Stuff Matters: Genius, Risk and the Secret of Capitalism. Harry Bingham
and show drive to succeed, but they also need to sell, they need to persuade…and, the worry persists, if they need to lie, then lie they will.
My quest to understand capitalism from the inside required me to understand the selling impulse too. I needed to meet the modern day Gerry Lamberts and understand what made them tick. But I had a problem. When I met senior CEOs and entrepreneurs, I could hardly ask them, ‘Would you be prepared to lie outright to gain a sale?’ When I did broach the question of salesmanship, I got the kind of answers you might expect. A man who had chaired a major British consumer goods company told me solemnly, ‘It’s about laying out the advantages and values of your product…You can’t fool the consumer. In the end, it’s all about communication.’ And I believed him – that is, I believed that he had come to believe that. I suspect that most senior marketers at most blue chip companies believe something very similar.
But Gerry Lambert did set out to fool the consumer. It wasn’t that he wanted to lie; it was that he didn’t much care whether he did or whether he didn’t. The modern day advertiser has to live with a host of protective consumer regulations, the scrutiny of advertising watchdogs, a media waiting to pounce, and a globalized market where a scandal in one territory can quickly create havoc in another. One advertiser told me candidly that he welcomed all these advertising regulations, ‘however boring and stupid’ they might sometimes be, ‘because the nature of what we do always pushes us to the max. It makes my job more manageable – more ethically manageable – if I know that I just can’t lie, however much I might feel pushed to do so.’
In short, the carefully managed world of the modern marketer has become a bad hunting ground for the true salesman. If I wanted to find the unvarnished truth about the sales impulse – Essence of Salesmanship, free of any careful PR overlay, free of any government-imposed restriction – I needed someone whose need for good PR had long since vanished. I needed someone who didn’t care what others thought. I needed someone who was a salesman through and through and who wanted to tell me how it worked.
And that was how come I came to be in a bar outside Liverpool Street station in London with a man that I’ll simply call Tom. Tom grew up in Essex. He had wide estuary vowels, no fancy schooling, and no Oxbridge polish. In US terms, this was a kid from the wrong bit of New Jersey, not the right bit of Martha’s Vineyard. He drifted into the City of London, working in the back office of a major investment bank. Tom knew he could sell stuff. Stocks, bonds, derivatives, he didn’t care. He just knew he could sell. But the major investment bank wasn’t set up to give Essex kids without much formal education the chance to prove themselves. The major investment bank wanted Oxbridge types speaking to clients and Essex types settling the trades. Tom got bored.
He dabbled in the markets during the dot.com boom and got dot.com busted when the markets crashed. He lost his own savings and his family’s savings too. Then a chance conversation in a pub told him about a job opportunity in Madrid. He didn’t know much about it, except that the job involved selling shares. He made a call, got offered a job, was on a plane to Spain the following week.
What he encountered there was madness. He found six salesmen yelling into phones. He found a place that had a tape recording of a busy trading room on permanent playback, as a way of making clients feel that they were dealing with a huge organization. He found a place where the chief salesman had a notice above his computer that read, ‘You’re Steve Fox. You’re a broker. Be a cunt.’ Tom received five minutes of training – essentially a guy telling him to ‘flog shit’ – and he was put to work.
That work involved calling punters in the UK – ordinary individuals with some money to invest, very few of them expert in finance – and getting them to buy stock in US companies. Unlike outright criminal enterprises (so-called ‘boiler rooms’) that stock was always delivered, but the salesmen didn’t know or care whether the stock itself was sound, or whether the investment in question made sense for the individuals they were talking to. Their job was selling. Nothing else mattered. It wasn’t about stock selection, financial know-how, customer care, or even the bare minimum of business ethics. It was selling, pure and simple.
To cut a long story short, Tom was very good at his job. He quickly became the most successful salesman in the company he joined then quit to set up a super-successful company of his own. The whole thing folded when his business empire was raided by the police, though an attempted prosecution fell lamentably short of proving criminality. He’s written an account of his time on the dark side and is looking to turn his talents to more positive ends.
When I met him, I asked him what made a salesman. What was the secret of successful selling? To start with, his answer puzzled me. He said, ‘You’ve got to be a chameleon…You’ve got to be a really good listener.’ Those might sound like plausible answers when written down, but seemed thinner than smoke when spoken in person. There was, on first sight, nothing of the chameleon about Tom. He was dressed in an expensive black open-necked shirt and black trousers. If he’d had less style about him, he’d have had a heavy gold signet ring and, in another era, perhaps a medallion too. He didn’t look like a chameleon, he looked like a salesman. You’d have guessed his profession from across the room.
Likewise with the listening. On the whole, when someone claims to be a good listener we think of a therapist, or perhaps the sort of close friend to whom we can pour our heart out, confident of a sympathetic ear and a glass of wine. Tom, on the other hand, would be a terrible therapist, having neither the subtlety nor the patience. Perhaps more accurately, he wouldn’t be interested enough to do it. He simply wouldn’t have cared about someone’s feelings about their mother’s inability to cuddle or their partner’s lack of sensitivity.
And yet, for all that, he was right. Talking to Tom and reading his book is an eye-opening introduction to how selling works. A salesman’s version of ‘good listening’ is simply about identifying the route into their wallet. For some people, it was letting them think there was a bargain to be had. For one rather lonely old woman, it was simply talking to her about anything at all and making her feel befriended and cared for. For someone else, it was talking to them about Schubert, their favourite composer. For someone else, it was simply about shouting at them – literally shouting: ‘YURI!! IT’S TOM. GET A PEN AND PAPER. I’VE GOT INFORMATION THAT COULD MAKE YOU A MILLION. YURI! I’M NOT MESSING ABOUT. GET A PEN AND PAPER FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!’
What makes Tom’s accounts of these conversations so disconcerting is that he’s not playing by the normal social rules of our species. Ordinarily if someone talks to you at length about your passions and pursuits, you’ll assume that they have a genuine interest in them. Ordinarily, but not always. We’re monkeys who have evolved complex social structures and whose brains are shaped to deal with that complexity. So things aren’t always simple. Perhaps a certain sort of conversation indicates a kind of flirtation. Or an attempt to create an alliance. Or it’s leading up to a request for help. We navigate situations of this kind all day, every day, without thinking anything of it.
What’s not quite so usual in regular social intercourse is the sheer brazen nakedness of Tom’s deception. He cared nothing about that old lady. He hadn’t heard of Schubert before typing the name into Wikipedia. If Yuri had liked whispering not shouting, then Tom would have been the breathiest whisperer in the land. The outrageously goal-oriented nature of Tom’s sales tactics takes the ordinary rules of human interaction and trashes them. In the evolutionary environment of the African savannah, when humans hung out in groups that were maybe 150 strong, people like Tom couldn’t have thrived. The nakedness of his deceptions would be exposed so soon, would leave him so friendless, that he’d have had to conform, at least to an extent, with the prevailing rules.
Indeed, much of the literature of salesmanship is purposely designed to help ordinary human beings over their savannah-designed mental circuitry. Those who teach salesmanship talk about overcoming ‘sales call reluctance’. That’s sales-speak for the ordinary human shyness when it comes to promoting oneself, one’s company, or one’s product. In savannah-world, where everything that goes around comes around, where reputations are quick to form and hard to shake, we’re right to have that shyness. It’s not that we’re not taking care of our own interests all the time. Quite likely we are. But if your tribe is just 150 strong,