What the World’s Best Sales People Can Teach Us All
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First published as The Art of the Sale in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2012
First published as Life’s a Pitch in Great Britain by Portfolio Penguin 2012
Copyright © Philip Delves Broughton, 2012
Cover design by Alex Dobbin
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-24-195998-5
Introduction. LIFE ON STEROIDS
Chapter 1. LOOSE ROBES
Chapter 2. THE PITCH
Chapter 3. THE SOUL OF A SALESMAN
Chapter 4. I BELIEVE
Chapter 5. LEVELING
Chapter 6. ART AND COMMERCE
Chapter 7. THE ZEN OF SALES
Chapter 8. HYBRID VIGOR
Epilogue. THE LEMONADE STAND
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Philip Delves Broughton is the author of the international bestseller What They Teach You at Harvard Business School, named Business Book of the Year by the Financial Times and USA Today. He was born in Bangladesh and grew up in England. He served as the New York and Paris bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph, and now writes for publications including the Financial Times, the Evening Standard and the Wall Street Journal. In 2006 he received an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is married with two sons.
Life’s a Pitch
‘A marvellous book about selling, and life, and who we are and how we tick … dazzling’ Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence
‘You can never look upon a sale in quite the same way again. Buy Life’s a Pitch and be enlightened’ Adrian Wooldridge, Economist
‘Entertaining, balanced and provocative’ Kirkus Reviews
‘Like Malcolm Gladwell, Philip Delves Broughton is drawn to success stories where natural talent takes second place to hard work. His enthusiasm and admiration are contagious’ Publishers Weekly
For Margret, Augie, and Hugo
You can get all A’s and still flunk life.
WALKER PERCY
You call yourself a salesman, you sonofabitch?
DAVID MAMET, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
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Life’s a pitch—and then you buy.
BILLY MAYS, THE INFOMERCIAL KING
I imagined when I went to Harvard Business School to study for my MBA that sales would be part of the curriculum. But it wasn’t. In fact, the subject is absent from most MBA programs. If you accept the idea that business is about selling things and making things, and that everything else is secondary, then this absence makes no sense. When I asked one of my Harvard professors to explain it, he told me that if I really wanted to study sales, I could pay for a two-week evening course somewhere. You could say the same thing about a lot of what the school taught, but no one was suggesting we go and learn strategy at night school.
]In his book Birth of a Salesman, the Harvard Business School professor Walter Friedman observed that “while business schools have continued to offer some type of sales management instruction—usually within a larger marketing course—they do not offer courses in salesmanship skills. The topic remains, just as it was in the 1910s, more suitable for popular how-to books and memoirs of successful salespeople than for academic classes. Economists, for their part, still tend to ignore the role of salesmanship in the economy.” Part of the problem is institutional. In order to get tenure at a business school, you need to be published in a handful of journals, which focus on finance, marketing, strategy, and operations, leaving little room or serious consideration for articles on selling. So for reasons that have nothing to do with the relevance of selling in business, selling is an orphan in business academe.
The effects of this omission are grave. Many supposedly well-educated people in the business world are clueless about one of its most vital functions, the means by which you actually generate revenue. The absence of knowledge about sales has opened a class division between salespeople and the rest of business. Salespeople are often seen as operating by different rules and needing different motivators from other employees. They need conventions in Las Vegas and complex commission structures. They need to be goaded to perform and reined in when they sell too hard. They are patronized as “feet on the street” by those who prefer to imagine that business can be conducted by consultants with dueling PowerPoint presentations. Salesmen themselves use terms that diminish the complexity of what they do. IBM salespeople used to talk of “pushing metal” (mainframe computers), and Xerox salespeople of “slamming boxes” (photocopiers).
When Bank of America rescued Merrill Lynch from imminent bankruptcy at the depth of the financial crisis in late 2008, Merrill Lynch’s brokers derided Bank of America’s retail bankers as “toaster salesmen.” Bank of America’s chief executive, Kenneth Lewis, was similarly described as a “former shoe salesman,” in contrast to Merrill Lynch’s Harvard- and Goldman Sachs–trained boss, John Thain. Lewis had indeed sold shoes while he was in high school; he had been paid a commission of 36 cents per pair. He’d also sold Christmas cards door-to-door and while in college worked at a municipal bond firm and as a reservations agent for United Airlines. Good for Lewis, one might think, to have risen up the hard way. So why reduce him to a “former shoe salesman”? Anyone who has actually started, bought, or run a business knows how absurd such pejorative perceptions of salespeople are. Selling is not a sideshow, a pesky obligation apart from the real business of finance, law, or accounting. It is business in gorgeous Technicolor.
]Richard Perry, the founder of Perry Capital and one of the most successful investors in America, put it very simply to me: “It’s all about sales. If I have sales, I can create profit.” Perry’s offices are in the General Motors building on Fifth Avenue in the heart of Manhattan, a building that weaves together many strands of contemporary American business. It was completed in 1968 as an expression of the might of the U.S. car industry, sheathed in glass and white Georgia marble, and occupies an entire city block. These days, its main tenants are hedge funds, law firms, and, beneath its street-level plaza, an Apple store. In 2008, the New York developer who owned the building had to sell it because of the credit crunch to a group of investors led by Goldman Sachs and assorted Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. The building’s evolution, from the symbol of homegrown manufacturing power to a home for hedge funds and iPhones runs parallel to that of the broader American economy.
Perry began his career at Goldman Sachs before striking out to found his own firm in 1988. Perry Capital has proved to be one of the most enduring and successful of the many hedge funds founded in New York over the past two decades, moving from investment strategy to investment strategy, from buying equities to issuing credit, fighting shareholder battles to betting big on mergers and acquisitions, making fortunes at every turn for its investors, employees, and Perry himself. During that time, he has met salespeople of every stripe, in financial services and beyond. As he sat back in one of his firm’s many hypermodern conference rooms, he told me, “If you aren’t selling, you aren’t part of the world.”
Perry possesses the supreme self-confidence required to surf the treacherous financial markets as adroitly as he does. It’s a style shared among any number of successful financiers. Bruce Wasserstein, the late chief executive of the investment bank Lazard, was famously gruff and unkempt. But if you were thinking of buying or selling a company, and you could afford him, he would be the first man on your team. You were happy to ignore his brusqueness because no one knew the M&A (mergers and acquisitions) game as well as he did. His success sold his services. “The great salesmen have the facts. They’re the anti-sell,” says Perry. “They don’t have to do anything. You just want to buy from them.” It’s like choosing between surgeons. Do you want the one with the tidy office and the ironed shirt? Or the rude slob who has performed 100 successful operations in a row? In some ways, this is the ideal. You have a product so irresistible that selling it is simply a question of placing it in front of the slavering prospect. No need for the artfully prepared bid, the tickets to the game, the winning smile. The salesman floats his pitch and the hungry buyer slams it over the bleachers for a home run. Everyone makes money and we all go home. But even in investing, where performance can be measured in the unforgiving digits of a risk-adjusted return, the selling goes on. Perry himself is a tall, athletic man, physically imposing and fashionably dressed. His offices are starkly white and dripping with modern art that emphasizes the firm’s wealth from the moment you enter. There is no false modesty here. Even after so many years, and such an extensive track record, Perry Capital remains dressed for success.
Compare this with Warren Buffett, whose reputation is built on his gift for stock picking and his persona as the Poor Richard of our time: thrifty, hardworking, and aw-shucks despite his billions. He runs his globe-spanning firm from a threadbare office in Omaha, Nebraska, with a staff of fewer than twenty. “Successful people are very aware of what their style is, and they play it,” says Perry. Success, whatever the wrapping, will attract followers.
In the United States, there are two potent and contradictory views of sales. The first was held by Benjamin Franklin and his later incarnations like Buffett and Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, and codified in the twentieth century by writers like Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. It holds that in a properly functioning democracy, no matter the condition of your birth, if you can sell, you can slice through any obstacles of class, status, or upbringing in a way inconceivable in more hidebound societies. Great salesmen need no other prop to succeed. Selling well, in this view, is also a reflection of a healthy character. It means you are the sort of person people are drawn to—hardworking, clean living, and trustworthy—and you are likely to succeed at whatever you choose to do.
The opposing view can be found in Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s brutal portrait of a man crushed by the demands of capitalism, living out the last pathetic day of his life. Willy Loman is defeated by his work as a door-to-door salesman and by his failure to achieve the hollow dreams he has set for himself. For him, selling is a form of humiliation, an offense against human dignity perpetrated for the vile purpose of commercial gain. It is capitalism at its absolute worst. And yet year after year, high school and college students are made to read this play and perform it, and audiences pay to see it. It is the most studied play at American universities.
In his autobiography, Timebends, Miller describes how he wrote it. In April 1948, he drove up from his home in Brooklyn to his country house in Roxbury, Connecticut. He wanted to build a shack where he could write, and he wanted to build it himself, without the help of a professional carpenter. As he nailed and sawed, he constructed the strange architecture of his play, in which Loman, his wife, and his two sons try to understand the forces that will ultimately kill him, the awful erosion of self that Loman suffered in his pursuit of the American dream.
I started writing one morning—the tiny studio was still unpainted and smelled of raw wood and sawdust, and the bags of nails were still stashed in a corner with my tools. The sun of April had found my windows to pour through, and the apple buds were moving on the wild trees, showing their first pale blue petals. I wrote all day until dark, and then I had dinner and went back and wrote until some hour in the darkness between midnight and four. I had skipped a few areas that I knew would give me no trouble in the writing and gone for the parts that had to be muscled into position. By the next morning I had done the first half, the first act of two. When I lay down to sleep I realized I had been weeping—my eyes still burned and my throat was sore from talking it all out and shouting and laughing. I would be stiff when I woke, aching as if I had played four hours of football or tennis and now had to face the start of another game.
It would take another six weeks for Miller to write the second act. But the sheer physical effort the first act took somehow reflects Willy Loman’s own desperate trials. When Elia Kazan, who directed the first production on Broadway in 1949, read it he called Miller and said, “My God, it’s so sad.”
Miller hoped his play would expose the “bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.” Thirty-five years later, attending a production of the play in Beijing, Miller described his astonishment to see the interest in Loman even in a Communist country. To the Chinese, Loman’s appeal was not as a victim of capitalism, but as someone who yearned to mean something, to be anything but anonymous. “When he roared out, ‘I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!’ it came as a nearly revolutionary declaration after what was now thirty-four years of leveling,” Miller wrote of the response in China.
Both views, Franklin’s sunny one and Miller’s depressing one, have their adherents in culture, economics, and politics, among those who see capitalism as a cleansing fire, with competition leading to fairness and truth and a just distribution of goods, and those who see it as the cause of scorched earth and ruined lives. And then there are those who shuttle around the middle, recognizing the importance of selling as a force for economic expansion and human improvement, yet admitting to its Faustian lures. The ability to sell can be a force for extraordinary good or evil, depending on the motivation of the seller. When Hunter S. Thompson described America as a “nation of two hundred million used car salesmen,” it’s hard to know if he meant it as a jibe or a compliment.
To excel at sales means you possess a power over people that can easily be misused. Put a formidable salesman together with a hateful idea, and you could end up with the Nuremberg rallies. Casanova turned his persuasive talents to deflowering nuns. Mahatma Gandhi used his to argue for the principle of nonviolence. Bill Clinton sold his way into the White House and out of a sexual scandal that might have sunk a lesser persuader. The Dalai Lama is a highly conscious manipulator of his message and style, depending on which audience he wishes to win over.
But whatever your view, sales surrounds us. Many of our choices in life come down to this: sell, or be sold to. Persuade, or roll over. When I told friends the subject of this book, half of them sneered. “Salespeople? Ugh,” as if they could smell the cheap cologne and hear the tiresome patter. The other half shifted eagerly in their seats, lips smacking at the idea. Selling! It makes the world go round. There is not another area of business that elicits such contrary and vigorous reactions. Accounting, marketing, law, strategy, finance all have their zealous practitioners, but they remain the province of priesthoods. An attitude to sales is shared by all of us. We have all bought and we have all sold, whether commercially, personally, or emotionally.
In my own life, there are salespeople I have loathed—the realtor who sold me my house—and those I have adored: the one who helped me buy a suit for my wedding. There are ones to whom I happily gave my money because they gave me what I needed at a particular moment. And there are those who left me feeling robbed. There are those I would recommend to every friend, and a few I wouldn’t inflict on my worst enemy.
There was the man in a Hawaiian shirt who sold me a car a couple of years ago, who laughed and chatted his way through the paperwork, dispelling every mite of my buyer’s suspicion, asking me about my family, talking about his, building rapport in a way so “sales-y” and yet so much more pleasant than most of my other human interactions that day or week. And then that accursed realtor, whose evasions, distortions, and delays befuddled the already torturous process of home buying to such a degree that as I crossed the finish line of closing, I wanted to leave him smeared with honey in bear-infested woods.
Even those of us not paid to be salespeople sell every day to ourselves, to our families, to our friends, and to our employers. Every morning, I sell to my children the idea that paying attention at school is worth the effort. I sell myself on the idea of writing a book. We sell ourselves into schools and organizations, and to potential mates. Waiters sell us the special and doctors sell us medication. To sell is to be human—with all that that implies.
Indeed, in the biblical view, a sale made us human. Before that sale, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, blessed by God, naked, joyful, surrounded by abundant food and beauty. Just one thing, God said. Do not eat from the tree of knowledge. If you do, he warned, you will die. The threat could not have been much clearer. Then along came the serpent, “more subtle than any beast of the field,” to persuade the man and woman to do the one thing they fear will surely kill them. In sales, this qualifies as an objection.
The serpent at this point was not the slithering creature of today but a walking, talking biped. Its purpose was to destroy the perfect equilibrium of Eden. To do away with Adam and get its scaly mitts on Eve. It did so by turning the threat of severe punishment to its advantage. How terrific must that tree be, it said to Eve, for God to make such a threat? And by the way, did he threaten you? Or just Adam? Suddenly, Eve is reeling. Well, yes, she stumbles, I suppose God did only tell Adam. Then, the serpent asks, why do you think God is so determined for you not to eat of the tree of knowledge? Because he doesn’t want you knowing as much as he does. He doesn’t want you knowing good and evil like he does. He doesn’t want any other Gods around the place.
So go on, take a bite. Won’t hurt you. Might even do you some good.
Disaster.
Eve tastes the fruit and persuades Adam to do the same. They are banished from the garden, clothed in animal skins, and forced to work the earth for food until the dreadful day when to dust they shall return. Easeful immortality forsaken for a bite of apple. But from a sales perspective, one has to admire the serpent’s hustle. No longer did Eve regard the tree as deadly, but rather as the attractive bearer of tasty fruit, which had the additional effect of making her wise. The serpent was a master of the one-off sale.
On June 12, 1973, Marlon Brando, at the height of his Godfather majesty, appeared on the Dick Cavett show for a rare interview. He was funny, laconic, and hard to pin down, especially on the subject of his work in movies. Brando didn’t want to talk about acting because, he said, there was no difference between what he did on-screen and what all of us do every day. But what he did say applies directly to sales.
“I think that we couldn’t survive a second if we weren’t able to act,” said Brando. “Acting is a survival mechanism, it’s a social unguent, a lubricant. And we act to save our lives actually every day. People lie constantly every day by not saying something that they think, saying something that they don’t think, or showing something that they don’t feel.
“If you’re working for an ad agency on some product and you hate the idea man, the boss,” Brando went on, “and you know that every time he comes in with some impossible notion, something that really makes you gag when you drive home on the freeway, you know damn well that you’re not going to get a raise, or you’re not going to get shifted out of the position you’re in if you don’t say ‘Leonard, I think that’s terrific. It’s just beautiful.’ You even lean forward, put your elbows on your knees to show enthusiasm and you do it day, after day, after day to survive in your job.”
We are all selling all the time, pitching to the various Leonards in our lives to get what we want. Sales is nothing more than the purely human ordeal of rejection and acceptance. We come to know if people believe in us or find us phony. Ideally we believe in what we sell, but often we need to act, to put on a show, maybe even conceal the truth. Our ability to sell, to persuade others, to serve others, is intimately wrapped up in how we define ourselves. Could you ever say the same thing about accounting?
But what really occurs when one person faces another and persuades him to buy? How do salespeople deal with the rejection inherent in selling, the unremitting no’s interspersed with the occasional, ecstatic yes? How do salespeople go from meeting to meeting making the same pitch, hearing the same depressing objections, and yet keep their spirits up? When we sell we are forced to confront the truth about ourselves. What we are willing to do for a buck: the way we present ourselves to different people in different settings to different ends; the extent to which we mix our personal with our professional relationships. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but whatever answers we decide upon determine much about who we are and our chances at personal success.
I am particularly fascinated by all this because on the few occasions in my life when I have had to sell, I have hated it. No one has ever suggested I was a “natural salesman,” the shiny-toothed, back-slapping hero of the car lot and backyard barbecue. I could never, as they say, sell sand to Arabs, or ice to Eskimos. Put me in front of a telephone with a list of names to call and I flinch. Tell me to ask for money, and most likely I’ll disappear to the bathroom, lock the door, and not reappear until you’ve gone. People who are bad at sales will often use self-flattering excuses to persuade themselves that their incompetence is a virtue. “I just can’t lie,” they’ll say. Or “I’m not enough of a bully.” When in fact, like me, they’re just bad at sales.
What follows is not a lesson in how to sell. It is an effort to sort through the paradoxes and difficulties of this most fascinating of professions; to confront a subject that people often try to reduce to tricks, nuggets, and ten simple steps. Selling is the single largest function in business. Millions more are employed in sales jobs in America than in manufacturing, let alone marketing, strategy, finance, or any of the other parasitic business functions. All over the world, from the most basic to the most advanced economies, selling is the horse that pulls the cart of business. It is both the most primitive and the most evolved aspect of economic life. It is ignored by business academics and is fraught with moral risk.
There are more lies told about selling than about any other aspect of business life. So I went in search of some truths. Not absolutes or answers, but honesty.
I traveled widely in my search because I wanted to be sure to think about selling not as a cultural or industry-specific problem, but as a human practice, common across peoples and businesses. The traits required to sell (resilience, conviction, persistence, and likability), are not needed just in business, but in life. I wanted to discover who can sell and how they do it. To set salespeople in their context and to ask questions that the vast sales training industry would rather not have asked at all: Is the ability to sell in fact trainable? Is the ability to sell a gift of nature or nurture? What are the personal costs a salesperson must bear?
I began with a memory from my own childhood.
Success consists of going from failure to failure
with no loss of enthusiasm.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Casablanca in August was no place for a grumpy English twelve-year-old. The heat was tireless and the sunlight glared off the white buildings of the slumbering city. The expatriate French and English had skipped town and the remaining Moroccans had slipped down a couple of gears, escaping into the cool, tiled darkness of their homes. My father, a clergyman, had taken over duties at the local Anglican church for a month and received in return use of the vicarage and a rickety old Peugeot. It was our summer holiday.
A couple of weeks into our holiday, once my father felt confident driving the Peugeot in Moroccan traffic, we drove north to Fez, barreling along the desert roads praying that the car would hold up. There was no air-conditioning, and if I opened the window, I risked a face full of dust. The only option was to steam gently in the velour seats. One of the parishioners in Casablanca had offered us the use of his Riad in the medina of Fez. We parked on the edge of the old town and walked into its shadowy heart. At the end of an alleyway, hemmed in by shops selling bronze and silver dishes, was a heavy wooden door. My father rapped against it and we were let in. A small courtyard, cast in gray light despite the brilliant sun high above, swallowed us up. The only sound came from a small fountain in the center. After settling in, it was time for us to do what everyone who visits a Moroccan souk must do: shop.
Shopping in Morocco at the time was not a question of pushing a cart down an aisle. It was more like hand-to-hand combat. Tugging, goosing, stroking, bellowing, caressing, whispering—anything was allowed provided it brought a foreign wallet into a store. My father, who had spent many years working in India, and mother, who grew up in Burma, found it all immensely entertaining. In England, all they had was the orderly high street shops, the polite butchers and grocers (“Good morning madam, will that be all?”), and the Muzak-y hum of the supermarket. In Fez, they realized how much they had missed the hullaballoo of the Oriental bazaar.
I don’t remember precisely how we ended up with three rugs, but I do remember this: Yielding to a persistent old fellow in a dark brown djellaba. Entering his narrow store, where rugs were piled high in the corners and tacked to every wall. Sitting on the floor, our backs against an itchy stack of carpets. A long, explanatory preamble, describing different rugs made by different tribes, the High Atlas tribes and the Low Atlas tribes, Berber pronounced as if with a shiver, “brrr-brrr.” My parents talking to each other about the rooms back at our home in England and their requirements for rugs: warm, colorful, something to lift their mood and console them during chilly mornings and the frequent times when the heating system went down. Cups of sugary mint tea being brought to our feet on a bronze tray by a boy younger than me. A flurry of rugs, flicked open and drifting onto the floor around us like flocks of geese. I remember the wizened dealer producing a Fez hat, the familiar purple cylinder topped by a tassel, trying to put it on my father’s head, and when he refused, placing it on mine.
Then the negotiation. My father smiling, sipping his tea, one hand resting on his knee. My mother, a far tougher proposition, scowling, shaking her head at every price, pushing the dealer lower and lower, her credit card lodged immovably in her wallet. The dealer looking up to the heavens, to the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, and pleading with my mother, “Be fair, do not be so hard.” He had mouths to feed, bills to pay, he could not be in the business of giving away these rugs, feel the quality, look at the workmanship, think of the hours invested, the bent, hardened fingers that knotted this wool. And you are offering to pay how much? Finally, settling on a price. The sigh of relief all round. The credit card swiped, the rugs taken and folded into impossibly tight bundles, and the promise that they would be sent to us in England. And then the walk home. My parents wondering if they would ever see the rugs again, their thrill at the whole performance. And then three weeks after we arrived home, the postman arriving with the packages marked “Fez.” The blaze of reds and blues brightening an autumnal English day, and every day since.
Any tourist who has visited Morocco has a similar tale to tell. The haggle is as much a part of the Moroccan holiday experience as the performing monkeys in the town squares. Several people told me that they had never experienced salesmen like the ones in North Africa and Turkey. So I decided to go and see if anything had changed since I was a boy, to find out what made the country’s merchants such redoubtable and renowned salesmen. An American friend who has lived for years in Morocco said the man I must meet lived in the north of the country, in Tangier.
Tangier is the most cosmopolitan city in Morocco, in the rough-and-tumble way of port cities. From much of the city, you can see clear across the Straits of Gibraltar to Spain. The white plumes of boats bustling back and forth between Africa and Europe carve up the blue of the Mediterranean, while more stately container ships move crosswise between the Mediterranean and the vast Atlantic. The cafés in the center of town feel unchanged from the 1950s when American writers like Paul Bowles came to the city in search of exotic liberation from their Western lives. All through the day, men sit at the tables drinking mint tea and coffee, smoking, watching life pass by on the street. You see a good number of older, lizard-skinned Frenchmen wearing blazers and Moroccan slippers strolling along the streets, and you feel that this remains a place of decadent escape.
Opposite the El Minzah Hotel in the center of town, where I was staying, was a doorway crammed with rugs, vases, and other decorative objects. The elderly store owner sat on a stool just inside surrounded by blue glass lanterns, orange beads, and backgammon sets. There was a large callus on his forehead from his bowing to the ground in prayer. I explained that I was in town to learn about Moroccan salesmen. He nodded and reached under the counter to produce a scruffy little white book titled The Rogue’s Guide to Tangier. He asked me to return it when I was done.
That afternoon, I read the book, paying particular attention to the chapter “Bargaining, the Incredible Art Of.” The waggish authors, Bert and Mabel Winter, wrote in the tone of nineteenth-century British colonial administrators: “The Moroccan will always let you believe you got a good bargain.” He misses nothing, they warn, from the wear on a wedding band to the state of your teeth, the roughness of your hands, and the slightest display of vanity, shyness, or nerves. The Winters advise us to always seem bored during bargaining, and describe tricks the salesman will play.
He will give you lightning-fast answers to questions, and will “make the injured spaniel look” to a wife. He will say, “OK, give me a price,” an attempt to elicit information that you must never answer. Instead, you should examine the object under discussion and say, “No you give me a price. It’s not worth bargaining for.” When he gives that price, just smile. His hands will fly up, he will look shocked and disappointed, but if he continues, the game is on.
They conclude:
While Tangier tradesmen make every effort to keep prices high, it is sometimes necessary to decrease them on short notice. Two seconds later, to be precise. The speed at which the second and third price come down depends entirely on your awareness, your sense of humor, your battle prowess, and most important, your ability to counterattack with a fast answer. Don’t be surprised if that makes bargaining sound like warfare. It is exactly that. A war of words which the best man will win. Him, not you.
The way to test this truth, they suggest, is to try selling back what you just bought.
So much in business is evanescent. Companies rise and fall, relationships last only as long as necessary, and technology quickly becomes obsolete. And yet travel the world, and you will always find a marketplace; whether in the ancient town squares of Europe or the souks of the Middle East, you’ll find permanent structures where people gather to buy and sell. At a shadowy bend of the Rue Les Almouhades, the main artery of Tangier’s Medina, is number 66, the commercial home of Abdel Majid Rais El Fenni, or Majid for short. He was the man I had come to Tangier to see. To get to his shop, you must pass dozens of others, all targeted at the cruise ship groups who come barging through the Medina’s narrow streets several times a day. These stores all sell the same things: ceramic bowls, cigarette lighters, souvenir Fez hats and imitation silver daggers, tagine dishes, and models of camels. The owners sit outside badgering tourists to come in. The smarter ones cut deals with the tour guides to bring in their groups. But this is a high-volume, low-margin business. You may sell a lot of lighters, but by the time you’ve paid 40 percent to the guide, there isn’t much left for you.
Majid’s is an entirely different operation. The friend who referred me to him said that Majid had started out like every other peddler in the souk, but had figured out a way to rise above the competition. His guest book contains the signatures of Yves Saint Laurent and Jacques Chirac, and he has sold to rock stars and ritzy hoteliers. If you’re rich and you want a North African feel to your home, you come to Majid. He is known to interior decorators, collectors, and antiques dealers the world over, and yet he started out a street hawker. I arrived at his store soon after he had opened for the day and he ushered me to a sofa against the back wall. He lit a chunk of sandalwood, “to change the atmosphere and create nice spirits,” and settled down in a throne-like wooden chair, wreathed in smoke from the sandalwood and tobacco. Water splashed behind him in a fountain.
He is a small man with a soft, unlined face, like the inside of a calfskin purse. His eyes are nearly black and are damp, like olives bobbing in a stew. He tends to wear matching outfits: one day it’s black pants, black shirt, black waistcoat, and a circular black velvet cap like an overturned soup bowl; the next day the same but in dark green. On the day I met with him, he wore a chunk of amber the size of a Ping-Pong ball on a leather string around his neck, which he fondled with his left hand as he talked. Pinched between the forefinger and second finger of his right hand was a cigarette he had rolled himself and which he was always forgetting and having to relight.
His store, he said, “is my kingdom, where I can be myself.” Along the walls are cabinets, lit from inside, displaying ornate silverware, coral, and amber beads from all across North and Saharan Africa. There is a tiled fountain at the center of the main floor, surrounded by stacks of colorful blankets and rugs, silk shirts and dresses, and beautifully inlaid wooden mirrors and glass lamps. The shop has two more stories, all beautifully clean, whitewashed, tiled, and decorated with carpets and furniture, leading up to a roof garden with a view over the Medina.
Majid grew up in a village in northern Morocco. His grandfather and uncle were both tradesmen and he remembers fabric dealers coming to his house when he was a child. Typical was a portly man who would settle down beneath a tree and start to unpack his wares. Majid’s grandfather and uncle would join him to look at the fabric and talk. The dealer would be invited to stay for dinner, and once they had eaten, the negotiation would begin. Within minutes, the dealer would stand up, shove his fabrics back into his truck, turn to Majid’s father and uncle, break wind and waft the smell into their faces, then storm off. A few days later he would be back. There would be another dinner, more shouting, arm waving, and storming off. The whole process could take days, but eventually there would be a deal. A few days later another salesman would arrive and the entire process would begin again.
“My uncle used to say that in business, you need three things,” said Majid. “The age of Noah, hundreds of years. The money of Suleyman, who dressed his slaves in gold. And the patience of Dawud, David.”
Majid’s father was an artisan who made kaftans and leather goods and sold them at a stall in Fez. When the competition in Fez grew too stiff in the mid-1960s, as tourists began arriving in Morocco, he moved up to Tangier. In 1965, at the age of fourteen, Majid opened his first store, next to his father’s in the Kasbah of Tangier, selling sheepskin jackets and other trinkets to the hippies passing through town. “I had this big Afro and the tourists liked to pinch my cheeks. I was a salesman kid. Every shop around me sold the same thing, so I was just another of those kids saying ‘come and look at my shop, come and look at my shop’ to everyone who passed by. But by today’s standards, we weren’t aggressive. If a tourist passed my shop, I didn’t follow them and tug their sleeve. Everyone was very clear about territories.”
This isn’t to say he was an angel. “I looked innocent then, and I did a few tricks to make a little more money. There was this Englishman who stank of gin who wanted to buy leather. I put up with the smell of his breath because I wanted to sell. He wanted black leather. I had it in sheepskin and goatskin. If I sold him the goat, I would make only five dirham in profit. If I sold him sheep, I made twenty dirham profit. The sheep was cheaper, but had a much better margin. He wanted to buy the goat, but for the lower price of the sheep, which would have left me with nothing. So when I sold it, I just switched the goat for the sheepskin. The next day, he came back and said the leather wasn’t the one he wanted. I told him that for another five dirham, he could have the goat. Then I rolled up the sheepskin and gave it back to him. The next day, he came back again and ordered two coffees and told me he was going to keep the leather, but he wanted me to show him how I fooled him. So I did. I showed him how I stashed the sheepskin behind my knee as I bent down to roll up the goatskin and then at the last minute switched them to give him the leather that made more money for me.”
The more time he spent in the Kasbah, the more Majid realized he wanted to be more than just another peddler hassling tourists. So he decided to educate himself. He traveled to Mali and Mauretania to meet up with the great caravans of traders who trek through the western Sahara. He learned to buy and polish amber and taught himself about silverware and ivory. “Anywhere I heard there was something interesting, I’d go.”
His travels taught him not only about objects, but also about value. “The salesman in Tangier is living in a cave,” he said. “One salesman up the road sells wallets for a certain price, so you sell them for a lower one.” Majid discovered that he did not have to accept this race to the bottom. With different products, he could set and manipulate prices in a very different way. After many visits to the amber traders of the Sahara, Majid came to perceive the difference between their prices and the prices acceptable to European and Middle Eastern clients. He realized he could make his own market by buying all the amber he could afford when prices were low, polishing it, storing it, and controlling supply.
]“What makes me different from others is that there is a story behind every object in my window,” he said. “I never studied beautiful things, but I studied the best of other people’s theories about beautiful things. So I know how to deal with wealthy customers, whether it’s the Rolling Stones or Catherine Deneuve or John Malkovich, Bob Dylan or Elizabeth Taylor. I remember I knew Elizabeth Taylor was coming and I brought my camera, but then I forgot to take a picture of her because I was consumed by the moment of explaining everything in my store.” Through presentation and storytelling, and understanding the desires of his customers, he could create value and set prices beyond the dreams of his neighbors in the souk.
His grasp of commerce also deepened the more he bought and sold. “You judge a good salesman when he buys. The profit is not when you sell, it’s when you buy. You make a profit the moment you buy. Only losers wait till they sell to make a profit. If I ask to look at something and you show it to me, 90 percent of the time, it’s going to be mine. I was once in the fruit market and saw a seller wearing a beautiful embroidered jacket. It was filthy, but I could see the quality. I bought it from him and the other sellers laughed because I took his pants too. Everyone is always ready to buy or sell, it’s just a question of asking. The thing that is not for sale is haram, forbidden by God.”
]Before he got married, to a Danish woman, Majid was in the habit of furnishing his home and then selling everything in it. “Now my wife gets attached to things.” But if you invite him around for dinner, beware. He has been known to buy his host’s carpets and roll them up and take them the moment the plates have been cleared.
Despite this apparent boldness, Majid has also developed a very stoic approach to selling. “You are like a beggar in sales, asking again and again all day. My father used to say that the salesman should have loose robes. You never get upset. Of course, sometimes you have customers and you want to kill them. But you’re not allowed to.”
Businesspeople often talk of the importance of humility, of serving your customers and acknowledging the fickleness of the markets. For salespeople, humility is not an option. But it is something that can be turned to their advantage.
“As a salesman, you look at everyone,” Majid told me. “You pay attention. But often customers don’t even look at salespeople. They treat them like dirt. But if you stand there and watch and listen, you can learn a lot about a customer. I tend to leave people alone to look at things. I turn the lights on, pay attention to what they’re looking at, but I don’t hassle them. The salesman who interrupts and waves his hands about has another twenty years of learning to do.”
]As we spoke, an Asian man entered the store, a camera hanging around his neck. Majid got up and turned on the lights in the cabinet next to where the man was standing. The man did not acknowledge him but kept walking through the store. Majid kept turning on the lights, but the man just kept walking through and out, looking just once at Majid, and only briefly, dismissively. Majid came back and sat down. Don’t you mind? I asked.
“Loose robes,” he said, flapping open his waistcoat. “Customers come into my store with all these stories and warnings in their heads, fears that they’re going to be ripped off. There was this American man once who came in and started looking at my things. He looked at my silver and asked ‘Is this silver?’ I said yes, and he said ‘Moroccan silver,’ meaning it was a blend of metals. He looked at another piece and asked if it was antique. I said yes. He said, ‘Made in the backyard, you mean.’ My wife was getting very upset. But it’s like fishing. When you have the fish, if you force it, you break the line. So you must let it out, bring it in, let it out, bring it in, until it gets tired. Then you just reel it in. He looked at my amber and asked ‘Is this plastic?’ I said no, ‘It’s amber.’ ‘Amber made in Hong Kong?’ he said. He was putting me down all the time and I let him until I found the moment to push back. Finally, he picked up this beautiful ivory bowl, one that had been carved by many generations of craftsmen, and he started shaking it. So I took him by the wrist and removed the object from his hand and held it up to the light. ‘You mishandled this piece,’ I told him. I explained its history, and he realized how stupid he had been. He said he was sorry, and I told him it was OK. He didn’t know. He felt ashamed. And that night he went to dinner with some people here in Tangier who told him of my reputation. The next day, he came by. Yesterday he was a wild horse. Today, he wants to be ridden, and I ride him. Whatever I say is now correct. He bought some impressive silver bracelets. If I hadn’t had the patience, I’d have lost a good fish. I didn’t use force, I used my head.”
Majid’s loose robes are a form of resilience, an essential trait for salespeople, and for any of us who hope to succeed in life. It is the ability to maintain an emotional equilibrium in the face of bad events. Rudyard Kipling describes it in his poem “If” as the ability to “meet with triumph and disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.” We see resilience in those who survived the Holocaust and went on to live rich, productive lives. But we also see it in anyone who survives each day hearing “no” more often than “yes.”
The good news from psychologists is that resilience is far more common than previously thought, and we are starting to understand how it is developed. Early studies of soldiers who suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) led us to believe that certain grim events led inevitably to psychological trauma. New research, however, suggests that this was an exaggerated view. In focusing on those soldiers who did suffer PTSD, researchers had ignored the majority who did not, or who were at least capable of moving on quickly with their lives despite the appalling things they had seen and suffered. We are much more resilient than we thought. We do not all need to “work through” our problems with a psychologist or “reach closure” on every bad thing that befalls us. Many of us can put those bad events in perspective ourselves, count our blessings, and move on.
George Bonnano, a psychologist at Columbia University, has written that various factors can produce resilience: a supportive family and good friends; the experience of hardship or bad luck in childhood; and not being neurotic. Alone or in combination, these factors produce a trait that Bonnano calls “hardiness,” similar to what we see in plants that can endure the traumas of harsh pruning or brutal winters and yet flower every spring. In humans, he describes resilience as “being committed to finding a meaningful purpose in life, the belief that one can influence one’s surroundings and the outcome of events, and the belief that one can learn and grow from both positive and negative life experiences.” Majid has this trait in spades, however blithely he flicks at his lapels, calling it just “loose robes.” We will see it repeatedly among great salespeople, this acceptance of rejection and failure as essential to building the muscles necessary for eventual success. They do not avoid rejection, but see it as a vaccine that strengthens their ability to resist the personal battering inevitable in a life in sales.
All around him in the Kasbah, you used to see salesmen using force. It was the traditional way of doing things, until it reached such a pitch that tourists started to avoid Morocco. According to Majid, the low point came when a wealthy American developer visited Marrakech at the invitation of the previous king. Like every