Leave Your Rolex and Some of Your Perfection at Home

Are you ready for another contrarian tip about successful sales negotiations?

A prior article suggested that you introduce a slight stammer or hesitation into your conversation with a prospect.

This article tells you why.  If you agree with what you’re about to read, you’ll never want to look too good again.

At risk of referring to Jim Camp a little too often in recent posts, I have to do so one more time here. The guy’s work provides a diamond mine of great and unconventional ideas about selling.

Vanity, Vanity. Too Much Vanity.

In the old school where I learned to sell, sales managers told me to learn my sale pitch, rehearse it into a voice recorder till I had it perfect.

They told me to get myself pumped up to deliver my pitch with energy, enthusiasm and conviction. They taught me to practice presenting myself as flawlessly as I could.

IBMers always wore suits and white shirts in those days, too.

In the software industry where I work, I lots of young sales people have achieved great success early in their careers.

Many show up for a meetings with customers wearing a Rolex or some other expensive watch and a fine Italian suit or other high-end clothes.

They carry an expensive pen, write in a fine leather portfolio, and drive their Porsche, BMW or Audio to local sales calls.

A Little Less Perfection, Please

Granted, in some industries it’s important for sales people to look successful.

But whenever you’re negotiating, it’s even more important for you to wear your imperfection on your sleeve.

That doesn’t mean you should trot out some flaws to display only when you’re ready to discuss business terms. You’re always negotiating when you communicate with a prospect or customer, so you need to show some imperfection all the time.

The more attractive and successful you look to a customer, the harder you have to work at cultivating this skill.

Why Display Your Flaws?

Jim Camp says all negotiations are 100 percent emotional until a contract is signed and the delivery or implementation begins.

This may be a little hard to accept at first, but let’s keep going. We’ll come back to it in a future article.

The key point here is that your display of perfection can make your prospect or customer feel less perfect, and their discomfort with you will work to your disadvantage. You want your customer always to feel at ease with you and somewhat superior.

You should never look incompetent or buffoonish. But you must always look human and flawed.

When You’re Too ‘OK,’ Your Customer Feels Less So

A best-selling book called I’m OK, You’re OK introduced the idea of Transactional Analysis to popular psychology in the early 1970s.

Its author, Dr. Thomas Harris, explains the notion that we all tend to behave in a manner consistent with any of three behavioral roles that we learned in early childhood. The roles are the Parent, the Child, and the Adult.

Regardless of our age, he says, we shift from role to role throughout each day. Most of us do so unconsciously.

With each shift in our role comes an important shift of emotions. For example, when we’re an adult and feel we’ve been treated like a child, we react with anger, frustration or resentment.

This is one reason why so many family reunions during the holidays tend to go badly. The slightest misstep can make you feeling like a child or a parent, with all the emotional baggage that comes with the role.

In every transactions, communication or exchange with another person, Thomas says, we send and receive signals that indicate any of three relationships:

• I’m OK and you’re not OK.
• You’re OK and I’m not OK.
• I’m OK and you’re OK.

Without going further down the path of Transactional Analysis, let’s just register the point that you always want your customer or prospect to feel “more OK” than you appear to be.

Think Columbo

Do you remember Lieutenant Columbo, the Los Angeles homicide detective who Peter Falk portrayed brilliantly on American television from 1968 to 2003?

Columbo, whose first name was never revealed in all those 35 years, wore a trademark rumpled trench coat. Peter Falk the actor has a glass eye that looks naturally crossed.

He often cocks his head slightly because of the glass eye, and he talks with a raspy voice.

Falk cultivated a disheveled appearance and a sloppy manner by digging through his pockets for notes, only to come up with a grocery list. He’d ask another character to borrow a pencil.

At a key point in a conversation with a suspect, he’d be distracted by something that appears in the corner of his good eye.

Columbo drove a beat-up Peugeot 403 Cabriolet convertible from about 1959. His wristwatch was probably a fifteen-dollar Timex, and it probably ran a little off the correct time.

Columbo used these techniques to make his adversaries feel unthreatened and superior. That’s when he gathered his most useful information.

Despite all this imperfection, and largely because if it, Columbo was an enormously successful detective.

How to Look Less OK Without Losing Their Confidence

I’m not suggesting you take your act quite as far as Peter Falk took his.

Even so, the possibilities for looking less OK are truly endless. The only caution is not to choose any that will make you look truly incompetent or untrustworthy.

You can forget your business cards. You can be sure your pen is out of ink when you go to use it. You can leave your nice portfolio at home so you have to borrow paper to take notes.

Maybe you can “lose” something else you wanted for the meeting. Put a funny typo in your PowerPoint presentation. Maybe you can wear socks that don’t quite match, or your necktie is a little too long or too short.

Or — as I originally suggested — you can fumble and stammer a little before you ask an important question.

The important thing, as always, is preparation.

So be prepared to appear less OK.

Stay fresh.

– Scott Silverback