s not, and hints about how to do better.

As a young scientist in the 1970s, he’d pioneered the concept of “learned helplessness.”...

Seligman’s work demonstrated that after extended experiences in which they were stripped of any control over their environment, some individuals just gave up. Even when conditions returned to normal, and they once again possessed the ability to seek gain or avoid pain, they didn’t act. They had learned to be helpless.

A pessimistic explanatory style—the habit of believing that “it’s my fault, it’s going to last forever, and it’s going to undermine everything I do”—is debilitating, Seligman found. It can diminish performance, trigger depression, and “turn setbacks into disasters.

Seligman and Schulman gave all the agents the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), a psychological assessment that offers a series of vignettes, the responses to which locate the person’s explanatory style on a pessimism-optimism spectrum…

“Agents who scored in the optimistic half of explanatory style sold 37% more insurance than agents scoring in the pessimistic half. Agents in the top decile sold 88% more insurance than those in the bottom decile,” they discovered.

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.

Optimism, it turns out, isn’t a hollow sentiment. It’s a catalyst that can stir persistence, steady us during challenges, and stoke the confidence that we can influence our surroundings.

... Seligman calls “flexible optimism—optimism with its eyes open.

As social scientists have discovered, interrogative self-talk is often more valuable than the declarative kind.

Answer it—directly and in writing. List five specific reasons why the answer to your question is yes.

It’s the golden mean of well-being, the magic formula for flourishing, the secret numerical code of the satisfied: 3 to 1.

Fredrickson’s ten positive emotions—joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love—on your phone, computer, or office wall.

When something bad occurs, ask yourself three questions—and come up with an intelligent way to answer each one “no”:

1. Is this permanent?

…

2. Is this pervasive?

…

3. 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.

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. They deliver useful information on our efforts. They alert us to when we’re on the wrong path.

Without negativity you . . . lose touch with reality. You’re not genuine. In time, you drive people away.” So allow yourself what she dubs “appropriate negativity

... Wellesley College’s Julie Norem calls “defensive pessimism.” Her work has shown that thinking through gloom-and-doom scenarios and mentally preparing for the very worst that can occur helps some people effectively manage their anxieties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

Robert Cialdini, the Arizona State University scholar and one of the most important social scientists of the last generation, calls this “the contrast principle.

As a result, framing a sale in experiential terms is more likely to lead to satisfied customers and repeat business. So if you’re selling a car, go easy on emphasizing the rich Corinthian leather on the seats. Instead, point out what the car will allow the buyer to do—see new places, visit old friends, and add to a book of memories.

The label frame …

Did a maneuver as innocuous as changing the label achieve results as significant as altering behavior? Absolutely. In the Wall Street Game, 33 percent of participants cooperated and went free. But in the Community Game, 66 percent reached that mutually beneficial result.

People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argue. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating—and the more intensive processing that requires can lead to generating more and better reasons why the person is a good choice. So next time you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.

Even more important, as your daughter explains her reasons for being a 4 rather than a 3, she begins announcing her own reasons for studying. She moves from defending her current behavior to articulating why, at some level, she wants to behave differently.

Once the catcher feels like a creative collaborator, the odds of rejection diminish,” Elsbach says.

The lesson here is critical: 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.

... questions often pack a surprising punch. Yet they’re underused when we try to move others, despite a raft of social science that suggests we should deploy them more often.

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.

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.

Remember: Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.

The researchers discovered that participants based their decisions on two factors: utility and curiosity.

People opened useful messages for extrinsic reasons; they had something to gain or lose. They opened the other messages for intrinsic reasons; they were just curious.

The types of tweets with the lowest ratings fell into three categories: Complaints (“My plane is late. Again.”); Me Now (“I’m about to order a tuna sandwich”); and Presence Maintenance (“Good morning, everyone!”).

Coats has argued that every Pixar film shares the same narrative DNA, a deep structure of storytelling that involves six sequential sentences:

Once upon a time ______________________________.

Every day, _______________.

One day _________________________.

Because of that, ___________________.

Because of that, _______________________.

Until finally ___________________.

If you’re sending information to your fellow Beeston citizens, your subject line pitch could be: 3 reasons why Beeston families support a new bridge.

As you prepare your pitch, whichever variety you choose, clarify your purpose and strategy by making sure you can answer these three questions:

After someone hears your pitch . . .

1. What do you want them to know?

1. What do you want them to feel?

1. What do you want them to do?

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.

1. Go first if you’re the incumbent, last if you’re the challenger.

…

1. 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.

Take some time to find out what they think you’re saying. Recruit ten people—a combination of coworkers and friends and family. Then ask them which three words come to mind in response to one of these questions: What is my company about? What is my product or service about? What am I about? Make it clear that you’re not asking them for physical qualities (“tall, dark, and handsome”) but something deeper.

Once you gather these words, look for patterns. Many people are surprised by the disconnect between what they think they’re conveying and what others are actually hearing. Knowing is the prelude to improving.

She [Cathy Salit] runs a company called Performance of a Lifetime, which teaches businesspeople improvisational theater—not to secure them low-paying gigs in drafty Greenwich Village clubs, but to make them more effective in their regular jobs.

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.

... you’ll do better if you follow three essential rules of improvisational theater: (1) Hear offers. (2) Say “Yes and.” (3) Make your partner look good.

The first principle of improvisation—hearing offers—hinges on attunement, leaving our own perspective to inhabit the perspective of another.

For many of us, the opposite of talking isn’t listening. It’s waiting.

That’s why Salit’s training emphasizes slowing down and shutting up as the route to listening well. We learn this is another exercise, called “Amazing Silence,” where I’m paired with a top television executive about ten years my senior. The rules: One person has to reveal to the other something important to him. The other person, who must make eye contact the entire time, then responds—but he must wait fifteen seconds before uttering a word.

Listening without some degree of intimacy isn’t really listening. It’s passive and transactional rather than active and engaged.

Offers come in all shapes and sizes,” says Salit. But the only way to hear them is to change the way you listen and then change the way you respond.

As Johnstone puts it, “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made.

Instead of swirling downward into frustration, “Yes and” spirals upward toward possibility. When you stop you’ve got a set of options, not a sense of futility.

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.

Roger Fischer… 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.

When sellers and buyers are evenly matched, pushing for win-lose rarely leads to a win for anyone—and often ends in lose-lose.

In Cathy Salit and Second City’s brand of theater, performers must follow this rule: Make your partner look good. Improv artists have long understood that helping your fellow performer shine helps you both create a better scene. Making your partner look good doesn’t make you look worse; it actually makes you look better.

Questions, whose potency we’ve seen in both interrogative self-talk and in pitching effectively, change the rules of engagement and therefore the nature of the interaction itself. The conversation becomes more of a dance and less of a wrestling match. That’s something that Fuller Brush founder Alfred Fuller intuited years before improv was ever invented. “Never argue,” he wrote. “To win an argument is to lose a sale.

Nineteen centuries ago, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.” Unfortunately, not many people listened to him.

Designate one day this week to be your slow day. Then when you have a conversation, take five seconds before responding. Seriously. Every time. It will seem odd at first. And your conversation partner might wonder if you were recently bonked on the head. But pausing a few additional seconds to respond can hone your listening skills in much the same way that savoring a piece of chocolate, instead of wolfing it down, can improve your palate. (If a whole day is too much, start smaller; try it for an hour.)

... “Yes and,” which forces them to build on the previous idea. You can’t refute what your colleagues say. You can’t ignore it. And you shouldn’t plan ahead. Just say “Yes and,” accept what the person before you offers, and use it to construct an even better campaign.

“There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes,’ and there are people who prefer to say ‘No,’” Keith Johnstone writes. “Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.

In most circumstances that involve moving others, we have several ways to accomplish a task, most of which can make our partners look good in the process.

So in an ingenious field study, two Georgetown University economists, James Habyarimana and William Jack, devised a method to change the behavior of Kenya’s daredevil drivers.

Our study emphasizes approaching the patient as a human being and not as an anonymous case study,” Turner told ScienceDaily…

Instead of seeing patients as duffel bags of symptoms, viewing them as full-fledged human beings helps physicians in their work and patients in their treatment. This doesn’t mean doctors and nurses should abandon checklists and protocols. But it does mean that a single-minded reliance on processes and algorithms that obscure the human being on the other side of the transaction is akin to a clinical error.

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.

Reading a CT scan alone in a room is abstract and distant. Reading a CT scan when a photograph of the patient is staring back at you makes it concrete and personal. In both traditional sales and non-sales selling, we do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person.

But the value of making it personal has two sides. One is recognizing the person you’re trying to serve, as in remembering the individual human being behind the CT scan. The other is putting yourself personally behind whatever it is that you’re trying to sell.

Our findings suggest that health and safety messages should focus not on the self, but rather on the target group that is perceived as most vulnerable.

In 2008, he [Grant] carried out a fascinating study of a call center at a major U.S. university…

But the people in the purpose group kicked into overdrive. They more than doubled “the number of weekly pledges that they earned and the amount of weekly donation money that they raised.

But the successful seller must feel some commitment that his product offers mankind as much altruistic benefit as it yields the seller in money.

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. This simple move—from upselling to upserving—has the obvious advantage of being the right thing to do. But it also carries the hidden advantage of being extraordinarily effective.

This approach connects to the quality of attunement—in particular, the finding that lowering your status can enhance your powers of perspective-taking. And it demonstrates that as with servant leadership, the wisest and most ethical way to move others is to proceed with humility and gratitude.

But emotionally intelligent signage goes deeper. It achieves those same ends by enlisting the principles of “make it personal” and “make it purposeful.” It tries to move others by expressing empathy with the person viewing the sign (that’s the personal part)...

By removing the cloak of anonymity and replacing it with this form of personal connection, you’re more likely to genuinely serve, which over the long haul will redound to everyone’s benefit.

... the two questions at the core of genuine service.

1. If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve?

1. When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began?

One way to begin is to visit Barbara Fredrickson’s website (http://positivityratio.com/). Take her “Positivity Self Test”—a twenty-question assessment you can complete in two or three minutes that will yield your current positivity ratio. Then establish a free account and track your ratio over time.

For more information, visit Seligman’s website (http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx), and take his Optimism Test to get a sense of your current style. And check out his classic book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life.

Michael Pantalon is a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine and a leading authority on “motivational interviewing.

… Pantalon writes in his book Instant Influence.

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini.

Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Three years after Made to Stick…

1. The Pixar Pitch Pro tip: Read all twenty-two of former Pixar story artist Emma Coats’s story rules: http://bit.ly/jlVWrG

Your try:

Once upon a time ____________________.

Every day, ______________.

One day _______________.

Because of that, _______________________.

Because of that, _____________.

Until finally ________________.

Keth Johnstone… Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre.

American philosopher Mortimer Adler

Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone.

Improvisation for the Theater by Viola Spolin.

Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse by R. Keith Sawyer. Sawyer is a leading scholar of creativity.