Stuff Matters: Genius, Risk and the Secret of Capitalism. Harry Bingham

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СКАЧАТЬ fell lamentably short of proving criminality. He’s written an account of his time on the dark side and is looking to turn his talents to more positive ends.

      When I met him, I asked him what made a salesman. What was the secret of successful selling? To start with, his answer puzzled me. He said, ‘You’ve got to be a chameleon…You’ve got to be a really good listener.’ Those might sound like plausible answers when written down, but seemed thinner than smoke when spoken in person. There was, on first sight, nothing of the chameleon about Tom. He was dressed in an expensive black open-necked shirt and black trousers. If he’d had less style about him, he’d have had a heavy gold signet ring and, in another era, perhaps a medallion too. He didn’t look like a chameleon, he looked like a salesman. You’d have guessed his profession from across the room.

      Likewise with the listening. On the whole, when someone claims to be a good listener we think of a therapist, or perhaps the sort of close friend to whom we can pour our heart out, confident of a sympathetic ear and a glass of wine. Tom, on the other hand, would be a terrible therapist, having neither the subtlety nor the patience. Perhaps more accurately, he wouldn’t be interested enough to do it. He simply wouldn’t have cared about someone’s feelings about their mother’s inability to cuddle or their partner’s lack of sensitivity.

      And yet, for all that, he was right. Talking to Tom and reading his book is an eye-opening introduction to how selling works. A salesman’s version of ‘good listening’ is simply about identifying the route into their wallet. For some people, it was letting them think there was a bargain to be had. For one rather lonely old woman, it was simply talking to her about anything at all and making her feel befriended and cared for. For someone else, it was talking to them about Schubert, their favourite composer. For someone else, it was simply about shouting at them – literally shouting: ‘YURI!! IT’S TOM. GET A PEN AND PAPER. I’VE GOT INFORMATION THAT COULD MAKE YOU A MILLION. YURI! I’M NOT MESSING ABOUT. GET A PEN AND PAPER FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!’

      What makes Tom’s accounts of these conversations so disconcerting is that he’s not playing by the normal social rules of our species. Ordinarily if someone talks to you at length about your passions and pursuits, you’ll assume that they have a genuine interest in them. Ordinarily, but not always. We’re monkeys who have evolved complex social structures and whose brains are shaped to deal with that complexity. So things aren’t always simple. Perhaps a certain sort of conversation indicates a kind of flirtation. Or an attempt to create an alliance. Or it’s leading up to a request for help. We navigate situations of this kind all day, every day, without thinking anything of it.

      What’s not quite so usual in regular social intercourse is the sheer brazen nakedness of Tom’s deception. He cared nothing about that old lady. He hadn’t heard of Schubert before typing the name into Wikipedia. If Yuri had liked whispering not shouting, then Tom would have been the breathiest whisperer in the land. The outrageously goal-oriented nature of Tom’s sales tactics takes the ordinary rules of human interaction and trashes them. In the evolutionary environment of the African savannah, when humans hung out in groups that were maybe 150 strong, people like Tom couldn’t have thrived. The nakedness of his deceptions would be exposed so soon, would leave him so friendless, that he’d have had to conform, at least to an extent, with the prevailing rules.

      Indeed, much of the literature of salesmanship is purposely designed to help ordinary human beings over their savannah-designed mental circuitry. Those who teach salesmanship talk about overcoming ‘sales call reluctance’. That’s sales-speak for the ordinary human shyness when it comes to promoting oneself, one’s company, or one’s product. In savannah-world, where everything that goes around comes around, where reputations are quick to form and hard to shake, we’re right to have that shyness. It’s not that we’re not taking care of our own interests all the time. Quite likely we are. But if your tribe is just 150 strong, taking care of your own interests also means building a reputation for being a trustworthy person; it means making friends and working for others. A shyness over self-promotion is part of the complex set of mental tools and dispositions that guided our ancestors through that maze.

      That was then, however. In today’s world, where Tom has a few million potential punters to part from their cash, the ancestral safety-check has pretty much stopped working. If a sales-woman allows her ‘sales call reluctance’ to get the better of her, then she’ll either move to a more congenial job – or be fired – or buy some books which will teach her, step-by-step, how to overcome her instinctive mental-emotional circuitry.

      Nor is it just her emotions that she’ll be learning to deal with. She’ll be learning to manipulate ours as well. For example, you know those little consumer competitions where you have to write in ‘just 15 words or less why you love’ a particular product? They feel like a throwback to some older, gentler world of consumer marketing, an anachronism. Yet research shows that if you can get someone to write about their love for (let’s say) a breakfast cereal, then their resulting purchase behaviour will reflect that ‘love’, no matter whether or not they believed what they wrote when they wrote it. The act of writing itself cements a relationship that might not even have existed beforehand. That’s why those contests endure.

      Or why is it that a competent car salesman will seek to avoid discussion of all those optional extras that come when you’re buying a car (paint finishes, alloys, extended warranties, and the like)? Surely, he should want us to expand our shopping lists. Again, however, consumer research indicates that if you introduce these extras too early, they become confusing – and the sale is less likely to happen. Once the sale is agreed, however, all those options come straight back onto the table. They’re no longer confusing. They’re complementary to the decision that’s just been made; they confirm and complete it.

      The list of such sales tricks is ever-growing and many of them are now widely known. We know what a supermarket is doing when it pumps fresh bread smells out around the bakery, or positions the premium variants of a particular product at eye-level, or packages its value brands in a way deliberately designed to look cheap and unappealing. On the other hand, though we know these things, we are still influenced by them. Our savannah-designed brain circuity doesn’t rewire itself simply because we’re aware of some of its fallibilities.

      If modern consumer marketing can sometimes come to seem like scientifically developed mind (and wallet) manipulation, it’s also too simple merely to blame the seller. As I read Tom’s memoir of his time at the rough edge of sales, it became clear that at its most elemental, sales is a game played out between buyer and seller, a kind of seduction. It’s not that the buyer has no interest at all. If they didn’t, they’d simply hang up. There wouldn’t be a sales tactic that could influence them to buy. But each buyer also has an obstacle, a resistance to that sale. The salesman’s task is to find that resistance and overcome it. Yuri liked to be shouted at, so Tom shouted. The elderly woman wanted a friend, so Tom became her friend. The bargain hunter wanted a bargain, so Tom transformed his sales patter into a dumb story about a once in a lifetime bargain. And so on. Each form of resistance met with Tom’s inimitable response.

      I don’t even think that those lured into buying necessarily believed Tom. Did that old lady believe Tom was nattering away to her about fox-hunting because he really cared about her and her interests? Almost certainly not. From the way Tom reports the conversation, she was elderly and lonely but of perfectly sound mind. In effect, she was allowing Tom to talk her into making an investment (the thing that mattered most to him), because he was giving her the thing that mattered most to her. It was a tit-for-tat bargain, where the rules were understood by both sides.

      Viewed like this, the artificiality of Tom’s sales techniques didn’t much signify. For sure, that elderly lady would have preferred a genuine friend to a phoney one, but a phoney one was better than no friend at all. Yuri would probably have liked being shouted at in any context, but if all that was on offer was being shouted at in a way likely to cost him several thousand euros, well, heck, he’d take whatever was going.

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