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I had started my presentation to the colonels with powerful communication: I talked confidently about my credentials. This wasn’t how I usually opened in the classroom. In my role as a professor, I’ve always felt a strong sense of responsibility to give to my students, and I tend to be more concerned about connecting with students than establishing my authority. When I teach undergraduates, I open my very first class with a story about my biggest failures. With the Air Force colonels, though, I was worried about credibility, and I only had four hours—instead of my usual four months—to establish it. Deviating from my typical vulnerable style, I adopted a dominant tone in describing my qualifications. But the more I tried to dominate, the more the colonels resisted. I failed to win their respect, and I felt disappointed and embarrassed.

I had another session with Air Force colonels coming up on my schedule, so I decided to try a different opening. Instead of talking confidently about my credentials, I opened with a more powerless, self-deprecating remark:

“I know what some of you are thinking right now:

‘What can I possibly learn from a professor who’s twelve years old?’”

There was a split second of awkward silence, and I held my breath.

Then the room erupted with bursts of laughter. A colonel named Hawk piped up: “Come on, that’s way off base. I’m pretty sure you’re thirteen.” From there, I proceeded to deliver a near carbon copy of my first presentation—after all, the information I had to deliver on motivation hadn’t changed. But afterward, when I looked at the feedback, it differed night and day from my previous session:

• “Spoke with personal experience. He was the right age! High energy; clearly successful already.”
  
• “Adam was obviously knowledgeable regarding the topic and this translated into his passion and interest. This allowed him to be very effective. One word—EXCELLENT!”
  
• “Although junior in experience, he dealt with the studies in an interesting way. Good job. Very energetic and dynamic.”
  
• “I can’t believe Adam is only twelve! He did a great job.”
  

Powerless communication had made all the difference. Instead of working to establish my credentials, I made myself vulnerable, and called out the elephant in the room. Later, I adopted the same approach when teaching Army generals and Navy flag officers, and it worked just as well. I was using my natural communication style, and it helped me connect with a skeptical audience.

Takers tend to worry that revealing weaknesses will compromise their dominance and authority. Givers are much more
comfortable expressing vulnerability
: they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid of exposing chinks in their armor. By making themselves vulnerable, givers can actually build prestige.

But there’s a twist: expressing vulnerability is only effective if the audience receives other signals establishing the speaker’s competence. In a classic experiment led by the psychologist Elliot Aronson, students listened to one of four tapes of a candidate auditioning for a Quiz Bowl team. Half of the time, the candidate was an expert, getting 92 percent of questions right. The other half of the time, the candidate had only average knowledge, getting 30 percent right.

As expected, audiences favored the expert. But an interesting wrinkle emerged when the tape included a clumsy behavior by the candidate. Dishes crashed, and the candidate said, “Oh, my goodness—I’ve spilled coffee all over my new suit.”

When the average candidate was clumsy, audiences liked him even less.

But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him even more.

Psychologists call this the
pratfall effect
. Spilling a cup of coffee hurt the image of the average candidate: it was just another reason for the audience to dislike him. But the same blunder helped the expert appear human and approachable—instead of superior and distant.
*
This explains why Dave Walton’s stuttering made a positive impression on the jury. The fact that Dave was willing to make himself vulnerable, putting his stutter out for the world to see, earned their respect and admiration. The jurors liked and trusted him, and they listened carefully to him. This set the stage for Dave to convince them with the substance of his arguments.

Establishing vulnerability is especially important for a lawyer like Dave Walton. Dave has a giver tendency: he spends a great deal of time mentoring junior associates, and he fights passionately for justice on behalf of his clients. But these aren’t the first attributes that a jury sees: his appearance doesn’t exactly ooze warmth. “I’m a big guy with a military look,” Dave explains,

and I have an intense streak. In the trade secrets trial, I wouldn’t say stuttering is why I won, but it helped my credibility: it made me a real person. It gave them an insight into my character that they liked. It humanized me: this is a guy we can pull for. It made me seem less polished, and more credible as an advocate. People think you have to be this polished, perfect person. Actually, you don’t want a lawyer who is too slick. Good trial lawyers aim to be an expert and a regular guy at the same time.

When Dave Walton stands in front of a jury in spite of his stutter, they can see that he cares deeply about his clients—he believes in them enough that he’s willing to expose his own vulnerability to support them. This sends a powerful message to his audience that helps win them over by increasing his prestige and softening the dominance in his natural appearance.

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 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 learned about the group
. By talking like a taker and dominating the conversation, you believe you’ve actually come to know the people around you, even though they barely spoke. In
Opening Up
, Pennebaker muses, “Most of us find that communicating our thoughts is a supremely enjoyable learning experience.”

It’s the givers, by virtue of their interest in getting to know us, who ask us the questions that enable us to experience the joy of learning from ourselves. And by giving us the floor, givers are actually learning about us and from us, which helps them figure out how to sell us things we already value.

To shed further light on how givers sell successfully, I want to take you on a journey to Raleigh, North Carolina, where I’m posing as a mystery shopper. I’m working with an innovative optometry company called Eye Care Associates, with the goal of figuring out what distinguishes star sellers from the rest of the pack. Every employee in the company has filled out a survey about whether they’re givers, takers, or matchers, and now it’s time for me to see them in action.

I enter an eye care office and express an interest in replacing a pair of broken sunglass frames that I purchased at LensCrafters. I walk over to a display case, and I’m approached by my very first salesman. He shows me a snazzy pair of glasses, and swiftly launches into a compelling pitch with powerful communication. The lenses are tailor-made for driving. The contours of the frames accentuate the shape of my face. The color matches my skin tone. I’ve never been mistaken for cool, but I briefly flirt with the fantasy that these shades could transform me into James Bond—or at least James Woods. When I express concerns about the price, the salesman confidently assures me that they’re worth it. They fit me so perfectly, he says, that the designers must have had a winning face like mine in mind when they created these shades. I develop a sneaking suspicion that he’s flattering me to make the sale.
Taker?

At another office, the salesperson offers to do me a favor. He’ll replace my frames for free, if I switch over to his office for eye exams.
Matcher . . . and I have the survey data to back it up.

Who’s the more successful seller: the taker or the matcher?

Neither. Both are right in the middle of the pack.

At a third office in Knightdale, North Carolina, I meet Kildare Escoto. Kildare is an imposing figure, with thick eyebrows and a thin goatee. He’s a serious weightlifter, and if you asked him right now, he could drop and do a hundred push-ups without breaking a sweat. His parents are from the Dominican Republic, and he grew up in rough-and-tumble New York City. He has the same title as the two salespeople I met at other offices, but his style couldn’t be more different.

We’re the exact same age, but Kildare calls me “sir,” and I sense that he means it. He speaks softly and asks me some basic questions before he even pulls out a single tray of sunglasses from the case. Have I ever been here before? Do I have a prescription to fill? What’s my lifestyle like—do I play sports? He listens carefully to my answers and gives me some space to contemplate.

I have 20/20 vision, but Kildare is so good that I suddenly feel the urge to buy a pair of shades. I blow my cover. I tell him I’m studying the techniques of outstanding salespeople—is he willing to discuss his approach? Kildare objects. “I don’t look at it as selling,” he explains. “I see myself as an optician. We’re in the medical field first, retail second, sales maybe third. My job is to take the patient, ask the patient questions, and see what the patient needs. My mind-set is not to sell. My job is to help. My main purpose is to educate and inform patients on what’s important. My true concern in the long run is that the patient can see.”

The data reveal two striking facts about Kildare Escoto. First, in my survey, he had the single highest giver score of any employee in the company. Second, he was also the
top-selling optician
in the entire company, bringing in more than double the average sales revenue.

It’s not a coincidence. The second-highest seller also more than doubled the average, and she’s a giver too. Her name is Nancy Phelps, and she has the same philosophy as Kildare. “I get involved with patients, ask where they work, what their hobbies are, what they like to do on vacations. It’s about the patients and their needs.” It’s revealing that when patients walk in the door, they ask for Nancy. “I’m a real believer in giving patients their new fresh eyes that they’re going to see their best in,” she says.

To see whether Kildare and Nancy are exceptions to the rule, Dane Barnes and I asked
hundreds of opticians
to complete a survey measuring whether they were takers, matchers, or givers. We also gave them an intelligence test, assessing their ability to solve complex problems. Then we tracked their sales revenue over the course of an entire year.

Even after controlling for intelligence, the givers outsold the matchers and takers. The average giver brought in over 30 percent more annual revenue than matchers and 68 percent more than takers. Even though matchers and takers together represented over 70 percent of the sellers, half of the top sellers were givers. If all opticians were givers, the average company’s annual revenue would spike from approximately $11.5 million to more than $15.1 million. Givers are the top sellers, and a key reason is powerless communication.