by Oren Klaff
To be fair, if any video game player deserved this star treatment at any tournament ever, it was this one. Mac “Bulletz4Breakfast” Jones was one of the best snipers in the world. He was a master of efficiency and knew where to be in the game at every instant and what to do from any spot on the map. If you needed to destroy enemy positions, win games, and rack up tournament points, you needed Bulletz or someone like him.
All this is to say: There wasn’t a team that didn’t want Bulletz. If we were going to have any hope of convincing him to come play for us, we’d have to offer him something other teams simply couldn’t—or weren’t thinking about. But what could that possibly be?
Anton and I spent a few energy-drink-fueled hours cooking up the best pitch we could come up with. The plan was to focus on how we could provide for him in the long term, whereas his current team was thinking only about the short term. We thought it was compelling and had a chance to sway him. Now we were going to find out as we elbowed through the semicircle of fans and presented ourselves.
“What do you guys want?” Bulletz asked as soon as we got within eyesight. “You’re poison right now, Anton. Don’t even stand near me. I could get fired just for talking to you.” Bulletz looked nervously around the lobby to see who might be watching or recording this conversation. “I already have a team,” he added with a tone of finality, and started to move away from us.
“Thought you might be able to use a couple of friends like us, given your current situation and what people are saying—because it’s not all good stuff,” I said, shrugging casually. It was crucial that we didn’t look needy. Whiz kids like Bulletz could smell desperation a mile away.
“Maybe you not so secure as you think if you no even allowed to talk to us,” said Anton. “We came because have something you want, you need, something you can use . . . if you’re going to keep playing the game.”
We had just said to Bulletz, in effect, “Industry people are talking about you and there’s a problem brewing. We can help get ahead of it—and even solve it.”
The idea was to cause an inkling of impending doom to creep into Bulletz’s thinking. With these two statements, we had used the twin psychological hooks that will always get the attention of a star competitor, whether an athlete, surgeon, entrepreneur, or executive. While almost nothing works on everyone, you’ll be surprised how effective this can be to get someone’s attention: arousing their curiosity by threatening their social ranking and then offering a valuable secret. When these elements are combined, no one can resist at least taking a look. It’s as close to a universal curiosity formula as you can get.
When you imply that someone’s position in the dominance hierarchy and social order is changing, they snap to attention. It’s the first rule of stardom that every celebrity desperately needs to know what is being said about him or her by others, and is highly tuned to gossip coming from fans and peers. Second, every star knows intuitively that you’re only as good as your last win, so they are on the constant lookout for valuable information provided by a competitor. Quarterbacks want to know what other quarterbacks are doing to prevent injury in running plays. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies want to know what other CEOs are doing to keep stock prices stable while interest rates are rising. And gamers want to know how other gamers are making money in the emerging eSports industry.
We had taken the first step in the recruitment of Bulletz, but we couldn’t push him to switch teams at that moment; he was barely willing to talk to us. This was going to be a slow boil. In the end, it would have to be his decision, or at least feel like it was. We needed Inception.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “I don’t need anything. I’m at the top of my game. Look around—I’ve got the best contract of any player at this tournament.” His pride was a little too defensive. He wasn’t used to thinking about his future pessimistically, and doing so had rattled him enough to get him to pay attention to us and start talking.
We had moved away from the crowd as security guards pushed the fans off and they scattered, looking for easier autographs.
“That contract of yours isn’t going to last another year,” said Anton, because he couldn’t help adding an extra jab. “You’re twenty-five years old, that’s the expiration date for a gamer.”
He was right. As living proof, Anton was already thirty-five and hadn’t been a competitive player for years.
“Your numbers are down,” I said, leaning in conspiratorially, like a good cop giving him advice for his own good. “Nobody’s winning streak lasts as long as they think it will.
“Let us show you what we have and you can decide for yourself if it’s valuable,” I continued. “We are building a gaming team that makes money year after year, and we don’t worry about winning or losing this tournament or that one. Look at Zero,” I said, pointing to Anton. “He’s a mediocre player compared to these kids, right? What would you pay him, seventy-five thousand? Or less?”
Bulletz nodded and winced at the same time, as if this was a very low salary to do the “hard work” of playing video games—but it was also the right number.
“Well, this year he’s going to make three million. We could help set you up like this—a better long-term picture for yourself, something that will work when you’re as old as Zero here. We have a different way of looking at things for players like you, a way that builds a lot of wealth, win or lose.”
“OK, I’ll listen, but it has to be fast,” Bulletz said, suddenly looking a little nervous. I almost felt bad for him. When you took away all those digital guns and grenades, he was just an uncertain kid who was always one big loss away from moving back to his hometown in the Midwest to work at an Apple store. “You want me to leave my management and take a shot with you? That’s professional suicide. If your team fails, no one will touch me.”
“No, you’re wro—” Anton started, and stopped when he felt me stepping on his foot to keep him from talking. If he started countering every one of Bulletz’s objections, he would just turn it into a battle of two big egos, and in that scenario Bulletz would never agree to join Anton’s team. The only way to get this kid to come on board was to let him feel all the negative thoughts he was experiencing and process them, and help him realize our deal was better for him. It had to be his own decision, without Anton bullying him into anything at all. I had to cut this short until I could talk to Anton about the importance of pessimism.
“Listen, kid, you’ve had a great five-year run,” I said. “You’re a legend. You know the game better than anyone. I mean, you’re right, you don’t need us right now. But you still need to see what we have.”
“OK,” he said quietly, “I’ll meet you during the preliminary round one.”
DROP THE DOME TO CONTAIN THE PESSIMISM
Autonomy and pessimism is a dangerous combination. The problem is that once your buyer starts thinking about negative aspects of you and your deal, he might start to question things you don’t want him questioning, for which there are no good answers and which don’t matter anyway. After you grant the buyer full autonomy to think, do, and say anything that comes to mind, you can no longer control him. The solution is to set up invisible boundaries ahead of time and get your buyer to accept them. Then, when you do grant him autonomy, he will naturally confine himself within the “do not cross” lines you created, without even realizing he is doing it.
Watching a classic Jim Carrey movie can teach us something about how this works. In the film The Truman Show, the main character, Truman Burbank, played by Carrey, comes to realize he has been living his entire life beneath a giant dome constructed by television producers. Everyone Truman has ever known turns out to be an actor, and he has unwittingly been the star of a TV show his entire life. It takes him decades to realize he has been living under a dome, discovering it finally when his sailboat crashes into plywood painted to look like the distant horizon.
This, of co
urse, is a dramatic Hollywood example, but it illustrates a fundamental truth: Humans are generally slow to question boundaries if we don’t notice them being set.
If you have ever flown on a commercial airliner, you have heard the safety instructions at the beginning of the flight. One instruction concerns the oxygen masks, which will drop down from the overhead compartment in the event of a sudden depressurization at altitude. In that talk, you are warned to put on your own mask before trying to assist someone else. Do you know why? It doesn’t matter why, because they aren’t asking you to debate this topic. They’re telling you how it works and if you don’t like it, feel free to get off the plane. (Of course, the answer is that at high altitude there is very little oxygen in the air, and the brain can survive for only a few seconds without supplemental oxygen, so in the time it takes to help someone else who is confused and struggling, you could both pass out and die and will be of no help to others.)
When boundaries are already in place ahead of time, or explained as the industry norm, we don’t question them. But when someone tries to push a seemingly arbitrary limit upon us out of the blue, we resist. If you want to change the rules, no problem—you simply have to do it very slowly, little by little, so your buyer doesn’t notice. Experimental psychologists describe this with names like “change blindness,” “choice detection,” or “the flicker paradigm.” No matter what you call it, study after study has shown that if the rules are imposed on us slowly enough, we don’t even notice. If control is taken away in a certain pattern and at a slow-enough pace, it is invisible to us.
So when it’s time to let buyers talk about the ideas you’ve presented and consider the implications for themselves, it’s important that they feel unhindered and able to steer the conversation in any direction they want. At the same time, you need to set invisible boundaries that contain their questions within a certain area. But you have to do this gradually so that the buyer doesn’t feel constrained by you.
My team and I have discovered how to impose boundaries on your buyer before you turn the conversation over to them to talk about whatever they want. If you do this in just the right way, they won’t notice any limitation at all. Then, when you grant them autonomy, they’ll stick to the areas you’ve already outlined and will not deviate.
Why would a buyer accept conversational boundaries that are imposed by you? Well, of course, you aren’t going to make it quite so obvious. You aren’t going to just come right out and tell the buyer that you’d like them to avoid certain topics. If you did that, they wouldn’t be able to think of anything but the off-limits areas; you will have created a Do Not Touch button that everyone will immediately reach for.
Instead, we need a more subtle way to impose boundaries.
THE BUYER’S FORMULA
In my deals, I use a seven-step Buyer’s Formula to lay down “do not cross” lines. It’s important to understand that not every fact, item, subject, and issue a buyer wants to talk about is worth discussing. For example, let’s say he found another person who offers a much lower price than you. Well, that’s great; he should go buy from them. I say this because nearly every professional salesperson I know refuses to have a price held over their head in a negotiation. Most of the time price is the least important part of the deal, because it’s the terms of the deal that really matter like financing, delivery timeline, and length of contract. And have you ever heard a potential buyer say, “Of course, I can’t make a decision now because I’ll have to convince my partner first”? OK, but why should I present my offer, negotiate the terms, and bargain in good faith knowing there’s a shadowy partner out there whom I haven’t met, am not going to talk to, and don’t know anything about, or who may not even exist? In the final analysis, every buyer wants to discuss and debate a wide range of topics, most of which are time wasters and don’t help anyone get to a decision. But we can’t ignore the buyer completely, and we do have to give them the opportunity for open discussion and debate—so it’s best to set up boundaries. In other words, set up the invisible fence to include the topics that matter. Anything outside the fence doesn’t matter.
At the end of my presentation, when it’s time to decide on next steps, I don’t ask for the sale. Instead, I reaffirm my status as an independent expert, and then I set up the invisible fence. How? I teach the buyer how to evaluate whether my deal is right for them. Then, when I’m done, the deal naturally comes together.
1. Introduce the Buyer’s Formula
To start, I’ll say something like, “I deal with this kind of thing all the time. Let me try and help.”
As an example, consider walking into a bike shop looking to get a solid bicycle for some light weekend mountain biking. The bike mechanic who helps you out will say something like, “Look, I’ve helped a thousand people buy a mountain bike. Let me tell you what I’ve found works best for a weekend warrior.” Statements like “I’ve done this a thousand times” always reinforce one’s status as an independent expert.
2. Outline Obvious Ways to Fail
Next, start to create boundaries that your buyer will not venture outside of, by highlighting the obvious ways to fail.
The bike mechanic might say, “Most amateur athletes who are just getting into trail riding will assume price is a way to measure the quality of a bike. In reality, higher price just means it’s more specialized for one certain type of riding—and useless for others. So don’t go by price. And don’t buy the frame online because it’s a mess out there on the internet: a fifty-four Trek is a fifty-two in Shimano and is a fifty-six in Colnago—nothing matches up from one brand to the next! There are no real standards in this industry like you might have with terabytes for a hard drive, miles per gallon for a car, or percent interest on a loan. With a bike, you sit on it, pedal a few times, and get the feel of it. And you have someone like me standing by so you don’t make an obvious wrong choice.”
3. Highlight Counterintuitive Ways to Fail
From there, you should move on to the less obvious, or counterintuitive, ways to fail. These are traps that most people fall into, things that your buyer surely believes he already knows, but really he doesn’t. You are going to expertly point a few of these out and teach your buyer at least one valuable insight.
The mechanic could say, “When you check the bikes out, it’s going to seem like carbon fiber and Kevlar are incredibly cool and the right way to go, high tech is best, right? Wrong. Unless you’re a pro, those materials are just too fragile. You drop it once, it cracks, and the bike is toast. Sexy materials only benefit riders trying to shave two seconds off a Tour de France time trial. But helmets are exactly the opposite of frames. For helmets, the more expensive they are, the more exotic the material, the safer and higher quality they will be.”
Once you’ve shown your buyer five or six things that can easily go wrong in his decision (starting with the obvious and moving to the less obvious), it’s time to shift into the positive actions he can take, so he feels he’s in control and is making informed choices.
4. List Obvious Actions
Now you can tell your buyer what actions he should take to get started. Again, start with a few no-brainers, or things your buyer already knows in the back of his mind and will definitely agree with.
“Obviously, you want to remember the bike is only seventy percent of the total cost,” the mechanic would continue. “You’ll need another six hundred dollars for helmet, pedals, shoes, gloves, and gear, so leave some cash in your pocket. I’d say don’t spend more than twenty-five hundred bucks for your first bike—total, for everything, then blow another six hundred on gear.”
5. Less Obvious “Hacks”
Then move into the less obvious tips and insights, or the “hacks” (these are the things you would only figure out by doing it at least 100 times).
“What I’d do,” the bike mechanic says, “is start with basic Shimano 105 components. They’re great, that’s what I ride.
You won’t need anything more than that for now. Get yourself a cheap Trek or Giant frame, all metal, a solid helmet like Giro Vanquish MIPS, and some high-quality shoes—SIDI Defender’s will work. Then, if you’re going to be riding more than ten miles a week, definitely spend a few bucks on a comfortable seat—go for the Eron, it’s bombproof. Trust me on the seat. After you get a hundred plus rides in on this bike, sell it and upgrade to XTR components and then spend five thousand on something you love that will keep you happy for the next five years.”
6. Hand Over Autonomy
Finally, hand over autonomy with a shrug and a line that detaches you from the outcome, like, “Yeah, well, that’s just what I’d do, having done it at least a hundred times already. I’m not the boss of you. You can do whatever you want.”
If you’ve done everything right, the buyer will enter a stage of pessimism and will start seriously considering the positives and negatives of your deal and asking questions—but it’s more likely those questions will all stay within the boundaries you set up in your Buyer’s Formula.
7. Redirect to Keep the Buyer “In Bounds”
From time to time the buyer will venture outside the boundaries you have set and ask about something that you already said was a rookie mistake in your Buyer’s Formula. The better you get at delivering the formula, the less often you’ll have to field rogue questions, but here’s how to deal with them when they do come up.