To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (22 page)

This is what makes improvisational theater work. Imagine a scene with two actors. The first, sitting in a chair, his hands perched on an invisible steering wheel, says to his partner, “Be sure to lock the door.” The second actor hasn’t been listening
for
anything. She’s just been listening. Her job in that situation, Salit tells us, is to “take in anything and everything someone says as an offer you can do something with.” The invisible steering wheel and the directive “Be sure to lock the door” constitute an offer. The second actor must accept it and build on it. Maybe she’s a passenger in a taxi. Maybe she’s a kid in the backseat of the family car. Maybe she has a broken arm and can’t reach the lock. But her ability to listen without listening
for
is what allows the scene to move forward.

Once we listen in this new, more intimate way, we begin hearing things we might have missed. And if we listen this way during our efforts to move others, we quickly realize that what seem outwardly like objections are often offers in disguise.

Take a simple example. Suppose you’re raising money for a charity and you ask your brother-in-law to contribute $200. He might say no. But he’s unlikely to say only that. He’s more likely to say, “Sorry, I can’t give two hundred dollars.” That’s an offer. Maybe he can donate a smaller amount. Or he might say, “No, I can’t give right now.” That’s an offer, too. The obvious move is to fasten onto the “right now” and ask when might be a better time. But the entire sentence is an offer—perhaps to contribute to your charity some other way, say, as a volunteer. “Offers come in all shapes and sizes,” says Salit. But the only way to hear them is to change the way you listen and then change the way you respond.

Which goes back to my mirroring exercise with the cosmetics executive. What each of us was doing in that session was accepting an offer. We didn’t have the option of objecting. (“No way, lady, I’m not doing that with my elbow!”) And once we accepted those rules, we fell into an odd but attuned ballet. Eventually, when the bell rang for us to switch roles again, our actions were so smooth that an outsider probably couldn’t tell who was leading and who was following. That’s the point of the first principle of improvisation. As Johnstone puts it, “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made.”
⁹

2. Say “Yes and.”

The “ocean of rejection” that we face every day in sales and non-sales selling delivers plenty of nos to our shores. But we also send many back out with the tide, saying “No” ourselves more often than we realize. Improvisational theater urges actors to check this behavior—and say “Yes and” instead.

Like a potter learning to center the clay on the wheel or a tennis player acquiring the proper grip, saying “Yes and” is a foundational skill for improv artists. This second principle of improvisation depends on buoyancy, in particular the quality of positivity.

But positivity in this regard is more than avoiding no. And it’s more than simply saying yes. “Yes and” carries a particular force, which becomes clearer when we contrast it with its evil twin, “Yes, but.”

Nearly every improv class includes a variation on the following exercise. We didn’t do this in Salit’s sessions, but she showed it to me when she visited my office a few months later. The exercise involves two people who are planning a hypothetical gathering—say, a high school reunion. One person begins with a proposition—for example, “Let’s have our high school reunion in Las Vegas.” Every subsequent comment from both participants must begin with “Yes, but.” It usually unfolds something like this:

“Let’s have our high school reunion in Las Vegas.”

“Yes, but that’s going to be too expensive for some people.”

“Yes, but that way only the people who really want to be there will attend.”

“Yes, but some of our classmates don’t gamble.”

“Yes, but there’s more to do there than play blackjack.”

“Yes, but even without gambling, it’s still not a great place for people to bring their families.”

“Yes, but reunions are better without all those kids.”

“Yes, but if people can’t find child care at home, they won’t attend . . .”

The planning process spins and spins, but nothing—and nobody—moves.

Then participants take an alternative route, where the undermining conjunction “but” is replaced with its more inclusive sibling, “and.” This version might go like this:

“Let’s have our high school reunion in Las Vegas.”

“Yes—and if it’s too expensive for some people we can raise money or organize road trips.”

“Yes—and if we start early, we could reserve a block of rooms at a hotel that offers volume discounts.”

“Yes—and for families with kids and for people who don’t gamble, we could organize activities during the day.”

“Yes—and if we have enough people, we might be able to pool our resources to pay for babysitters so one night some parents can go out on their own.”

“Yes—and those who wanted to could all go to a show together.”

Instead of swirling downward into frustration, “Yes and” spirals upward toward possibility. When you stop you’ve got a set of options, not a sense of futility.

There are certainly plenty of times in life to say “No.” When it comes to moving others, however, the best default position is this second principle of improv. And its benefits stretch further than sales and non-sales selling.

“‘Yes and’ isn’t a technique,” Salit says. “It’s a way of life.”

3. Make your partner look good.

In the summer of 2012, two giants in the field of moving others passed away. Roger Fisher, who died in August of that year shortly after reaching his ninetieth birthday, was a Harvard Law School professor and a freelance diplomatic troubleshooter. In 1981 he coauthored
Getting to Yes
, the most influential book ever written about negotiation. Fisher’s signal contribution was the concept of “principled negotiation,” which proposed that the aim of negotiating shouldn’t be to make the other side lose but, where possible, to help it win. This idea, which quickly became shorthanded as “win-win,” transformed business and legal education. Until then, many viewed negotiation as a zero-sum game, where parties vied for the largest share of a fixed pie. But Fisher’s work urged young business students and law students, and less-young people inside organizations, to reframe these encounters as positive-sum games, where one person’s victory didn’t depend on another’s defeat. If each party looks past the other party’s position to its actual interests and invents options for mutual gain, negotiations could end with both sides better off than when they began.

The second giant, who died just six weeks before Fisher at the age of seventy-nine, took the core of Fisher’s idea to an even larger audience. In 1989, Stephen R. Covey wrote
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
, which went on to sell more than twenty-five million copies. Habit 4 on Covey’s list is “Think Win-Win.” Establishing this habit isn’t easy, he acknowledged, because “most people have been deeply scripted in the Win/Lose mentality since birth.” But the only way to truly influence others is to adopt “a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions.”
¹⁰

Because of Fisher’s and Covey’s influence, “win-win” has become a fixture in organizations around the world, though often more in parlance than in practice. One explanation for the disconnect between word and deed goes back to the upheaval I described in Chapter 3. Under conditions of information asymmetry, results frequently are win-lose. After all, when I know more than you, I can get what I want by beating you. And since information asymmetry was the defining condition of sales for so long, our muscle memory often takes us in that direction. But with the emergence of information parity (or at least something close to it), those instincts, developed for a different environment, can send us down the wrong path. When sellers and buyers are evenly matched, pushing for win-lose rarely leads to a win for anyone—and often ends in lose-lose.

Improv offers a way to freshen our thinking: a method that shares the worldview of Fisher and Covey but reorients it for a time when many of us have become desensitized to “win-win” from hearing it so regularly but experiencing it so rarely. In Cathy Salit and Second City’s brand of theater, performers must follow this rule: Make your partner look good. Improv artists have long understood that helping your fellow performer shine helps you both create a better scene. Making your partner look good doesn’t make you look worse; it actually makes you look better. It shatters the binary, either-or, zero-sum frame of mind and replaces it with a culture of generosity, creativity, and possibility. This third principle of improv—make your partner look good—calls for, and enables, clarity, the capacity to develop solutions that nobody previously imagined.

To illustrate this principle, Salit tells us to find new partners. Mine is a friendly forty-something woman who works for a large financial services company. For this exercise, called “I’m Curious,” we choose a controversial issue that lends itself to opposing pro-con positions (
Should marijuana be legal? Should the death penalty be abolished?
). Then we each choose a side, with one person trying to convince the other of his or her point of view. The other person must respond, but here’s the wrinkle—only with questions. The questions must be genuine queries, not veiled opinions (
Does it trouble you that the only people who share your view are imbeciles?
). They can’t be yes-no questions either (
I’m right, aren’t I?
). If our partner violates any of the rules—by making a statement or asking a prohibited type of question—we’re to ring the motel bell to announce the violation to the whole group.

I begin in the role of questioner, and my partner stakes out a position on a long-forgotten American political controversy that happened to be front-page news the day of our seminar.

I respond to her first claim with an arch “Really?” which is technically a question but not one exactly true to the spirit of the exercise. So I gather myself and ask a real question.

She answers and expands her argument.

Trying to remember the importance of slowing down, I pause, take a breath, and begin my question with “But what about . . . ?”

A little better.

Then she moves to another line of reasoning.

Without waiting, without even realizing what I’m saying, I gasp, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

Ding!

Four minutes into the game, I’ve ended up in the penalty box.

Now it’s her turn in the questioner role. Maybe because she’s seen how poorly I did, she performs more nimbly. Whenever I set out an argument, her first response—every single time—is “That’s so interesting!” The maneuver gives her time to conjure a question, but it also spins the weather vane in a friendlier direction. And when she poses a question, I have to stop a moment, think, and offer an intelligent answer.

The idea here isn’t to win. It’s to learn. And when both parties view their encounters as opportunities to learn, the desire to defeat the other side struggles to find the oxygen it needs. Questions, whose potency we’ve seen in both interrogative self-talk and in pitching effectively, change the rules of engagement and therefore the nature of the interaction itself. The conversation becomes more of a dance and less of a wrestling match. That’s something that Fuller Brush founder Alfred Fuller intuited years before improv was ever invented. “Never argue,” he wrote. “To win an argument is to lose a sale.”
¹¹

Making your partner, the person you’re selling to, look good has become even more critical than it was in Fuller’s day. Back then, unscrupulous sellers didn’t have to worry so much about making buyers look bad. Buyers often had nowhere else to go and nobody to tell. Today, if you make people look bad, they can tell the world. But if you make people look good, they can also tell the world.

“In improv, you never try to
get
someone to do something. That’s coercion, not creativity,” Salit says. “You make offers, you accept offers—and a conversation, a relationship, a scene, and other possibilities emerge.”

As goes improv, so go sales and non-sales selling. If you train your ears to hear offers, if you respond to others with “Yes and,” and if you always try to make your counterpart look good, possibilities will emerge.

SAMPLE CASE

Improvise

Take five.

Nineteen centuries ago, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”

Unfortunately, not many people listened to him.

You can avoid their mistake by taking Epictetus’s counsel seriously. One of the simplest ways to do that—to reduce your ratio of talking to listening—is simply to slow down.

Designate one day this week to be your slow day. Then when you have a conversation, take five seconds before responding. Seriously. Every time. It will seem odd at first. And your conversation partner might wonder if you were recently bonked on the head. But pausing a few additional seconds to respond can hone your listening skills in much the same way that savoring a piece of chocolate, instead of wolfing it down, can improve your palate. (If a whole day is too much, start smaller; try it for an hour.)