To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (19 page)

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. So given your knowledge of the underlying social psychology, the next time you’ve got a strong case to make to a prospective employer, new sales prospect, or undecided friend, do you think you should skip making a statement and instead ask a question?

3. The rhyming pitch

Lawyers, especially trial lawyers, are in the moving business. They sell juries on verdicts. And integral to their efforts is their closing argument—the final summary of all the evidence that’s been presented over the course of the trial. It’s the ultimate pitch, days and sometimes weeks of material reduced to its essentials.

In 1995, an American lawyer named Johnnie L. Cochran presented his closing argument in the trial of his client, the former football star O. J. Simpson, who stood accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. Among the evidence the jurors had to consider was a bloodstained glove found at the murder scene that prosecutors said belonged to Simpson. To demonstrate that the glove was indeed his, during the trial, prosecutors had asked Simpson to slip it on in front of the jury. Simpson tried, but struggled—and failed to get the glove on. In his closing statement, Cochran made the following pitch for his client’s innocence: “If it doesn’t fit . . .”

Most Americans who were alive at the time know the rest: “. . . you must acquit.” The jury exonerated Simpson—and one reason was Cochran’s seven-word rhyme: If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

Cochran, who died in 2005, was probably operating on instinct and experience, but his technique has ample support in the social science literature. For instance, in a 2000 study, Matthew S. McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh of Lafayette College presented participants with a list of sixty aphorisms and asked them to rate whether each was “an accurate description of human behavior.”
¹²
Researchers included existing aphorisms that rhymed along with modified versions that did not, as you can see below.

Participants rated the aphorisms in the left column as far more accurate than those in the right column, even though each pair says essentially the same thing. Yet when the researchers asked people, “In your opinion, do aphorisms that rhyme describe human behavior more accurately than those that do not rhyme?” the overwhelming answer was no. Participants were attributing accuracy to the rhyming versions
unconsciously
. Only when they were explicitly instructed to disentangle the meaning from the form did they rate the statements as equally accurate.
¹³

What’s going on? 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.

That’s one explanation for why Haribo, the German candy company best known for its “gummy bears,” uses a rhyming pitch in every country where it operates and in each of those countries’ languages.

For example, its pitch in English is:
“Kids and grown-ups love it so—the happy world of Haribo.”

In French it’s:
“Haribo, c’est beau la vie—pour les grands et les petits.”

In Spanish it’s:
“Haribo, dulces sabores—para pequeños y mayores.”

Haribo is acting on knowledge that you, too, can use in your work and life. If you’re testifying before your city council, summarizing your main point with a rhyme gives council members a way to talk about your proposal when they deliberate. If you’re one of a series of freelancers invited to make a presentation before a big potential client, including a rhyme can enhance the processing fluency of your listeners, allowing your message to stick in their minds when they compare you and your competitors. Remember: Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.

4. The subject-line pitch

E-mail has become so integrated into our lives that, as Xerox PARC researchers describe, it has “become more like a habitat than an application.”
¹⁴
But as with any habitat, the more deeply we’re immersed in it, the less we notice its distinctive features. That’s why many of us haven’t realized that every e-mail we send is a pitch. It’s a plea for someone’s attention and an invitation to engage.

Whether somebody accepts that invitation, or even opens the e-mail at all, depends most on who sent it. You’re more likely to look at a message from your boss or your girlfriend than from a company you’ve never heard of promising a product you’ll never need. But the next most important element in e-mail engagement is the subject line—the headline that previews and promises what the message contains.

In 2011 three Carnegie Mellon University professors conducted a series of studies examining why some subject lines are more effective than others. In one experiment, they used the “think-aloud method,” wherein participants worked through their e-mail in-boxes and narrated their decisions about what they read, replied to, forwarded, or deleted. The researchers discovered that participants based their decisions on two factors: utility and curiosity. People were quite likely to “read emails that directly affected their work.” No surprise there. But they were also likely “to open messages when they had moderate levels of uncertainty about the contents, i.e. they were ‘curious’ what the messages were about.”
¹⁵

Utility and curiosity were about equally potent, but they seemed to operate independently of each other. Utility worked better when recipients had lots of e-mail, but “curiosity [drove] attention to email under conditions of low demand.” One explanation for the different behaviors under different conditions was the motives behind each choice. 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. Ample research has shown that trying to add intrinsic motives on top of extrinsic ones often backfires.
¹⁶
As a result, say the Carnegie Mellon researchers, your e-mail subject line should be either obviously useful (
Found the best & cheapest photocopier
) or mysteriously intriguing (
A photocopy breakthrough!
), but probably not both (
The Canon IR2545 is a photocopy breakthrough
). And considering the volume of e-mail most people contend with, usefulness will often trump intrigue, although tapping recipients’ inherent curiosity, in the form of a provocative or even blank subject line, can be surprisingly effective in some circumstances.

Along with utility and curiosity is a third principle: specificity. Indeed, Brian Clark, founder of the popular Copyblogger copywriting website, recommends that subject lines should be “ultra-specific.”
¹⁷
Thus a mushy subject line like
Improve your golf swing
achieves less than one offering
4 tips to improve your golf swing this afternoon
.

Tapping the principles of utility, curiosity, and specificity, if I were to send you an e-mail pitch about the preceding five paragraphs, I might use this subject line if I suspected your inbox was jammed:
3 simple but proven ways to get your e-mail opened
. But if I thought you had a lighter e-mail load, and you already knew me well, I might use:
Some weird things I just learned about e-mail
.

5. The Twitter pitch

Each year the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa receives more than three hundred applications for roughly seventy spots in the coming year’s MBA program. Applicants submit their university grades, scores on the standardized business school admission test, letters of recommendation, and several essays. But in 2011, Tippie added a contest to its process, one intended to test the pitching prowess of the future business leaders it would be educating. The school asked a fairly standard essay question: “What makes you an exceptional Tippie full-time M.B.A. candidate and future M.B.A. hire?” But it told applicants to respond in the form of a tweet—a micro-message of 140 or fewer characters.
¹⁸

Meet the Twitter pitch, which uses Twitter as a platform and its character count as a limit on loquaciousness. One of the pioneers of this form is Stowe Boyd, a programmer, designer, and investor. In 2008 Boyd was heading to a conference and planning to meet with some start-up companies. To avoid getting buried beneath a sandstorm of eager entrepreneurs, he required any start-up seeking a meeting to send him its pitch via Twitter. This approach, said one commentator, is “quick, painless, and to-the-point. It cuts through the PR babble and forces companies to summarize what they do in 140 characters or less.”
¹⁹
As Twitter insinuates itself more deeply into our lives, Boyd’s “twitpitch” has become another important tool in everyone’s persuasion kit.

The mark of an effective tweet, like the mark of any effective pitch, is that it engages recipients and encourages them to take the conversation further—by responding, clicking a link, or sharing the tweet with others. The few scholars who have studied this new medium with any rigor have found that only a small category of tweets actually accomplish those goals. In 2011, three computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Georgia Tech undertook the first systematic look at what they call “microblog content value.” They set up a website called Who Gives a Tweet and invited Twitter users to rate other people’s tweets in exchange for subjecting their own tweets to reader evaluations. After analyzing more than forty-three thousand ratings, the investigators found a communications medium that a secondary school guidance counselor would say wasn’t living up to its potential. Readers rated only 36 percent of tweets as worth reading, a surprisingly low figure considering that they were evaluating tweets from people they’d chosen to follow. They described 25 percent as not worth reading at all. And they rated 39 percent as neutral, which, given the volume of our daily distractions, is tantamount to declaring those, too, not worth reading at all.
²⁰

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!”).
²¹
But three of the categories rated the highest provide some insight on pitching via this new medium. For instance, readers assigned the highest ratings to tweets that asked questions of followers, confirming once again the power of the interrogative to engage and persuade. They prized tweets that provided information and links, especially if the material was fresh and new and offered the sort of clarity discussed in Chapter 6. And they gave high ratings to self-promoting tweets—those ultimate sales pitches—provided that the tweet offered useful information as part of the promotion.
²²

Which leads back to the University of Iowa’s venture into Twitter self-promotion. The winner of that first contest was John Yates, who crafted his winning entry in the form of a haiku (even including the syllable count of each line) to emphasize his previous work experience in Asia:

Globally minded (5)
Innovative and driven (7)
Tippie can sharpen (5).

No, it doesn’t make one’s heart swell. But it’s engaging and provides relevant information. And it secured the applicant a spot in Tippie’s incoming class, along with a scholarship package worth more than $37,000. Given his ability to earn more than $600 per character, and more than $3,000 per syllable, young Mr. Yates might have a future in the new world of selling.

6. The Pixar pitch

Four hundred miles north of Hollywood, in a small city along the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay, sits the headquarters of an unlikely entertainment colossus. Pixar Animation Studios, in Emeryville, California, opened in 1979 as the geeky computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. Thirty-five years later, it’s one of the most successful studios in movie history. Starting with
Toy Story
in 1995, Pixar has produced thirteen feature films that together have grossed $7.6 billion worldwide, an astonishing $585 million per movie.
²³
Six Pixar films—
Finding Nemo
,
The Incredibles
,
Ratatouille
,
WALL-E
,
Up
, and
Toy Story 3
—have won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, just a few of the twenty-six total Oscars the studio has taken home.