To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (10 page)

Successful negotiators recommend that you should mimic the mannerisms of your negotiation partner to get a better deal. For example, when the other person rubs his/her face, you should, too. If he/she leans back or leans forward in the chair, you should, too. However, they say
it is very important that you mimic subtly enough that the other person does not notice what you are doing
, otherwise this technique completely backfires. Also, do not direct too much of your attention to the mimicking so you don’t lose focus on the outcome of the negotiation. Thus, you should find a happy medium of consistent but subtle mimicking that does not disrupt your focus.
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(Emphasis in the original.)

“Strategic mimicry” proved to be effective. The participants told to mimic—again, with just five minutes of notice and preparation—did it surprisingly well and to great effect. In the gas station scenario, “negotiators who mimicked their opponents’ mannerisms were more likely to create a deal that benefited both parties.”
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In the recruiting scenario, the mimickers fared better than the non-mimickers—and did so without adversely affecting the other side. The researchers titled their paper, “Chameleons Bake Bigger Pies and Take Bigger Pieces.”
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The reasons, Galinsky explains, go to our very roots as a species. Our brains evolved at a time when most of the people around us were those we were related to and therefore could trust. But “as the size of groups increased, it required more sophisticated understandings and interactions with people,” he told an interviewer. 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.”
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Synching our mannerisms and vocal patterns to someone else so that we both understand and can be understood is fundamental to attunement.

Other research demonstrates mimicry’s effectiveness. For example, a Dutch study found that waitresses who repeated diners’ orders word for word earned 70 percent more tips than those who paraphrased orders—and that customers with servers who mimicked were more satisfied with their dining experience.
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In a French study of retail salespeople, half of the store clerks were instructed to mimic the expressions and nonverbal behavior of their customers and half were not. When customers approached the salespeople for help, nearly 79 percent bought from mimickers compared with about 62 percent from non-mimickers. In addition, those who dealt with the mimickers reported “more positive evaluations of both the sales clerk and the store.”
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A Duke University experiment in which an interviewer presented what purported to be a new sport drink found that when people were subtly mimicked, they were more likely to say they would buy the drink and to predict that it would be a success.
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And much as perspective-taking and empathy are fraternal twins, mimicry has a first cousin: touching. The research here, much of it by French social psychologist Nicolas Guéguen, is similarly plentiful. For instance, several studies have shown that when restaurant servers touch patrons lightly on the arm or shoulder, diners leave larger tips.
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One of Guéguen’s studies found that women in nightclubs were more likely to dance with men who lightly touched their forearm for a second or two when making the request. The same held in a non-nightclub setting, when men asked for women’s phone numbers.
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(Yes, both studies took place in France.) In other research, when signature gatherers asked strangers to sign a petition, about 55 percent of people did so. But when the canvassers touched people once on the upper arm, the percentage jumped to 81 percent.
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Touching even proved helpful in our favorite setting: a used-car lot. When salesmen (all the sellers were male) lightly touched prospective buyers, those buyers rated them far more positively than they rated salespeople who didn’t touch.
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Of course, mimicry, like the other attunement behaviors, requires deftness. When people know they’re being mimicked, which was exceedingly rare in the experiments, it can have the opposite effect, turning people against you.
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Twisting the dial toward someone else’s perspective doesn’t mean claiming that you’ve been to the place where your prospect just vacationed or that your uncle lives in her hometown. That’s not attunement. That’s lying. The key is to be strategic
and
human—to be strategic
by
being human.

Gwen Martin understands that. She began her career as a salesperson and in 2007 cofounded NumberWorks, a staffing agency headquartered in Minneapolis that provides accountants and financial professionals to organizations that need help with complex projects. The company is one of the fastest-growing in its industry, and one reason, I had heard, was Martin’s sales prowess.

So on a trip to Minnesota, and in a subsequent phone interview, I asked her what qualities were necessary in effectively moving others. At the time, I’d not yet encountered the research above. She knew nothing of it either. Martin surprised me by repeatedly using a word one rarely hears in this context: “humility.” “The most common thread in the people who are really good at this is humility,” she told me. “They take the attitude of ‘I’m sitting in the small chair so you can sit in the big chair.’” That’s perspective-taking through reducing power, the first rule of attunement.

Martin also said that top salespeople have strong emotional intelligence but don’t let their emotional connection sweep them away. They are curious and ask questions that drive to the core of what the other person is thinking. That’s getting into their heads and not just their hearts, attunement rule number two.

Most of all, “you have to be able somehow to get in synch with people, to connect with them, whether you’re with a grandmother or the recent graduate of an MBA program,” she told me.

How does she describe this capacity?

“This might sound strange,” she said, “but I call it the ability to chameleon.”

The Ambivert Advantage

Extraverts make the best salespeople. The reasons are clear from the very textbook definition of this personality type: “Individuals high on extraversion are characterized as sociable, assertive, lively, and sensation seeking.”
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Moving others requires interacting with others—and social situations, which can drain the energy of introverts, is something extraverts relish. Extraverts’ comfort with other people also means they don’t shrink from making requests, and such assertiveness helps, whether you’re convincing a prospective client to hire your public relations firm or asking a stranger to switch seats on a train. Extraverts are friendly and gregarious, which means they’re more likely to strike up the lively conversations that lead to relationships and ultimately, perhaps, to sales. Finally, extraverts, by their very nature, seek stimulation, and the energy and enthusiasm that bubble up can be infectious, not to mention conducive to many forms of influence and persuasion. Sociable, assertive, lively, and sensation-seeking: It’s the ideal profile for moving others.

“Salespeople represent the prototypical extraverts in our culture,” many analysts say, the very embodiment of “the extravert ideal” that shapes Western society.
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Little wonder, then, that extraverts often pursue careers in sales, that most sales guides extol outgoingness and sociability, or that research confirms that managers select for this trait when hiring a sales force.
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The notion that extraverts are the finest salespeople is so obvious that we’ve overlooked one teensy flaw. There’s almost no evidence that it’s actually true.

When social scientists have investigated the relationship between extraversion and sales success, they’ve found the link, at best, flimsy. For instance, while supervisors often give extraverts high
ratings
, several researchers have found that extraversion has “no statistically significant relationship . . . with sales
performance
” and that “extraversion is not related to sales
volume
.”
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One of the most comprehensive investigations—a set of three meta-analyses of thirty-five separate studies involving 3,806 salespeople—found that the correlation between extraversion and sales was essentially nonexistent. (Positive correlations are measured on a scale that goes from 0 to 1, with higher numbers—say, 0.62—indicating close correlations and 0 no correlation at all. Across the thirty-five studies, the correlation between extraversion and sales performance was a minuscule 0.07.)
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Does this mean that introverts—those soft-spoken souls more at home in a study carrel than at a cocktail party—are better at moving others? Not at all. In fact, the evidence, which is emerging in new research, reveals something far more intriguing.

Adam Grant is a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and one of America’s top young social psychologists. Some of his previous research had examined extraversion
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and he’d become curious that a trait so widely associated with sales didn’t have much connection to success in that realm. So he decided to find out why.

Grant collected data from a software company that operates call centers to sell its products. He began by asking more than three hundred sales representatives to complete several personality assessments, including one that social scientists use to measure where people fall on the introversion-extraversion spectrum. This particular assessment lists statements such as “I am the life of the party” and “I am quiet around strangers” and asks participants to rate themselves on a 1-to-7 scale, with their answers resulting in a numerical measure of extraversion. Then Grant tracked the sales representatives’ revenues over the next three months.
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Perhaps not surprisingly, introverted sales reps didn’t perform as well as extraverted ones, earning an average of $120 per hour in revenue compared with $125 per hour for their more outgoing colleagues. But neither did nearly as well as a third group: the ambiverts.

Ambi-whats?

These are people who are neither overly extraverted nor wildly introverted.
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Go back to that 1-to-7 introversion-extraversion scale. Ambiverts sit roughly in the center. They’re not 1s or 2s, but they’re not 6s or 7s. In Grant’s study, these Goldilocks personalities—not too hot, not too cold—earned an average of nearly $155 per hour, easily besting their counterparts. In fact, the salespeople who had the highest average revenue—$208 per hour—had extraversion scores of 4.0, smack at the midpoint.

What’s more, when Grant plotted total revenue over the three months against employees’ scores on the 1-to-7 scale, he found a distinct, and revealing, pattern. Indeed, revenue peaked between 4 and 4.5—and fell off as the personality moved toward either the introvert or extravert pole. Those highest in extraversion fared scarcely better than those highest in introversion, but both lagged behind their coworkers in the modulated middle.
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“These findings call into question the longstanding belief that the most productive salespeople are extraverted,” Grant writes.
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Instead, being too extraverted can actually impair performance, as other research has begun to confirm. For example, two recent
Harvard Business Review
studies of sales professionals found that top performers are less gregarious than below-average ones and that the most sociable salespeople are often the poorest performers of all.
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According to a large study of European and American customers, the “most destructive” behavior of salespeople wasn’t being ill-informed. It was an excess of assertiveness and zeal that led to contacting customers too frequently.
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Extraverts, in other words, often stumble over themselves. They can talk too much and listen too little, which dulls their understanding of others’ perspectives. They can fail to strike the proper balance between asserting and holding back, which can be read as pushy and drive people away.
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