EPISODE 39

The third day was a half-session that usually broke up at 1 o’clock.  If Day One was meant to break the spirit and Day Two was for manufacturing the breakthrough in thinking about marketing and sales, then Day Three was a call to action.  It was actually very cool to see how the group had progressed.  Not only were they unified in their desire to change the way that they marketed their businesses, they were also very excited about the prospect of getting home and applying some of what they’d learned.  Having done all that we could with our students, Bosco and I went out for a drink.  He took a sip of his scotch and water, put the glass on the table and then launched into a soliloquy. Bosco was relaxed; feeling very full of himself, and that was often when he was at his best.  He would try out different ways of expounding on the themes that he’d tried to teach and in this case, knowing that I was an ardent Red Sox fan, he told me that selling was like playing baseball.

“It’s a simple game and people all over the world play it.  But to do it at the Major League level is quite another thing entirely” he said.  “There are only 750 men that get to play on a big league roster on any given day. Think of all of the best players you knew in high school.  How many of them made it to the varsity team in college?  Not that many, in fact, maybe none!  Now consider how many of the guys who got offered even a minor league contract after college.  There are dozens of single-A, AA and AAAteams operating right now, all of them with players who are better than any of the best you saw play in college.  And how many of them ever get called up to the big leagues each year for even a game or two?  Not a too damn many.  So now consider how few of the guys who went all the way from high school to college to the minors and eventually to the majors who get one of those 750 starting jobs.  The odds against success at that level are staggering!  But every year, thousands of kids play ball and train and work their way as far as they can through the system in hopes of making it all the way.” 

He paused for a second to take another sip of his whiskey before asking, “What makes a good ball player?”

“Talent, I suppose,” I said quietly.  “They have to have the raw stuff.  If they can run faster, swing harder or throw more accurately, they’ll have a shot.”

“Look Michael, if natural aptitude was what it took, then the Majors would be flooded with great players, which isn’t true.  The same is true in our business.  Talent is useless without training.  In fact, most salespeople don’t have any aptitude for what they do.

“In reality” he continued, “there are two basic types of successful salespeople: the Unconscious Competent and the Conscious Competent.  The Unconscious Competent is very rare.  These people have the ability to get the prospect to trust them implicitly, without resorting to any of the tricks that we normally associate with sales.  They don’t ‘pitch’.  You take Sasha Haskins.  She doesn’t think she’s a salesperson, but in fact she’s one of the best you’ll ever see.  Her great secret is that she doesn’t try to sell.  She really wants to help her clients.  She’s also an excellent listener.  She actually cares for them.  In a way, she’s like someone’s mother.  She wants to do right by them and she follows that instinct.  Sasha is the perfect Unconscious Competent.  She sells based on pure trust.  You can’t learn that and you sure can’t fake it either.

“But the rest of us, we have to work at it.  Michael, you’re one of the best salesmen I’ve ever met, but you can be your own worst enemy at times.”

I decided not to rise to the bait and I let Bosco continue.  He was on a roll anyway, so who was I to interrupt him?

“Here’s why.  When you first started working for me, all you wanted was to know how we grew people’s hair back.  Remember?  I wouldn’t tell you.  The reason was that I knew you’d go tell all of your prospects what we were going to do.  With a little bit of information, you were the most dangerous man on the planet!  You’d disclose and disclose and you’d present and present.  You could kill a sale quicker than hell that way.  I watched you burn leads that way until I couldn’t stand it anymore.  Shit!  You didn’t even know what you were selling and you still over-presented! Fuck, I bet there were days you burned through a couple grand worth of my leads.  But one thing was sure, I knew that you could be taught!”

So, the Conscious Competent was a raw talent who could be broken and that’s exactly what Bosco had done with me.  He wouldn’t tell me what I was selling and that forced me to continually direct the conversation away from what we were going to do for the prospect.  My job was to draw out what our potential client wanted.  Initially, it was nerve-wracking work, but I’d learned how to do it.  The secret to success in selling hair was in never selling the hair.  You had to get the prospect to reveal his pain, his fear, and ultimately – his dreams. 

On those days, I sold hope.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 2nd.

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