Flip the Script

by Oren Klaff

  I made my final point: “When Raymond tried to pose as someone he’s not, even with the ski mask, it was obvious. The shopkeeper sees right through it. But when Raymond drops the phony stuff and just acts like his normal self, a wheeler-dealer, he gets the deal done.”

  I explained how we were making the same mistake in our office by wearing different masks during the sales calls and trying to take on personalities that were not our own. “When I listened to those sales calls today,” I said to Elias, “I looked at it from the customer’s point of view. To the customer, our staff has so many different personalities, it’s sort of a multiple personality disorder. Our salesperson doesn’t feel authentic or real. We’re trying too hard. I think I can fix this problem.”

  THE FIVE PERSONALITIES OF THE SALES APOCALYPSE

  What I had realized in Devils Lake is that the salespeople on our team, much like salespeople everywhere, were struggling to make sales by using a loser’s formula. During nearly every sales call, they shifted from persona to persona, appealing to whatever emotional state the buyer was in at that moment. It boiled down to five different personas, or archetypes. This change from persona to persona confuses buyers, who crave consistency and certainty from people they’re doing business with. These are the five personas that make up the Loser’s Formula, listed in order of their appearance in most sales presentations:

  The Ultimate Nice Guy

  The ShamWow Guy

  The Sorcerer

  The Angel

  The Wolf

  I’ll break these down in a bit more detail.

  1. The Ultimate Nice Guy

  At the top of a sales call, most people start by putting on the Ultimate Nice Guy persona. In other words, we play it safe. We want above all else to be liked, and we try to achieve this by seeking common ground. Great to talk to you today! Where are you calling from? Really, my uncle used to live in Houston, hot down there in the summer. Plans for the weekend? Fishing! I love fishing, my grandfather used to . . . Then, shifting to work topics, it goes a little like this: What kind of business are you in? Oh, that’s awesome, I love pest control! The Ultimate Nice Guy is the first archetype or mask that salespeople fall into because it is the easiest and safest approach. No one is going to complain about a pleasant, approachable, friendly start to a call. This leads to surface-level conversation: current news, weather, sports, empty exchanges.

  What’s wrong with a nice guy? At a basic level, nothing, and it’s certainly true people are more likely to do business with us if they like us. Look, I get it—the impulse at the top of the meeting is to impress upon others we are nice and relatable and have common ground with the buyer. But the real problem with the Ultimate Nice Guy persona is that it signals to the buyer how much power he has over us. Once we have lost status (and given away our power) we shift from the Ultimate Nice Guy archetype into the ShamWow Guy archetype, who will go on to explain all the features of the product or idea.

  2. The ShamWow Guy

  People expect to know what it is we’re selling, right? So we start listing the best features of the product, our most famous customers, the five-star ratings, our incredible customer service reputation, and our recent industry awards. This is where we become the ShamWow Guy.

  For those who haven’t seen the ShamWow commercials, here’s some background:

  Over three weekends in the summer of 2007, Israeli-born filmmaker and entrepreneur Offer Shlomi shot a two-minute commercial extolling the virtues of the ShamWow, a cleaning towel that promised to soak up twelve times its weight in spilled liquids and revolutionize your life. Shlomi handled the yellow cloth with the dexterity of a stage magician, wiping up small puddles and blotting soda-soaked carpets, describing an endless list of features for what was basically a thirty-five-cent kitchen cloth. Nobody was better than Shlomi at hyping features.

  When we’re in the ShamWow archetype, we similarly spring into action listing everything our product can do, has done, and might do in the future. It has a hundred terabytes; we are the only ones with hyper-threading; we’re FINRA compliant; we can do it in four weeks when everyone else takes six weeks or longer. Oh, and did I mention it comes with free shipping, a 15 percent discount, and a money-back guarantee?

  Of course, this information overload usually doesn’t get through to the buyer unless he already has idea receptors built for whatever we’re trying to tell him. Once all the best and brightest features and facts of the product are out on the table we realize, Yikes! I need to explain how these features will actually benefit the buyer. And then, yet another transformation begins.

  3. The Sorcerer

  The Juiceman juicer was one of the first products to be sold and brands built through the infomercial format. The Juiceman show featured energetic pitchman Jay Kordich, who blends an orange, a carrot, and some parsley, then goes on to explain how fantastic the rest of your life will be once you’re able to do this in your own kitchen. You’ll soon be smarter, more handsome, and more attractive to both men and women. After buying this product, you’ll date and marry the person of your dreams, who is also smart, ravishing, athletic, and rich. You’ll have beautiful children together who will be good at math, play polo with the Rockefeller kids, win national chess competitions, attend Harvard, invent a cryptocurrency, and buy you a retirement mansion in Malibu.

  The Sorcerer archetype explains how each of the product’s amazing features will benefit the buyer in many exciting (but unverifiable) ways. He or she spins the features into a set of magical benefits. Depending on individual personality, there may be a little sleight of hand here with the numbers, some showmanship with a demonstration, and possibly the sharing of “secrets.” (“You didn’t hear it from me, but this is the same software Jerry Seinfeld uses to keep track of his ninety-seven Porsches.”) The Sorcerer mask will stay on until the buyer is sold on how great life will be after going into business with us.

  4. The Angel

  Now that we’ve given the buyer all the information he ever wanted (and never wanted) about our products and ideas, and we’ve tried to get him super excited about the benefits our products offer, we really need to know the chances of closing the deal—high or low, good or bad? Now it feels time to do a “trial close” and see how close or far we really are to making some money. Who better to test the waters without causing a ripple in the pond than the Angel persona? She is a sweet, kind cherub who looks and sounds easygoing, wonderful to work with, submissive, and eager to please as she asks, “So what do you think? Is this something you’d be interested in? Any questions before we move forward?”

  By this time in the sale, the buyer has been talking to just one person, but he’s encountered four different characters, each of them formulaic and unimaginative, each completely self-serving and predictable. It’s off-putting and the buyer starts to wonder, “Who are you really? What are your values, what do you stand for, and how far will you go just to make the deal?”

  The buyer’s caution grows as time goes on, even as he is controlling the sale and owning the relationship. He will decide what happens next, how fast things will progress, and ultimately what the final price will be—if a deal is even to be made. But first, he will respond to the Angel’s trial close by introducing objections, himself testing the waters for discounts, free upgrades, and other signs of weakness.

  The buyer offers, “Well, you know, it’d be really hard for us to switch accounting software so late in the year; we haven’t fully budgeted for this kind of expense. It’s good to know what our options are.” The Angel has done little but push the buyer to voice a full range of objections. As the Angel is overwhelmed, these objections must be overcome, and the final transformation takes shape.

  5. The Wolf

  Things are getting hairy, and the final sales archetype now emerges. With the first glimmer of an objection, like the first rays of moonlight falling on a man with the werewolf curs
e, the Angel rapidly transforms into the Wolf. The Wolf jumps on the buyer’s objections to wrangle him into submission and make the objections irrelevant in hopes each one will be dropped, clearing the way to a sale. In practice, the dramatic switch from the Angel to the Wolf is a shock to the buyer, who doesn’t know how to respond. He clearly does not enjoy dealing with the Wolf archetype because we have suddenly turned combative and aggressive, but what is even more off-putting is that by this point in the call or presentation, we have taken on the personality of five very different characters. The long-suffering buyer is tired, and doesn’t have much energy left for thoughtful debate and considering purchasing options. He either agrees to buy knowing he will drop out later, or pumps the brakes, explaining that no decision can be made until his partner reviews the proposal. (We have not heard of this partner or “committee” previously because they may not even exist.)

  * * *

  —

  KNOWING WE DEFAULT to these five archetypes in the course of a sale, I have long wondered why. Why do we move through these dramatically different personas as we try to sell someone a product, service, or idea?

  The cognitive psychologists on my payroll have explained it this way: The human brain is programmed to respond to the immediate demands of any social situation and modify our behavior accordingly. The demands of any presentation push us naturally into a pattern of behavior, virtually every time the same. So as our behavior adapts to what the buyer wants to hear, the classic archetypes of Ultimate Nice Guy, ShamWow guy, Sorcerer, Angel, and Wolf appear in response. While each archetype serves the immediate purpose, the summary effect is negative.

  In the final analysis, the buyer concludes, “This guy has multiple personalities!” The problem is, the human brain is built to seek out relationships that offer consistency in character. We desperately want to build a matrix of reliable and predictable social relationships, because we have a deep desire to feel like we understand and control our world and can predict who will do what, and when.

  With the typical sales script, however, it’s impossible for the buyer to form a consistent mental model of the real you because of the personality changes through five different archetypes. It’s easy to imagine how this kind of wearing of masks triggers alarm bells, leading the buyer to conclude that something is wrong here—“This salesperson keeps changing who he really is to chase the sale. And who will he become after I give him the money or agreement? I’m not sure I’ve seen that character yet, or that I want to.”

  The solution, of course, is to stop modulating behavior as you move through a presentation. But what, exactly, should you replace it with? By studying Elias and dozens of other naturals in the art of compellingness, I’ve discovered the answer lies in flipping the script.

  MY TWO-DAY TRAINING IN COMPELLINGNESS

  The training I delivered to our North Dakota sales team after I had realized what was really going on was a long, cold, yet productive two days. At one point, I even accepted a cup of microwave coffee (and regret having done so to this day). But the results were exactly what we wanted: a huge bump in sales revenue.

  So what did I possibly teach in two days that made such a huge difference? A principle called “I’m not always right, but never uncertain.”

  On day one, I taught the team about Stick to Your Guns Theory, an idea that goes far beyond the trope of self-confidence. In fact, self-assurance is a tired and worn-out concept you’ll find in chapter one of every old-fashioned sales manual, and basically what they teach salespeople at “win friends” seminars. Stick to Your Guns, by contrast, has the beating heart of a much bigger idea, the kind that wins wars, changes history, and gives rise to leaders who are talked about for a thousand years: how to have an unshakable set of values and moral boundaries that are always on display to the buyer and at the same time completely immovable. I explained it like this:

  Imagine a movie studio called this office, saying they wanted to spend one hundred fifty thousand dollars on a prop bike for Johnny Depp to ride off a cliff in an upcoming bank robbery–style film shoot. And the prop bike they want is a 1968 Moto Guzzi V7R. If Danny here answered the phone, or if any of you took that call, you would say, “Great. Where do you want us to deliver it?” and you’d fill out the paperwork, take the order, and book the sale.

  Not Elias.

  Elias would say, “Hold on there, chief—did you say ride a V7R off a cliff? I do not have to tell you the V7R is a holy grail motorcycle; there are just seventeen left in the world—ten of those are in museums . . . and yes, sure I can get one. But to drive one into the ocean, are you completely high on quaaludes? Lose my number.” Click.

  In fact, this actually happened; the story is legendary among our customers. Paramount Studios had called looking for a period-accurate Moto Guzzi V7R, and Elias told them to go fly a kite, but not exactly in those words. Elias sells some of the most exotic, coveted, cherished vehicles of the modern era. He doesn’t burn museum pieces to the ground to make a few bucks. Customers love the fact that he has the integrity not to sell out to the studios, or anyone with a bad attitude, a bad business plan, or a bad reputation. Elias has a fixed set of principles. Now, for sure, they may not be in alignment with the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Catholic Church of West Hollywood, Interpol, Parents Against Rock and Roll, or your grandmother’s knitting club, but they are a complete set of principles, easy to understand, based on simple logic, and most important, they don’t change from moment to moment, day to day, or year to year. He sticks to his guns, no matter what.

  I taught our sales team about the Five Personalities of the Sales Apocalypse. The key isn’t to try to act how Elias would or how Oren would. The key is to stop being reactive to the needs of the buyer, and write personal scripts that are authentic to who you are, then stick to your guns (politely) anytime a buyer offers resistance or tries to push you around. Discount? No, not on your life. Free upgrade? No, why would I do that? Send me a proposal? OK, so we have a verbal agreement on terms? This prevents the buyer from unmasking you, discrediting you, or changing the script in any way. The only thing he can do is work with you or go away—which sometimes is for the best.

  On day two of the training, there were lots of questions. For example, asked Danny, “If I’m not the Ultimate Nice Guy, then what am I?” The answer to this is as easy as it is straightforward: You are the expert. You must become an undisputed expert in the mind of the buyer in the first few minutes, and then continue to add credibility, insight, and competence to this expert status throughout the conversation. The Status Tip-Off and the Flash Roll are the perfect points of entry to creating this expert status. Your own industry knowledge, principles, and experience will cement that status.

  In Devils Lake, sales more than doubled the following quarter—and doubled again the quarter after that. The team was soon selling bikes and parts on pace with Elias, and we had learned how to be compelling.

  CHAPTER 8

  Flip the Script, Go Anywhere, Try Anything, and Put It All on the Line to Win an Impossible Deal

  How to Put All the Scripts to Work

  All kinds of good news arrives to you via text message, without much emotion or ceremony, something like “we had a baby” or “we got the deal,” and you might even get a smiley face to go along with it. But bad news is something completely different because it’s usually delivered by a phone and in a serious tone. The other side really wants you to feel the pain they are feeling. This is why Simon’s taut tone telegraphed the bad news as soon as I picked up the phone. “Oren, old boy,” he said with a stiff British accent. “It seems we’ve gone pear shaped on a deal, and I never thought I’d be in this position, but I’m going to call in a favor you owe me.” He continued with the details: “We buggered up an important client, Volka Motors UK. Now the account is being awarded to Bradford-McCoy in New York next week.” I could hear bits of spit fly from his lips as he said the words Bradford-McCoy, the age
ncy he’d left twelve years ago to start his own firm. “We’ve popped our clogs—it’s bad news to lose a UK account to a bunch of . . . Americans.”

  “Yeah, how embarrassing,” I said, rolling my eyes as I sat in my office in California. But I couldn’t fault him for being so anxious. This was indeed very bad news for Simon, who was CEO of one of the hippest ad agencies in London. Simon is the kind of charming, tall, blue-eyed, square-jawed Brit you’d cast as the driver in a Range Rover commercial. In the world of ad agencies, his impeccable eye for design and color is legendary. According to the legend, he once fired the entire design team because of a dispute over gunmetal gray versus dark smoke gray. Simon’s agency, 12 Kings, is one of the most interesting, influential, and progressive ad firms in the world. Their slogan is “We push past the point of disruption.”

  Translation: “We’re too cool for school.”

  “Could you hop over the pond straightaway and put us right?” Simon asked. I hesitated because I knew how much he hated bringing in outside help (especially from an American). There was an awkward silence as he trailed off. Finally, he spoke up again: “I’ll fly you first cabin, British Airways.” Now he was talking my language.

  And so, thirty-three hours later, after an eleven-hour flight and a night at the Savoy, I poured over the Volka marketing materials Simon had sent me. Volka was an industrial giant who manufactured cars, trains, and construction equipment, so any mid-sized agency would want this account. To figure out the problem with Volka, I was chauffeured to 12 Kings’ headquarters, where I waited to meet Simon the Great to discuss where and how he’d messed up.