Give and Take: a revolutionary Approach to Success pdfdrive com

Selling: Separating the Swindlers from the Samaritans
Expressing vulnerability in ways that are unrelated to competence may build
prestige, but it’s only a starting point for givers to exercise influence. To
effectively influence people, we need to convert the respect that we earn into a
reason for our audiences to change their attitudes and behaviors. Nowhere is this
clearer than in sales, where the entire job depends on getting people to buy—and
buy more. We often stereotype salespeople as manipulative and Machiavellian,
thinking of great sellers as intimidating, confrontational, self-serving, or even
sometimes deceitful. Daniel Pink finds that the first words that come to mind
when we think of salespeople are pushy, ugh, and yuck. In one study, people
ranked the forty-four most commonly chosen MBA occupations in terms of how
socially responsible they were. Salesperson ranked forty-third, barely above
stockbroker at the very
bottom of the social responsibility list
. This sets up the
expectation that top salespeople must be takers, yet in the opening chapter, we
saw a preview of evidence that many highly productive salespeople are givers.
How do givers sell effectively?
Bill Grumbles
is a powerful executive, but if you met him, you probably
wouldn’t realize it. He speaks so softly that you might find yourself leaning
forward just to hear him. After working his way up to a vice presidency at HBO,
he became the president of worldwide distribution for TBS. Throughout his
career, Grumbles has gone out of his way to help and mentor others. Today, he
spends his time coaching business students on leadership and volunteering to
give them career advice. Early on, powerless communication actually helped
him rise to the top of HBO’s sales charts.
Back in 1977, HBO was an unknown brand; most Americans didn’t even
have cable. Grumbles was in his late twenties, and he was sent to open an HBO
sales office in Kansas City. He had no sales experience, so he started doing what
he did best as a giver: asking questions. His questions were sincere, and
customers responded. “I would be on a sales call, and I’d look at the walls,
around the office, and see their interests. I’d ask about their grandchildren, or
their favorite sports team. I would ask a question, and customers would talk for
twenty minutes.” Other salespeople were bringing in one contract a month.
Grumbles was four times as productive: he brought in one contract a week.
By asking questions and listening to the answers, Grumbles showed his
customers that he cared about their interests. This built prestige: customers

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respected and admired the concern that he showed. After one of his early sales
calls, a customer took him aside to tell him he was a “great conversationalist.”
Grumbles laughs: “I’d hardly said a thing!”
Asking questions opened the door for customers to experience what the
psychologist James Pennebaker calls the
joy of talking
. Years ago, Pennebaker
divided strangers into small groups. Imagine that you’ve just joined one of his
groups, and you have fifteen minutes to talk with strangers about a topic of your
choice. You might chat about your hometown, where you went to college, or
your career.
After the fifteen minutes are up, you rate how much you like the group. It
turns out that the more you talked, the more you like the group. This isn’t
surprising, since people love to talk about themselves. But let me ask you
another question: How much did you learn about the group?
Logically, learning about the people around you should depend on listening.
The less you talk, the more you should discover about the group. But
Pennebaker found the opposite: the more you talk, the more you think you’ve