To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (12 page)

Buoyancy

O
n Wednesday morning, the day after he’d sold about $150 worth of carpet sweepers and cleaning products to two San Francisco lawyers, Fuller Brush Man Norman Hall returns to their office to deliver the goods. But when he arrives, the lawyers have not. So Hall and I retreat to a break room situated in the corner of the building’s seventh floor. The room is the aggressively generic sort of space you find in many office buildings—a small kitchen setup against one wall, a cheap table surrounded by cheaper chairs in the room’s center. But it gives us a place to park. And there we sit, chatting about Hall’s life, waiting for his customers to show up so he can give them their loot and get on with his day.

About a half-hour into our conversation, a woman who works down the hall enters the break room and begins preparing a small pot of coffee. When her back is turned, Hall signals with a raised index finger that he wants to interrupt our conversation to begin one with her.

“Are you the new office down the way?” he asks.

“We are,” she says, turning her head, but not her body, to respond.

“I’ve been calling on these two attorneys here for many, many years. And I was going to introduce myself,” Hall says. “I don’t know whether there’s much interest. But I’ve been covering this area of the city for almost forty years.”

The woman, her back still turned and her voice devoid of even a fleck of emotion, says, “Uh-huh.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard of Fuller Brush,” Hall begins.

“Yeah . . . we . . . uh,” she replies. She’s uncomfortable. And it’s clear that the encounter has become a game of beat the clock. Will her coffee finish brewing before Hall gets fully into his sales pitch? “I don’t think we have any need.”

Drip . . . drip . . . drip.

“I don’t press myself on people,” Hall assures her, calm in his voice and time on his side.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip.

“
Okaaay
,” she says, in the singsongy rising intonation of someone trying to end a conversation. “
Thaaank yoooou . . .”

Hall pretends to be oblivious. “I carry the home catalog. And then I do supply certain offices with minor cleaning items. That’s why I’m here,” he says.

She turns, crosses her arms, and alternates her gaze between Hall and the coffee. Hall explains that the lawyers have been his customers for fifteen years and that he’s waiting to give them what they ordered the day before. He tells her again that he’s been working this neighborhood for four decades. He reiterates that he doesn’t press, that he’s not one of those pushy salesmen, that he simply has some products that might be useful, and that he can tell her about them in just a few minutes and not waste any of her time.

Drip . . . drip . . . the coffee is done.

“
Wellll
,” the woman says, stretching the word for long enough that an outright no becomes a grudging maybe, “stop by on your way out.”

Hall asks her name. It’s Beth. She exits with her fresh cup of coffee. Silence fills the room. Hall waits until Beth is out of earshot. Then he leans in toward me across the break room table.

“That,” he says, “is how it starts.”

—

N
orman Hall began selling Fuller brushes because he was broke. Born in New York City, the son of a Russian mother who took care of the household and a Scottish father who was a sales representative for a publishing company, Hall worked some as a child actor. But upon graduating from high school, he enrolled at Cornell University intent on becoming a doctor. “It quickly became apparent that medicine wasn’t my best vocation,” he told me. “I spent more time performing than studying.”

After a stint in the U.S. Navy, he returned to New York City to give professional acting a serious try. It was difficult. In need of steady income, he followed his father’s path and became a salesman for a publishing company. Before long, he found himself in San Francisco, opening the West Coast office of Grove Press, the imprint that published Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. In a few years, that office cratered. So did Hall’s marriage. He started a restaurant, which flopped and burned through his savings.

It was the early 1970s, and “I was down to my last buck,” Hall said. “I answered an ad for Fuller Brushes because it offered very fast turnover and quick cash flow.”

He quit four times the first week.

Although he’d been a salesperson before, and therefore had met with his full share of rejection, he found door-to-door selling especially brutal. These rejections came fast and ferociously, often in the form of a rude comment and a slammed door. But every time he wanted to quit, one of the San Francisco office’s veteran salesmen pulled him aside. This fellow—Charlie was his name—was “the quintessential Fuller Brush man,” Hall said. He encouraged Hall, telling him that the nos he was piling up were just part of the process, and that he should “keep going, keep going.”

“By God, at the end of the week, I had a nice wage for myself,” Hall said.

Hall did keep going, still trying his hand at acting and looking for other ways to support himself. “It was a day-to-day thing,” he said. “But after about five years, I finally reconciled to the fact that this is my career and I’d just do a damn good job of it.”

Not that it’s ever easy. But what wears him down isn’t lugging boxes of hairbrushes and bottles of stain remover up and down roller-coastery hills or trekking five miles a day on seventy-five-year-old legs. It’s something deeper. Each day, when he makes his rounds, Hall confronts what he calls “an ocean of rejection.”

Draw a map of the world of selling and the most prominent topographical feature is that deep and menacing ocean. 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

The hardest part of selling, Norman Hall says, occurs before his well-polished shoes even touch the streets of San Francisco. “Just getting myself out of the house and facing people” is the stiffest challenge, he says. “It’s that big, unknown faceless person I have to face for the first time.”

Most sales and success gurus offer a standard remedy for Hall’s hesitation: He should pump himself up. He should take a moment to remind himself how fabulous and unstoppable he is. For example, Og Mandino, whose inspirational books helped set the tone for sales advice in the twentieth century, recommended that we each should tell ourselves, “I am nature’s greatest miracle” and that “I will be the greatest salesman the world has ever known.”
¹
Napoleon Hill—author of
Think and Grow Rich
, one of the best-selling American books of the last century—wrote that the “first step in salesmanship” was “autosuggestion,” “the principle through which the salesman saturates his own mind with belief in the commodity or service offered for sale, as well as in his own
ability
to sell.”
²
From Anthony Robbins in the United States to Paul McKenna in the United Kingdom to any sales training course anywhere in the world, the advice arrives with remarkable sameness: 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.

We human beings talk to ourselves all the time—so much, in fact, that it’s possible to categorize our self-talk. Some of it is positive, as in “I’m strong,” “I’ve got this,” or “I will be the world’s greatest salesman.” Some of it—for a few of us, much
of it—is negative. “I’m too weak to finish this race” or “I’ve never been good at math” or “There’s no way I can sell these encyclopedias.” But whether the talk is chest-thumping or ego-bashing, it tends to be declarative. It states what is or what will be.

However, the person whose example you should be following takes a different tack. His name is Bob the Builder. And if you haven’t been around preschool children in the last fifteen years, let me offer a quick dossier. Bob is an overall-clad, hard-hat-sporting, stop-motion-animated guy who runs a construction company. His TV program, which began in England in 1999, now entertains kids in forty-five countries. Bob is always finding himself in sticky situations that seem inevitably to call for traditional sales or non-sales selling. Like all of us, Bob talks to himself. But Bob’s self-talk is neither positive nor declarative. Instead, to move himself and his team, he asks a question:
Can we fix it?

Devotees of Mandino, Hill, Robbins, and McKenna might shudder at allowing this shaft of doubt—questioning one’s ability?—to shine through our psychic windows. But social scientists are discovering that Bob has it right. 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.

Three researchers—Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracín of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi—confirmed the efficacy of “interrogative self-talk” in a series of experiments they conducted in 2010. In one, they gave participants ten anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “when” to spell “hewn”). They separated the participants into two groups, each of which was treated identically except for the one minute before they tackled their assignments. The researchers instructed the first group to
ask
themselves whether they would solve the puzzles—and the second group to
tell
themselves that they would solve the puzzles. On average, the self-questioning group solved nearly 50 percent more puzzles than the self-affirming group.
³

In the next experiment, the researchers presented a new group of participants with another round of anagrams, but they added a twist of trickery: “We told participants that we were interested in people’s handwriting practices. With this pretense, participants were given a sheet of paper to write down 20 times one of the following words:
Will I
,
I will
,
I
, or
Will
.”
⁴

The outcome was similar. People who’d written
Will I
solved nearly twice as many anagrams as those who’d written
I will
,
Will
, or
I
. In subsequent experiments, the basic pattern held. Those who approached a task with Bob-the-Builder-style questioning self-talk outperformed those who employed the more conventional juice-myself-up declarative self-talk.

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. Imagine, for instance, that you’re readying yourself for an important meeting in which you must pitch an idea and marshal support for it. You could tell yourself, “I’m the best. This is going to be a breeze,” and that might give you a short-term emotional boost. But if you instead ask, “Can I make a great pitch?” the research has found that you provide yourself something that reaches deeper and lasts longer. You might respond to yourself, “Well, yes, I can make a great pitch. In fact, I’ve probably pitched ideas at meetings two dozen times in my life.” You might remind yourself of your preparation. “Sure, I can do this. I know this material inside out and I’ve got some great examples to persuade the people who might be skeptical.” You might also give yourself specific tactical advice. “At the last meeting like this, I spoke too quickly—so this time I’ll slow down. Sometimes in these situations, I get flustered by questions, so this time I’ll take a breath before responding.” Mere affirmation feels good and that helps. But it doesn’t prompt you to summon the resources and strategies to actually accomplish 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.”
⁵
As ample research has demonstrated, people are more likely to act, and to perform well, when the motivations come from intrinsic choices rather than from extrinsic pressures.
⁶
Declarative self-talk risks bypassing one’s motivations. Questioning self-talk elicits the reasons for doing something and reminds people that many of those reasons come from within.
*

To help get us out of the door, then, the first component in buoyancy is interrogative self-talk.

Can you do that?

Well, you’ll have to ask yourself.

During: Positivity Ratios

I’m pretty sure Norman Hall is an ambivert. A few days in his company proves he’s not a hard-core introvert. Besides, he couldn’t have earned a living selling brushes for forty years if he were skittish about speaking up or uncomfortable around strangers. But Hall isn’t exactly a wrist-grabbing, backslapping extravert either. He’s thoughtful, deliberate, and—as he often describes himself—soft-spoken.

“I hate salesmen who are used-car types, who press and press and press. And I don’t want to be one of those guys,” he told me. “I am more soft-spoken in my work than I am in my real life.” Like all effective sellers, Hall is a master of attunement. He listens and observes more than the stereotypical yap-yapping salesman, but he also adds his voice and makes his case with vigor when the situation demands. And if you watch his ambiversion in action and listen carefully to what he says and how he interacts with others, he also demonstrates the second component of buoyancy: positivity.