by Oren Klaff
Later that afternoon Mitch wired us $10 million. He never even walked the property; our third-party independent reports were good enough. With Mitch on board and his money in escrow, we hit our Rolodex hard and easily had the remaining investors lined up within a week.
A happy ending for everyone, kind of. I had a wife and kid back at home who hadn’t seen me in two weeks. On the plus side, they would still have a house to live in, thanks to my share of the $6 million from the deal.
As Logan’s jet took off and we headed back toward California, I couldn’t help but breathe a huge sigh of relief. That was way too close a call.
I pulled out my phone to check a few of the temperature zones in our new refrigerator and make sure the beer was going to be ice cold when I got home. Yep, 34 degrees, just the way I like it. “This isn’t so fancy,” I thought to myself. Just a regular fridge like everyone uses in my neighborhood . . . Plain Vanilla.
CHAPTER 6
Leveraging Pessimism
It was 2:41 a.m. The caller ID read ZERO GRAVITY. My phone was supposed to be in airplane mode because we were on vacation, but I’d left it on because of the fires burning in California near our home, and now, at a time of night that I generally find to be the most tranquil, it was vibrating and ringing like an air-raid siren.
It was February. A heavy snow was falling. We were in Vail, Colorado, with our four-year-old son, enjoying a family ski trip. “No calls, for sure,” I had promised. Just me, you, and the baby.
But at two a.m. I had to pick up this call because I had three million bucks riding on Zero Gravity.
“Oren, I need you to help. I am ready take company public but need sniper right now. You help me get best one OK?”
“Wait a sec,” I whispered, trying not to disturb the beautiful woman sleeping next to me (as if the phone erupting into a chorus of “Barracuda” a few moments earlier had not already done so). I threw on shorts and quietly headed down the hallway toward the living room in our suite, with a view of the slopes. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be carving fresh powder in the morning as planned.
Now I was ready to ask some questions of my own. “Anton, is your hundred thousand dollar watch broken again?”
“Ha ha. No time for you funny guy, Oren.”
This was Zero Gravity’s real name, Anton Kolisnychenko. A few years ago I had met Anton in a bar in his native Ukraine when I had lost my guide earlier in the day and was stumbling around downtown Kiev without a translator, a charged cell phone, or a clue. As day turned to night, I was getting very, very thirsty, so I slipped into a modern-looking bar. They served vodka and just one type of beer—Genesee Cream Ale (worst beer on the planet).
Anton was the only other soul in the bar who spoke any form of English. He helped me translate the menu and he ordered potatoes and some weird dish called golubtsi, which I quickly discovered does not mean “delicious hamburger.” We shared a meal of golubtsi, selyodka, and kishke. And formed a friendship.
But now that friendship was being tested.
“You told me call if I need you. Well, now need you. You meet me tomorrow,” said Anton.
This wasn’t a question. And as usual with Anton, there were no pleasantries, no apologies for calling at two a.m. Just typical straight-to-the-point Anton, with whom an early-morning call always ended with “You need to meet me in a Soviet Bloc country twelve thousand miles away for such-and-such random emergency situation.”
But sometimes there was three million dollars at the end of that twelve-thousand-mile trip. And sometimes there was just a hard-to-pronounce cabbage roll. In the future, I had to get better at figuring out which was which.
“I am lost my prize sniper right before yesterday. Without superstar number one sniper, I can’t win XXL tournament.”
That hit the fear center of the brain, and for good reason. XXL was a gaming tournament in which $3 million in prize money could be won by the best teams, and until a moment ago, Anton had one of the best teams. In fact, I had recently made a large business bet that he would win this very tournament.
“If I don’t win, can’t fund my software company, can’t take company public like we plan.” While Anton rambled, I flipped on the light, temporarily blinding myself, and began fumbling with the hotel’s in-room coffee maker.
“Oren, you tell me, please,” he said more desperately than I’d ever heard him sound. “What am I do now? This is what you say, situation crazy.”
I slid a cup under the coffee maker. In just a few minutes I had gone from fast asleep to hearing the words “Hey man, you need to find me a world-class sniper or we’re going to lose a shot at three million bucks.”
And there was even more riding on it than $3 million. You see, we needed that money to buy another company, and take the combined companies public on the Nasdaq stock exchange—another way of saying we needed $3 million to get $20 million and hopefully make $100 million. The exact details of how this works aren’t important; what matters is that we had a plan, and we needed the XXL tournament winnings to get the whole process started. It was XXL or die.
“Wait a second, you already have a sniper,” I said, starting to wake up as caffeine made its way into my central nervous system. “What happened to the fat Asian kid in the Van Halen shirt? He’s awesome.”
“Oh, you mean GummiBear? Yes of course, he’s best in world. But Oren, I quit that team.”
“Wait. What?” Anton leaving his team was like Tom Brady in his prime quitting the Patriots. This was indeed situation crazy. “Why would you leave your team, Anton?”
He gave me a long, rambling rant about unfair treatment at the hands of the company that managed his team, while I placed him on mute and cursed him loudly. Finally, he reached the end of his monologue and I took the phone off mute to get down to business.
“OK, let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said, rubbing my forehead and trying to piece together the various strands of Anton’s story. “You got sick of management putting you on a constant game rotation with no rest, so you organized a mutiny but it backfired, and your contract got terminated, so you pulled together a new team . . . but you don’t have a sniper. Without a good sniper the whole deal is up in smoke. And now, at two-thirty a.m. on a Tuesday while I am in Colorado on a family vacation, you want me to find you a sniper?”
“I know you can do it, Oren Klaff. You are the only person I can call. I am so much believing in you. And it will only take you few hours. Then you go back to happy snow vacation. I can’t win without best sniper. If I don’t win XXL money, it all goes up in gas.”
“Smoke,” I corrected him.
“I quit smoke last year,” Anton said.
“Never mind. So who’s the best sniper in the world?” I asked.
“Mac Jones ‘Bulletz for Breakfast,’” he replied. I waited for him to laugh or somehow indicate that he was joking, but he didn’t.
“So he’s the guy we need?”
“Absolutely. It’s Bulletz or we definitely lose.”
I wasn’t quite understanding. “Why don’t you just ask him to play with you? I mean, you’re an eSports celebrity. And you make millions for your teammates. Everybody in the world wants to play on your team. Why would he say no?”
“I already ask him,” said Anton. “He says already on good team. He is celebrity with very good contract and not want to change middle of season. Maybe next year, maybe not.”
It was now Tuesday morning at 3:15 a.m. I was not too happy. “Just tell me how to find him. That’s all I need to know,” I said flatly, hiding my frustration.
“He’ll be at Gamecon tomorrow in Las Vegas,” said Anton, excited to have me once again solving his problems. “This is why I say, please come; it’s only short flight. I’ll send the 604-LX.”
That meant a Bombardier Challenger 604 aircraft was headed my way. At 48,000 pounds, 20 seats, a small bedroom, with s
hower, and 600 mph cruising speed, that’s as good as it gets.
“OK, comrade,” I said. “I’ll meet you there for a few hours, and then it’s back to the slopes for me, got it?”
“No, but thank you,” said Anton, a.k.a. Zero Gravity, misunderstanding me on purpose (his way of doing things). “See you in few hours because plane there soon. It is just easy; meet pilot at Beaver Creek. OK very good.” Click.
I sighed. Anton, if nothing else, was definitely an optimist.
THE PESSIMISM PROBLEM
Everyone loves an optimist. A positive outlook is one of the most important traits we look for in friends, employees, leaders, and especially salespeople. We teach our kids that a can-do attitude is the key to success. And almost every self-help book starts with the mantra “You can do it!” (once you meditate, visualize what you want, and eliminate all forms of negativity). After all, positive thinking works wonders, right? We actualize what we visualize. Maybe and maybe not.
It’s certainly enjoyable to talk about what will happen once the deal is closed, the money is in the bank, and the business plan starts happening. It’s fun to imagine a future where our problems are long gone, we live in a dream house, everyone adores us, and we are showered with praise. Psychologists simply call this the Optimism Mind-set: the belief that generally speaking, good things are going to happen soon, very soon.
A positive outlook can motivate people toward incredible accomplishments. Optimists are the ones who put a man on the moon last century, and in this century, they’ll put another one on Mars. Optimists climbed Mount Everest, created nuclear energy, and sequenced the human genome. Optimists are good at motivating and attracting others to join their cause.
So if you had to guess, what types of professionals are the most optimistic?
There’s no question about it: entrepreneurs and salespeople. By definition, their job is to seed optimism. They’re programmed to promote a vision of the future in which your biggest problems are solved, your life becomes easier, and your dreams are checked off one after the next. Just buy now and you will look better, feel better, make more money, get the girl, be parent of the year, and rise in the social hierarchy to become a beloved role model for the regular citizens to admire.
Given the nature of their profession, salespeople are programmed to be optimistic and push you in that direction too. But does projecting optimism work as well as we think?
Just consider how the typical sales sequence goes:
Introduce the product; explain the offer.
Be exceedingly optimistic; encourage the buyer to feel good about the product.
Try to close: “So what do you think? Do we have a deal today?” At which point the buyer raises his or her concerns and objections.
Work hard to crush each objection, one by one. Tell the buyer none of his fears will materialize, and all of her dreams will come true.
Try to close again—and keep trying (try till you die).
The problem with this pattern is it is closer to debate and argumentation than it is to selling and convincing. The result? Even if the buyer relents and says yes, he hasn’t really bought in; most likely he didn’t have the time or energy to debate the purchase any further with you, so he said yes to end the standoff and get out of the conversation. But he may or may not have had any real intention of going through with it. This is why it’s such a common occurrence for salespeople to think they’ve closed a deal, only to watch it fall apart as time goes on.
Pure optimism—the kind that bubbles up from the emotional core of salespeople—actually creates stress for the typical buyer. Bursting enthusiasm and excessive positivity can disrupt the buyer’s decision-making process and violate his or her sense of autonomy—something you never want to do.
Let me flip the script for you: It’s pessimism, not optimism, that is the formula for success in sales.
Pessimism gets a bad rap as the evil opposite of optimism. It’s not. What pessimism actually does is provide an alternative point of view, and it’s one the buyer has to consider before making a purchase decision that sticks and doesn’t result in buyer’s remorse.
When it comes to making a deal in which there’s a lot on the line, buyers always go through a period of skepticism and unease before they ultimately decide they feel good enough to move forward. They must consider how the partnership with you might fail; how things might not work out the way you say; and how, by choosing you over someone else, they may actually lose some (or all) of their money. You should not fight this process, but instead guide them through it.
I realize this might seem counterintuitive and self-destructive. After all, it doesn’t exactly sound like the positive thinking they teach at a “Win Friends and Influence People” seminar. To influence people, we’re supposed to minimize all negative thoughts, leaving buyers excited and enthusiastic about investing in us and our ideas, right? Not exactly. The possibility of failure enhances a buyer’s motivation to act.
There is a kind of self-satisfaction to pessimism. Thinking about obstacles and the many things that might go wrong in a deal is healthy and reassuring, because nothing in life is perfect, and buyers are searching for that imperfection to decide if they can live with it or not. If you hide the negatives, the sale cannot proceed. Until the negatives are out in the open, the buyer’s spoken or unspoken state of mind is “What’s the catch?” Therefore, pessimism is not a type of negative thinking that needs to be argued with, overcome, and destroyed. Instead, it should be invited and cultivated.
Think about it this way. When you pressure a buyer to express optimism and move ahead with your deal before they feel ready, it threatens their feeling of autonomy. People react negatively when their autonomy is restricted in any way, because, as I established early in this book, we are hardwired to want to feel we are making our own decisions through a period of personal reflection, on our own time, and without pressure by others. You must give the person you are doing business with a feeling of autonomy so they feel totally free to object, demur, and disagree, knowing that you aren’t going to be jumping on their case to overcome objections.
Giving a buyer autonomy doesn’t mean giving up control, but most people feel they have to choose one or the other. Have you ever seen a good presentation that is well organized, insightful, and persuasive but at the last moment fizzles like a damp match that won’t light, failing to close the deal? The last few seconds probably involved one of these statements:
“So . . . what do you think? Is this something you would be interested in?”
“That’s my pitch, so let me turn it over to you, are there any questions?”
“Does all this make sense? What are your thoughts and feelings about moving ahead with the purchase?”
These are common ways to end a presentation—I’ve seen it a thousand times over. The problem with these kinds of statements is that they do nothing but put absolute control in the hands of the buyer. Next, the astute buyer will supply a laundry list of reasons why he can’t go any further today, and say exactly what every buyer is preprogrammed to say: “This looks good. We don’t have any more questions right now, but if you give us all the information by email, we’ll discuss it internally and get back to you in the next few weeks.”
A few weeks? And who exactly is “we”?
Clearly, you cannot give the buyer complete control to decide how to proceed with you and your deal, because it may well be the last you hear from them. The goal is not to have weeks of follow-up calls and frustrating interactions. The goal is to create Inception today . . . Now.
I’ve found that the solution is pretty simple: Give a buyer permission to start questioning you and your deal, but first teach them exactly what to question about it.
Pessimism + Autonomy + Expertise = Inception
You have to be careful, however, because telling anyone what to
question and what not to question can be viewed as if you’re telling them what to think. And when a buyer sees an obvious manipulation, he or she starts to back away.
Evidence of this comes from the auto industry, which historically used high-pressure tactics and trained their salespeople to never take no for an answer. Today, it’s quite different. Every major auto manufacturer has gone to standardized pricing published online, and low-pressure deal making. They have learned that pressure backfires.
Buyers want control (or at least the illusion of it) over the buying process. When a buyer feels controlled by you, he takes a step back, or leaves the negotiation entirely. Any feeling of psychological control, time pressure, scarcity pressure, social pressure, or other typical sales tools causes buyers to simply back away.
But you wouldn’t need to control anyone if you had a way to put in place a sort of hidden boundary, so the conversation stayed focused on what’s important and stayed away from distraction. Imagine an invisible fence, like the ones used to keep a dog in the yard, which would contain a buyer’s questions about what really matters. Inside the invisible fence are all the facts that need to be accepted, topics open for discussion, issues you are happy to discuss. Outside the fence are off-limits topics, things that don’t matter, and time wasters. And if you set this invisible fence properly, the buyer won’t realize you’ve erected the boundaries and will accept them as a natural part of the conversation.
In Las Vegas for the big tournament, I was about to use this approach to help Anton recruit a world-class sniper for his Counter-Strike team. But there were a few twists in store I didn’t see coming.
PICKING OFF A STAR SNIPER
“There he is,” said Anton, taking my arm and pointing in the direction of a kid who fit the perfect gamer stereotype: dyed blond hair with a few purple streaks, three-hundred-dollar sneakers, black hoodie, drinking a Mountain Dew. A group of fans surrounded this eSports “athlete,” pushing for autographs as they might a football or baseball star. It seemed a bit much, because, after all, these were just video game players.