And the communication between visits, whether via phone, text, e-mail, or paper letters, must leave the customer with the impression of a harmonized and consistent performance. If a company wishes to achieve the desired effect, then it can perform no event without first considering all others in the sequence of visits and communication. As Arthur Shaw, senior vice president of electronic brokerage at Charles Schwab, told BusinessWeek, “The challenge is to make the branch and the Web a seamless experience.”13 Exactly. Each episode with customers, across whatever media, should be scripted so as to progressively build toward a climax that accomplishes the particular objectives of the communication. Poor salespeople execute these tasks without regard to how they come off over time, while polished salespeople carefully match every detail. As a result, the work ultimately requires fewer takes and has a greater likelihood of creating the right impressions.
Matching multiple people from the same organization who must interact with the same customer over time must also be done with care. Situations requiring such matching include all retail operations, salespeople from different divisions or business units all calling on the same customer, and various order-processing, technical support, and customer service personnel who communicate directly with end users. Not only do such circumstances point to the need for someone to direct the overall performance, but also each individual representative must be aware of how his or her work aligns with that of fellow actors. Employee uniforms, whether the skimpy outfits at a Hooters restaurant or the blue suits and white shirts of old-time IBM, represent management's desire to present a consistent appearance matched across all those who represent the company. The same attention should be given to sets, props, gestures, and a host of other details that together enhance the experience of interacting with the company.
The importance of matching people also exists in team selling, when everyone meets a customer at the same time and place. Even those people who have no lines must match their performance with those in speaking roles. Not only must the physical reactions of the non-speakers reinforce what a colleague (perhaps the “star”) says and does, but also they must be chosen with a scrutiny equal to that with which they would select or emphasize a spoken word. One shouldn't just sit there behaving any which way, but act in a deliberate manner that enhances the credibility of the overall performance: a nodding head, an attentive look, a seemingly not-to-be-noticed gesture to be noticed by a key decision maker—all contribute to the performance. As in the closing scene of the classic movie Casablanca, in which a glance and a tear impart volumes, the final success of a sales call can be as much a function of what is seen but not heard as of the few spoken words that really matter.
Matching theatre isn't easy; it requires deliberation and thought. Yet the everyday pace of business often precludes spending much time rehearsing a performance scene by scene across the full spectrum of possible activity. In the performing arts, the amount of time devoted to rehearsing (and the tolerance for multiple takes) varies depending on the medium. Major motion pictures, indies, thirty-second commercials, television sitcoms, soap operas, and webisodes all have different thresholds. In business as well, preparation time for meetings varies, and the need to succeed with only “one shot” often dominates the performance scene. Still, matching remains the key to success. Just as improv and platform techniques can be learned, so too can matching—even in such unfavorable circumstances. Thomas W. Babson instructs aspiring actors in the matching skills required within various film venues. His book The Actor's Choice: The Transition from Stage to Screen describes how to move from platform to matching theatre. Babson's “three-level system”—which encompasses physical, motivational, and emotional behaviors across “six choices” (character, relationships, objective, opening emotion, transitions, and what he calls “speakout”: what the character thinks when he's not speaking)—applies as much to any business venue as it does to any film set.14
Street Theatre
The fourth and perhaps most engaging form of theatre is street theatre. Historically, it is the domain of jugglers, magicians, storytellers, puppeteers, acrobats, clowns, mimes—all those actors who must first draw people to their performance and then amaze this found audience with their skills and abilities, and, finally—often the most difficult part—ask them for money. While a doctoral student in performance studies at New York University, Sally Harrison-Pepper analyzed the street performers of Washington Square in lower Manhattan. She describes the essence of this form of theatre in her book, Drawing a Circle in the Square:
Forgoing the sanctity of a walled theater space, with darkened auditorium, fixed seating, prepaid audiences, and reassuring reviews, the street performer instead engages and manipulates the urban environment, using its traffic, noise, and passersby as props for his shows. Buses rumble by; helicopters hover overhead; hecklers interrupt the rhythm of the performance; rain, cold, or police can defeat the performer entirely. The audience surrounds the street performer, restless, waiting, impatient. Yet the street performer succeeds in transforming urban space into a theater place, turning visitors resting on steps into an audience seated on bleachers.15
What a perfect description of successful selling. When going into a prospect's office, factory, or home, sales reps have no control over what they find there. They must instead “engage and manipulate” foreign space and thereby turn it into a stage on which to enact their selling performance. Rather than rely on the settings of a permanent stage, the best sales reps use whatever they find at hand as props by dynamically applying what worked in the past to the new situation. Neither bothered nor flustered by interruptions, they use the well-timed remark or expression to draw disruptions into the flow of the overall performance. Whether juggling, doing magic tricks, clowning around, or selling, street performers demonstrate a high degree of skill and ability.16 How do they do it? Practice, practice, practice.
Seemingly improvisational, street performers in fact studiously rehearse—just as much as those in platform theatre, if not more so. In street theatre, though, every performance differs, depending on the composition and conduct of the audience as well as the specific outside elements that occur (an ambulance rushing by, for instance), not to mention the mood of the performer on that day. Street performers must gauge the audience, identify those who will go along with their gags and those unlikely to (sometimes even delaying or postponing performances when the audience doesn't seem “right”), and then turn every disruption into part of the act itself, lest they lose the audience completely and have to start all over again. While following a general outline based on past successes, every street performer determines on the fly which bits from the repertoire to include and which to forgo. The end result: an audience-unique performance that creates value by reusing something known.
In other words, rather than improvise their show, street performers actually mass customize their performances. Their bits—whether a clever remark, a particular routine, a sales trick, or a seemingly extemporaneous response to a naysayer—are standardized modules dynamically linked together on demand to create one seamless performance, or “gig.” Each [bit = module] flows from a stable script, while the final street performance text emerges from the choices made along the way, as depicted in figure 7-2, just as mass customized offerings emerge from the choices made during the designed interaction.
Figure 7-2: Street performance script
Source: Sally Harrison-Pepper, Drawing a Circle in the Square (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 117.
The finale of all street performances remains the same, however. As Harrison-Pepper relates, “Often, the timing of the entire street performance is built around the crucial final phase—the pitch … Street performers learn that the pitch must be precisely timed to transform [an] audience's greatest emotional energy into the greatest number of dollar bills.” Consider again personal selling: whenever a sales rep draws from a portfolio of internalized selling routines, he performs street t
heatre. The timing of the entire performance flows into the final pitch, asking for the sale.17 The sales rep determines in advance the basic script—just like the introductory segments, main points A, B, C, and finale of figure 7-2—but adjusts it in real time based on the needs of the audience. He may lengthen one routine if a prospect gets excited, shorten another when the energy in the room declines, or throw in an unforeseen routine when he discovers a particular interest. All the while, he reacts to objections and interruptions (like heckles and disruptions on the street) as they occur by pulling the proper bit from his repertoire of practiced routines.
Interestingly, this aspect of street theatre, like improv, also draws on techniques first used in commedia dell'arte, which, after all, was first performed “in the market place where a crowd has to be attracted, interested, and then held if a living is to be made.”18 Over time, commedia players became adept at various standard bits and set gimmicks, called lazzi, many of which remain immediately recognizable even today: Arlecchino making a loud noise by sitting on a pig bladder; Zanni counting money in a “one for you, two for me” fashion; Pierrot pulling a chair out from under Il Capitano as he sits down; Arlecchino miming the catching of a fly buzzing around his head. And whenever a performance falters, a character might pull out a long stick and beat a fellow player (from which we get the term slapstick).19 These were not improvisations but dependable, repeatable routines, known to be effective from past performances, introduced at will whenever the situation seemed to warrant it.
Harrison-Pepper reports that fire-spitting Tony Vera, in the 1980s the acknowledged “King of Washington Square,” always began his performances with the lazzo of drawing a large chalk circle on the sidewalk south of the square's prominent arch and then writing his name around its perimeter. Thus would he turn an empty space into a bare stage: “All I have to do is step into that circle and my crowd starts to develop,” he said. “It happens by itself. It's magic.”20 To engage the growing audience, Vera would ignore them while focusing intently on the proper placement of his various props at strategic locations within the circle (again, a time-honored lazzo dating at least to the medicine man shows of the nineteenth-century Old West). Finally, before beginning, Vera would “inspect” the area for debris and start whisking with a small broom (a lazzo shared with the Jacobs Field sweeper).
Each of Vera's shows emerged as he selected on the fly the routines he felt would yield the most money from a particular audience. He would always include the best of his bits and, after first dragging out the finale to heighten its anticipation—not unlike Barbra Streisand and her gum-chewing routine—would conclude with his stock, yet utterly amazing, routine of spitting ten-foot fireballs from his mouth. Throughout, he masterfully responded to the disruptions that inevitably occurred. Vera actually hoped a fire alarm would go off sometime during his performance, for it enabled him to employ one of his best bits, as related by a fellow street performer: “One thing Tony did that I thought was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen was when he lit one of his fire torches and a fire alarm went off somewhere. He looked up, gave the torch to somebody in the audience, and left! Just stood in the audience, going ‘La dee da, I don't know what's going on.’ And it appeared to the audience that it was phenomenally spontaneous. I'm sure that it had happened before but, you know, it was just perfectly timed. It's a very flowing thing.”21 Now that's how to handle what would otherwise be a very distracting disturbance. How much more should we be ready and able, no matter what our job responsibilities, to handle the questions, objections, disturbances, and interruptions that inevitably occur during any interaction with a customer?
While executives' presentations to financial analysts must remain pure platform theatre, if they follow with a Q&A period, then they absolutely must not rely on improv skills. Rather, they should use street performance to anticipate possible lines of questioning, work out the perfect answers in advance, and then practice, practice, practice until they come off as great extemporaneous responses to each question that arises. Every performer, no matter what the circumstances, should be prepared with practiced bits to seize the spontaneous opportunities that arise in the course of doing business.
For example, customer service reps at inbound call center operations need exceptional street theatre skills to connect and empathize with customers seeking information, initiating orders, or simply asking for help with a problem. Some corporations retain coaches to help train their reps on how to handle calls. One of the best is the “Telephone Doctor,” a stock character created by Nancy Friedman of St. Louis, Missouri (founder of a company named Telephone Doctor Customer Service Training). The good doctor appears in more than a hundred routines in an eighteen-tape DVD training library. Topic titles include “Selling Skills A to Z,” “How to Handle the Irate Caller,” and “That's Just Rude!” Each routine provides a bit that any rep can pick up, rehearse, and deliver on demand.
The Hartford uses street theatre in its Personal Lines Insurance Center, realizing that no one representative could adequately handle all possible calls from members.22 Hugh Martin, the center's former head, modularized the organization into an ensemble of specific roles: generalists, who answer all calls and handle those they can, and a variety of specialists, who handle more difficult questions related to particular issues, such as widowhood or the regulations of certain states. Each generalist keeps a stock set of routines that can be brought to bear at a moment's notice once he realizes a caller's needs exceed his knowledge. In essence, the generalist has access to a raft of bits waiting to be called into action, even though they'll be performed by someone else. Martin says the center forms an “instant team” for every call, although “on-demand cast” would be just as accurate. He further relates, “No two phone calls are exactly alike because no two members placing them have the exact same needs. But we couldn't afford to look up answers all the time, so we designed a system where each response, while seemingly spontaneous, is really a pre-engineered routine performed by someone who knows the right answer.”
Indeed, street theatre characterizes the work performed by all mass customizers, including Andersen Corp., Ross Controls, Paris Miki, and others introduced earlier in the book. Their work consists of gigs made up of bits or, if you prefer, activities made up of modular capabilities that stage a direct encounter between performer and audience. Mass customizers “profile” individual audience members to initiate the encounter's interaction and, in the process, amaze the audience by making the apparently complex seem simple, revealing only and exactly those elements that need to be made known. And then, before the performance is completed in the finale, the audience first must wait so as to heighten the anticipation for the end of street performance work: the mass customized offering.
Such [street theatre = mass customization] cannot be faked. The street performers must develop a high degree of expertise before even attempting to amaze an [audience = customers]. He must focus on the management of his repertoire of [bits = modules], on how he will dynamically link them in new and exciting ways, and, most important, on his ability to sense and respond to the unique characteristics of the individuals walking across his otherwise bare stage.23
One Bit at a Time
A street performer's bits cannot be picked fully formed out of a hat (even by a magician). Rather, they appear one bit at a time as the performer methodically advances his techniques—by determining which old bits no longer work well, responding spontaneously to new kinds of disruptions, or creating a new idea for a routine. Because just-invented routines have never before been performed, this first-time showing is no longer the province of street theatre; rather, it is improv theatre. All new bits must first be improvised, whether in front of an audience or in rehearsal. But rarely, if ever, does improvisation yield a perfectly formed bit. Perhaps a rejoinder falls short of the mark but provides the basis for developing a great routine. Or an idea for a new bit turns out wrong, even though it leads down an unforeseen but fruitful path. How
ever he arrives at the bit, once he's figured out its steps and nuances, he still isn't ready to use the bit in front of an audience. First, he must practice, practice, practice; the performer must repeat it over and over again until he has it down and can effectively replicate it at will, and this means he's now performing platform theatre. He then must refine the bit via matching theatre, making sure that it gets the right reaction every time, tweaking it as necessary until it works consistently and, as a final step, ensuring that it fits in with whatever bits might precede or follow it. Only then can the performer recall the new bit on demand to provide the audience-unique value he deems appropriate. Only then can he renew his repertoire of street theatre routines, refreshing his performances with the new bit.24
This cycle of activities, from street theatre to improv to platform to matching and finally back to street theatre, enables accomplished street performers to work new bits into their acts.25 This is exactly how the great Tony Vera created bits for his seamless, on-demand performances, as he explained to Harrison-Pepper:
“You work every day in the streets and find out what you're doing wrong, okay? And you're doing something wrong, you don't do that. Try something else. It works, keep it in the act. Keep doing it 'til your act is polished.” What did he mean when he said something “works”? He replied: “People laugh, they have a good time, and mostly you can tell by what's in your hat at the end of the show. If it didn't work, that means not as much money—and vice versa.”
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