by Oren Klaff
REVERSE ENGINEERING THE ART OF COMPELLINGNESS
What does it even mean to be compelled? In its most basic form, it’s that feeling of being unable to look away from something or someone. It can feel like being caught in a trance or placed under a spell, and it can lead you to a sudden insight in a way that opens the door to Inception. But what is it that actually makes one person more compelling than another?
Sure, most of us can easily recognize the basics of a compelling individual: a winning smile, a great sense of humor, an attractive physique, a keen intelligence. Personal charisma is a patchwork of complex and sophisticated social and emotional skills that allow charismatic individuals to affect and influence others without pushing, forcing, or even persuading.
I used to think a compelling person was made up of three elements: appearance, intelligence, and enthusiasm. And then I tried backing this up with research, only to find that, while those traits certainly make someone likable, enthusiasm doesn’t contribute to compellingness at all, and it can even cause salespeople to inadvertently scare away customers.
If enthusiasm isn’t the secret to compellingness, then maybe it’s sex appeal.
No, it’s not that either. My research quickly revealed that physical attractiveness isn’t going to move the needle very far in business, politics, or dealmaking. Kim Jong Un, for instance, is decidedly not sexy by our Western standards. You’d have to search far into some weird subcultures to find someone who wants to swipe right for Mr. Un. Despite that, with his finger over the nuke launch button, he is incredibly compelling and a regular feature at the top of the news cycle.
But what about intelligence? That was the last element I looked at, and I was sure it would hold the key. Surely smarter people would be seen as more competent and trustworthy and this would lead others to find them more compelling. But did this theory hold up to research? Not at all. In fact, the smartest people in the world can often put you to sleep the fastest.
Take Harry Markopolos, a brilliant quantitative financial specialist with an instinct for the numbers behind complex derivatives. He smelled a rat in the workings of Bernie Madoff Investment Securities as far back as 1999, spotting Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme years before it came to light. Markopolos lived in fear for his life, spending everything he had trying to convince the world (and the Securities and Exchange Commission) the fraud actually existed. He contacted politicians and badgered journalists to write about Madoff. He even presented the SEC with a detailed dossier in 2005 bluntly titled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud.”
So why didn’t anyone pay attention?
Markopolos should have been extremely compelling to the government, the media, and other investment funds: He was intelligent, had the story of the century, and was screaming through a giant megaphone. Still, nobody found him worth paying much attention to. He wasn’t able to get his idea across when it mattered most. Though he’s brilliant and well-spoken, he lacked something.
So what sets aside the most compelling people from the rest of us who are “merely” likable, smart, and enthusiastic? It seems impossible to pin down something specific that the rest of us could copy. We can’t all be movie stars, win the Super Bowl, or control a nuclear missile site. I combed through the data and research articles and conducted interviews, but it seemed there was no one who had really tackled this to my satisfaction. So I kept at it, looking for a replicable formula.
And then I had a breakthrough. I eventually figured out how to be compelling by first figuring out how not to be compelling.
Over the years, I’ve boiled all my research down into a method to skyrocket your ability to be compelling. Unfortunately, I hadn’t discovered any of this yet when I woke up flat on my back on a sheet of ice in Devils Lake, North Dakota.
MEETING THE TEAM—AT 20 BELOW
I could not feel my left leg. A searing pain was pressing into my neck. My right arm was numb and my ears were ringing. I turned to the side and slowly opened my eyes. The snow was turning to reddish-brown slush under my head. “I must be bleeding,” I thought, trying to remember what had just happened.
If you had to pick a place on the map that was the exact polar—and I do mean polar—opposite of my home in Beverly Hills, there’s a good chance you’d choose Devils Lake.
First of all, it’s always cold there, unless it’s blisteringly hot. Today it was minus 20.
A thermal glove materialized in front of my eyes. “Here, boss,” said Big Danny, the lead supervisor of the warehouse. “Take my hand. You stay down any longer, your head’s gonna freeze to the pavement. Probably have to cut your hair to get you up then. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Wait,” I said through chattering teeth, trying to piece together the past few minutes. “I think I’m bleeding. Maybe don’t move me.” Was I going into shock from blood loss? Was I going to die, here, in the parking lot of the Dew Drop Inn?
“That’s not blood, chief; that’s the coffee you spilled. You’re fine; let’s get moving.”
Danny didn’t wait for me to get up on my own; he bent down, pulled me up by the front of my jacket, and brushed me off like I was five. I struggled to regain my balance, noticing that the parking lot of my motel was on a steep, icy hill. I had just fallen while standing on a literal slippery slope (I was starting to understand why they warn you about those).
At least I wasn’t burned by my full cup of steaming hot coffee as I went down—it froze in midair on the way to my face. On that particular day in January it was so cold you couldn’t even get chocolate—they told me the stuff just explodes into ice crystals at -35 degrees, so they don’t carry it until May at the earliest.
“You’re gonna need to get some real boots out here,” Big Danny told me, stating the obvious. He looked me over and clearly didn’t find me very impressive. “And you should get a puffier coat and a warm hat that covers your ears. Remember, out here the native Inuits still use refrigerators so they can keep their food from freezing. You get that, boss? It’s so cold you need a fridge to keep your food from turning into ice vapor . . . and, you know, just to educate you on some key survival strategies up here, you lose eighty percent of your body heat through your head. Can’t afford to do that in North Dakota, no sir. You want me to take you to the Walmart before we head to the shop and get you rigged out?”
“Ah, no thanks, Big Danny,” I said, limping toward his truck. “I don’t want to be late on my first day meeting the team.”
“Your funeral,” he said with a shrug.
I climbed into the passenger’s side of his truck, anxious to get into the heated cab. Except it was freezing inside the truck too.
Big Danny eased onto Highway 20, one of the only two major arteries going through town. He pointed off into the distance, where I could just make out a Walmart sign.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stop off, boss? It’ll only take a minute and you’ll be a whole lot more comfortable. No offense, but dressing like that up here, they’re going to think you’re stupid or crazy or both.”
I had never been to a Walmart. Through chattering teeth I answered, “Yes please, Walmart.”
In the store, I quickly grabbed some insulated boots, a workman’s coat, a pair of leather construction gloves, and a hat that Big Danny insisted I buy (even though it looked ridiculous on me).
“Great hat,” Dawn, our cashier, said cheerfully as she rang us up. “I bought that same one for my husband last year.” Danny smiled at me and pointed at Dawn, nodding his head. “You going to wear them boots out?” Dawn trained her eyes on me. She was intense and seemed to be letting me know that she’d just made a very helpful suggestion. I changed my boots right there in front of her, embarrassed by my colorful but out-of-place Fred Segal socks.
I glanced up at Dawn and, sure enough, she was eyeballing my socks with the trained eye of a cold weather survivalist. It suddenly occurred to me that I mig
ht have a little culture clash problem with the sales team I was about to meet. I was going to be walking into a room full of Dannys and Dawns and trying to command their respect and loyalty. Maybe this was going to be harder than I originally thought.
Devils Lake, I realized, was not the kind of place where locals used phrases like “emotionally charged imagery” or “dramatic character arc” or “protagonist-driven plot”—concepts that were the norm back home in Hollywood. How was I going to turn the staff of this town into a team of compelling salespeople?
I had two days with the team before I had to head to New York for another deal. That gave me about forty-eight hours to figure out how to teach Big Danny and Little Danny, Gus “Guzzler” Gussard, Tommy no-last-name, Tiffany, and her daughter Crystal how to sell motorcycles like Elias, legendary motorcycle and Jet Ski racer, airplane racer, and Hollywood Hills rock-and-roll tequila-drinking go-all-nighter.
As we pulled up in front of the shop a few minutes later, I was getting the jitters. What was I going to tell these people that they would understand and be able to use to improve sales? What could they possibly have in common with a guy like Elias?
I stepped into the company office, ready to teach them what I knew. But the first thing I noticed was that it was freezing cold inside. Nobody was wearing a coat. They acted as if it was 72 degrees or something.
“What’s the temperature in here?” I asked.
“Fifty-five,” said Little Danny, Big Danny’s assistant. “If you want something warm, I can make you a cup of coffee in the microwave.”
Microwave coffee? No thanks.
I headed straight to the back of the freezing warehouse, where the whole team had assembled to hear me speak. I stepped onto the makeshift stage—a piece of plywood perched atop four paint buckets. The howling wind was banging a drum solo against the corrugated tin walls.
I could tell by their faces that I didn’t look like anything the Dannys, or Crystal, or Gus, or Tommy, or Tiffany had ever seen before. Despite Big Danny’s best efforts to dress me as a local with boots and my puffy coat and my ridiculous hat, I looked like the Man Who Fell to Earth.
I laid it all out for them. “Despite our best intentions, we’re only selling about seventy-five thousand dollars a week, not nearly enough. This puts our whole company into negative territory, and there’s frustration at the home office. That’s why I’m here today, to help kick things into gear. I’ve been doing this a long time, and here’s how I like to think about our business: Nobody needs an Italian racing motorcycle. Ducati, Guzzi, whatever . . . Compare our customer to a shopper in your local Walmart—he is buying stuff he needs: a snowplow, a generator, a block heater, a jumper cable. But our products are different. Our products serve an emotional purpose. It’s about desire, not necessity. It’s about the opportunity to spend some money needlessly on a desire. So your job is to increase that desire. And how do you do that? By making our products harder to buy.”
Blank faces. I couldn’t tell if I had blown their minds or if they were just waiting for me to leave.
“So . . . are there any questions on that?” I asked.
Little Danny raised his hand.
“Yeah, go ahead, Little Danny.”
“What’s a Guzzi?”
“Danny, it’s a European motorcycle that we sell parts for. C’mon, man, that’s what we do here. But listen, the point is, you guys are making the sale too easy for the buyer and it’s killing your deals. Neediness! Discounts! Stop doing all that stuff. Make the customer fight for it. Make these products hard to attain, while simultaneously feeding the customer’s desire for them.”
Crystal’s hand went up. “So what you’re saying is that we need to try and not sell people things so that they’ll try harder to spend their money on things they don’t need.”
“That’s right!” I said, delighted that I’d reached at least one member of the team.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
Oh man, I was so out of my element.
“OK, guys,” I said, clapping my hands together, “that’s probably enough instruction for now. Why don’t you get out there and make some calls? I’ll be listening in to see what you might be doing right or wrong. Then, tomorrow, we can have another meeting like this. Great work, team!”
And without waiting for acknowledgment, I hopped off the “stage” and headed straight to my “office,” letting it be known that anyone who wanted to come ask questions was welcome.
Nobody came.
Oh well. I easily spotted my office along the side of the warehouse. It was the rusted metal door with “Oren’s Office” written on a Post-it note with a smiley face. I pushed through the door, wincing at the cold. My eyes immediately went to the tiny space heater in the corner; it was silent, unplugged. There was another Post-it note on it: “This works.” For the first time since arriving in Devils Lake, I burst into a huge smile.
Then I buckled down and got to work.
I fired up my computer and pressed Play on our sales-management software, which recorded all our calls. It was Gus talking to a UK motorcycle enthusiast. The buyer was looking for a new set of front forks for his Ducati Superleggera and we were one of the few vendors who carried it. “Nice,” I thought to myself, “here’s twelve thousand dollars in the bag before it even started.”
Except it wasn’t.
Gus scared the client away and the call ended awkwardly: “So what do you think? I can get these shipped out to you tomorrow, be there by Tuesday—do you want to pay by credit card, or . . .” Same thing on the next call with Tiffany and a guy from New York who needed a gas tank for his Moto Guzzi MGS-01. And the one after that between Tommy and a buyer in Arkansas looking for a set of carbon fiber wheels.
As the tapes rolled and the heater fan whirred quietly, I stripped off one layer of clothing at a time. My down jacket. My windbreaker. My thermal hooded sweatshirt. Eventually my wool hat. The tapes of sales calls kept rolling, one after another, as I paced around the office, thinking. There was something similar happening on every single call, a roadblock that our sales team was hitting. It was weird because we weren’t that bad. We were polite. We asked questions. We gave detailed product descriptions. We explained why this product was better than that product. We tried to explain away objections. We asked for the order a few times. Isn’t that what salespeople do? It didn’t matter which of our salespeople it was or where the buyer was located or what they were trying to purchase—the result was the same. The call ended awkwardly with the buyer making excuses and deferring the decision to later, because he had to “check in” with an unavailable partner or mechanic or wife or brother or a few Teletubbies, or whoever, and then quickly getting off the phone—presumably to go search the internet for a better deal.
But I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was the sales team was doing wrong. Sure, they could have been more charismatic, or given more technical information, or been less needy, but there was something big going on here.
After six hours straight at my desk, I was fried and I didn’t have a definitive answer. I stopped the tapes and leaned back in my chair, thinking. And for some reason, my eyes fell on the mini–basketball hoop in the corner of the office.
“Yes,” I thought to myself, “of course. That’s it!”
Just then, a phone rang. Apparently I had an office line. I found an old-school Panasonic cordless phone in the desk drawer and picked it up. “This is Oren,” I said a little hesitantly. Nobody knew where I was. And anyone who did would not be calling me with good news.
“Hi Oren, it’s Elias. Listen, got a call from Danny today. He’s worried about what you’re doing up there. The team doesn’t like you that much. He says they’re ready to dump you into the lake first chance they get to make it look like an accident. I guess we’re going to have to pull you out of there and try something else.” He sounded disappointed.
> “Hey, I don’t want to be argumentative, but the problem is you, not me,” I said. “Elias, you’re too good—ten people here doesn’t equal one of you. You are a natural-born salesman. You were literally born to sell anything on wheels. Girls love you. Guys love you. Hell, I love you. Compellingness is in your DNA. You instinctively understand how to create beauty, allure, exclusivity, and desire. You know how to sell power and speed, to create an irresistible appeal. For you, things just sell themselves.
“I’ve been listening to tapes of their calls all day and I realized something,” I continued. “These guys have been trying to follow what you do, but it’s not working for them because they aren’t you.”
I threw the basketball to the mini-hoop and it bounced off the rim. I was never a good shot anyway.
“It’s like . . . Remember that scene in White Men Can’t Jump?”
I heard a laugh on the other end of the line because we had watched the movie together at least five times.
“That scene where Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson beat this guy Raymond in a five-hundred-dollar winner-take-all pickup game, so Raymond needs more money to keep playing, he gets a gun from his car, walks to the corner liquor store, puts on a ski mask, points that forty-five Magnum at the store owner,” I said. “Remember what the store owner says?”
“Yeah, of course,” said Elias, as he quotes the line from the movie. “‘Raymond, is that you? Take that damn mask off!’”
“Exactly!” I was getting to the point now. “And right after he’s recognized by the shopkeeper, Raymond pulls off the ski mask, drops the whole gangster persona, and goes back to being his normal self. He reminds the shopkeeper that he should be protecting his store better because it’s a dangerous neighborhood. Then Raymond sells his gun to the shopkeeper at a good price in a quick negotiation, everyone’s happy, and Raymond gets the cash he needs to keep playing basketball against Wesley Snipes.”