To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (21 page)

Ask people to describe your invisible pitch in three words.

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.

8.

Improvise

O
n a sleepy Tuesday morning in late spring, I find myself in a weird and compromising position: I’m on the fourteenth floor of a Manhattan office building, standing toe to toe with a woman who’s not my wife and staring deeply into her eyes.

Don’t blame me for this transgression. Blame my ears. Like most of you, I’ve had a well-matched set of ears my whole life. But like many of you, I was never really taught how to use them. So I’ve come to this strange setting, a narrow conference room with windows covered by plain brown paper, to learn how to listen. And like the thirteen executives here with me—they hail from large companies like Bank of America and from digital start-ups with oddly spelled names—I’ve come to study with a master. Her name is Cathy Salit. Back in 1970, she dropped out of eighth grade and started her own school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. That led to a career as a community organizer and then to one as an actor and then, with a few peculiar twists, to her current position as something of a sales whisperer.

She 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. And at the heart of what she teaches is listening.

As I wait for Salit’s session to begin, one of my fellow students—he wears glasses and his lower lip juts out in front of his upper one—asks me where I work.

“I’m a writer,” I say, inviting the conversation with false cheer. “I work for myself.”

He turns away and doesn’t talk to me again. Seems like this guy needs help on listening. (Or perhaps I need to reread the chapter on pitching.)

So when the time comes to partner up for the first exercise, I avoid him and instead approach a slim and stylish woman about my age. She’s a top executive at a major cosmetics company—and looks the part. Four-inch heels that enclose dainty feet whose toenails are painted slate gray. Tan pants and a sheer, ruffled blue blouse. Platinum hair pulled back into a tight ballerina’s bun.

We stand facing each other, my unshaven chin only inches from her tiny porcelain nose. Our first lesson, Salit says, is “the mirror exercise.” We look our partner in the eye and match her every movement as if we’re gazing at ourselves in the mirror.

My partner slowly raises her right hand—so I slowly raise my left hand. She lifts her left hand, showing me her palm. I raise my right hand to the same level and turn the palm outward. Her head turns right. Mine, on cue, goes left. Legs lift. Shoulders shrug. Knees bend. All together.

It’s awfully close and a little awkward. To be forced into such intimacy with an unattractive stranger is excruciating—or so I imagine she’s thinking.

Then Salit dings a bell—the kind you’d find at the front desk of the Bates Motel—and it’s my turn to lead. I place my arms akimbo. Her thin arms match the pose. I widen my stance. So does she. I clasp my fingers together and raise them above my head. She does the same. I pivot my body clockwise. She . . . I can tell you’re getting this now.

As we learned in Chapter 4, strategic mimicry can enhance perspective-taking. But the mirroring we’re doing here has a different purpose. Salit is teaching us the techniques of improvisational theater—which, it turns out, are critical for anyone who wants to move others.

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. Both invite rejection—for salespeople, slammed doors, ignored calls, and a pile of nos; for actors, a failed audition, an unresponsive audience, a scathing review. And both have evolved along comparable trajectories.

Theater, for instance, has always relied on scripts. Actors have discretion to interpret material their own way, but the play tells them what to say and, in many cases, how and where to say it. America’s sales pioneers sought to replicate theater’s staged approach. One of the titans, John H. Patterson, who founded the National Cash Register Company in the late 1800s, required all of NCR’s salesmen to memorize scripts. Over time, as Harvard University business historian Walter Friedman has written, these scripts grew more detailed—morphing from a short primer called “How I Sell National Cash Registers” into a sales manual that ran nearly two hundred pages.
¹
The ever more detailed instructions, Friedman says, focused “not only on what salesmen should say, but also on what they were to do while saying it,” complete with NCR’s version of stage directions. Sprinkled into the company-crafted monologues were asterisks “that indicated that the salesman was supposed to point to the item he was referring to”—as in
Now, sir, this register* makes the entries. The indication* of the transaction shows through this glass.*
²
Patterson and his crew even produced a
Book of Arguments
so that if customers raised questions or concerns, its salesmen could respond with well-rehearsed lines.

The NCR way—carefully scripted mini-dramas leading to a happy ending for the seller—dominated sales around the world for most of the twentieth century. And it remains part of the modern landscape—with sales organizations devising elaborate processes and audience-tested phrases to guide their players toward the final curtain. Scripts perform nicely in stable and predictable environments—when buyers have minimal choices and sellers have maximal information. But those circumstances, as we’ve seen, have become rarer. A memorized
Book of Arguments
is less valuable when the company already provides a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” on its website and when, in any event, customers can discover the ground truth from their social networks.

Here theater offers some instruction on what comes next. For hundreds of years, except for the occasional clown or mime, most stage performances relied on actors reciting memorized lines written by someone else. Indeed, until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain’s office in the United Kingdom had to read and approve every play before it could be performed in the UK—and sent monitors to watch the plays to ensure performers were sticking to the approved text.
³

But about fifty years ago, two innovators began to challenge the single-minded reliance on scripts. The first was Viola Spolin, an American who in the 1940s and 1950s developed a set of games—first for children, then for professional actors—centered on improvising characters, speeches, and scenes. In 1963, she wrote a book,
Improvisation for the Theater
, that encapsulated these exercises and quickly became a mainstay of theater programs. Thanks to her son, Paul Sills, who took up the family trade, her ideas eventually gave rise to the now legendary Second City troupe—whose alumni (from John Belushi to Stephen Colbert to Tina Fey) have shaped American popular entertainment with their mastery of off-script, real-time comedic performance.

The second innovator was Keith Johnstone, a Brit who worked for years at London’s Royal Court Theatre. As he grew weary of conventional theater he, too, began devising his own set of looser, less traditional performance techniques. And in 1979 he wrote what many consider the seminal work in the field,
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
. (The founders of Palantir, a company I mentioned in Chapter 2, ask all employees to read
Impro
before starting their jobs.)

By encouraging directors and performers to recognize the virtues of breaking with the script, Spolin and Johnstone helped make improv a mainstream form of entertainment. Sales and non-sales selling are developing along a similar path—because the stable, simple, and certain conditions that favored scripts have now given way to the dynamic, complex, and unpredictable conditions that favor improvisation.

Beneath the apparent chaos of improvisation is a light structure that allows it to work. Understanding that structure can help you move others, especially when your astute perspective-taking, infectious positivity, and brilliant framing don’t deliver the results you seek. In those circumstances and many others, 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.

1. Hear offers.

Theatrical improvisation is not a complete alien on the planet of business. Scholars such as Keith Sawyer at Washington University, Mary Crossan at the University of Western Ontario, and Patricia Ryan Madson, who taught at Stanford University, have studied its dimensions and applied its concepts to management, innovation, and design.
⁴
But most experts haven’t looked at improv in the realm of sales, even though, as one young scholar says, salespeople adept at improvising “can generate ideas, incorporate changes quickly and easily, and communicate effectively and convincingly during sales presentations.”
⁵

One reason for the oversight might be a legacy of a hundred-plus years of sales training. Since the days of NCR’s carefully plotted scripts, salespeople have been taught to “overcome objections.” If the customer doesn’t want to buy, your job is to turn her around—to convince her that the problems she’s raising either don’t exist or don’t matter. Overcoming objections is a stage in every formal sales process, one that usually follows “prospecting for leads,” “qualifying leads,” and “making the presentation”—and that stands just before “closing.” But now that sales has changed dramatically, the very idea of turning people around might be less valuable, and perhaps less possible, than it’s ever been.

Improvisational theater has no room for overcoming objections because it’s built on a diametrically opposite principle. “The bread and butter of improv,” says Salit, “is hearing offers.”

The first principle of improvisation—hearing offers—hinges on attunement, leaving our own perspective to inhabit the perspective of another. And to master this aspect of improvisation, we must rethink our understanding of what it is to listen and what constitutes an offer.

For all the listening we do each day—by some estimates, it occupies one-fourth of our waking hours
⁶
—it’s remarkable how profoundly we neglect this skill. As the American philosopher Mortimer Adler wrote thirty years ago:

Is anyone anywhere taught how to listen? How utterly amazing is the general assumption that the ability to listen well is a natural gift for which no training is required. How extraordinary is the fact that no effort is made anywhere in the whole educational process to help individuals learn how to listen well.
⁷

Little wonder, then, that so few of us, in fact, do listen well. For many of us, the opposite of talking isn’t listening. It’s waiting. When others speak, we typically divide our attention between what they’re saying now and what we’re going to say next—and end up doing a mediocre job at both. And a few professionals, including those who are in the business of moving others, don’t even bother to wait. In one typical study, researchers found that physicians interrupt the majority of patients in the first eighteen seconds the patient speaks during an appointment, which often prevents the patient from describing what brought her to the office in the first place.
⁸

That’s why Salit’s training emphasizes slowing down and shutting up as the route to listening well. We learn this in 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.

The executive opens his heart more than I expect. He tells me that after thirty-two years of demanding work, he’s questioning whether what he’s doing now is what he should be doing forever and whether it’s time to leave the jackal-eat-jackal savannah of New York media. His eyes water a bit as he speaks, which makes me even more uncomfortable than I was doing the vertical bebop with the high-heeled cosmetics vice president.

When he’s finished, I have to respond. But not yet. I begin counting down the seconds in my head.
Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen. No breaking eye contact. Twelve. Eleven. This is agonizing. Ten. When will the madness end?

It does end. But those fifteen seconds feel preposterously long and, as in the earlier exercise, disturbingly intimate. And that’s what Salit wants. Listening without some degree of intimacy isn’t really listening. It’s passive and transactional rather than active and engaged. Genuine listening is a bit like driving on a rain-slicked highway. Speed kills. If you want to get to your destination, you’re better off decelerating and occasionally hitting the brake. The ultimate idea, she says, uncorking a small bottle of Zen in the cramped conference room when the session is over, is to “listen without listening
for
anything.”