The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich

Chapter 7

Nothing Is As It Appears

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

—Albert Einstein

 

In any selling scenario, the meaning of a gesture, a statement, a smile, a slip of the tongue, may not be entirely clear in the moment. But not only is there more concealed behind such superficialities than often can be readily appreciated, what a customer reveals in unconscious ways is likely to remain true. That's why the Street-Smart Salesman lets a customer do the lion's share of the talking no matter how many years they do business together—decades even. The more a customer reveals to the seller over time, the more enhanced the seller's ability to part that customer from more of his company's money.

Some time ago, a rep on my salesforce called me to report that a 20-year customer for whom she was lately responsible had defected to the competition. As far as my rep knew and insisted, the client's decision to quit us was totally product-driven; our goods just didn't measure up, or some such technical nonsense. Out of the blue, two decades into a business relationship, this customer suddenly requires product standards our company can't meet? Was blaming the company's supposedly slipping product standards really the best way for the rep to explain to the boss why she'd lost a customer after 20 years?

I sure wasn't buying it. Over the course of 20 years, there'd been plenty of times when a competitor had one or another better product; that ...