What is the relationship between the two oldest professions?
This is the third in a series about selling and seduction. Today we talk about a book by a the former “Mayflower Madam,” who ran a high-class escort service in New York City in the 1980s. In Uncensored Sales Strategies: XXX-Rated Secrets, Sydney Biddle Barrows shares sales and marketing insights from her experience as an entrepreneur in an ancient but unconventional line of business.
Dan Kennedy, Barrows’ co-author, has written many good books on sales and marketing. He is a top copywriter and a partner in Glazer-Kennedy, a company that provides direct-marketing counsel to business owners.
The book’s tagline promises “A Radical New Approach to Selling Your Customers What they Really Want – No matter What Business You’re In.” The book cover, printed to look like a porn book wrapped in plain brown paper, advises that it’s targeted at “mature sales professionals and entrepreneurs.”
Let’s get one thing out of the way fast. The authors attract your attention with suggestive language, and they try – sometimes a little too hard, in my opinion — to maintain your interest by extending the sexual metaphor throughout the book.
But it’s often a stretch to link sex to the generally businesslike ideas and examples they share. You’ll find far more sex in Shakespeare.
Tap Into the ‘Secret Desires’ of Your Customers
The chapter entitled “Seduction: Satisfying Your Customer’s Secret Desires,” makes the solid point that you should sell a memorable experience rather than a commodity. And you should manage all elements of the experience in way that doesn’t disappoint your customer, right down to the smallest detail.
In the second part of the book, “Tools and Tactics of Seductive Selling,” Barrows suggests that you be aware of the “movie” your prospects play in their mind before they contact your business. This movie is their expectation of what it will be like to do business with you.
To sell successfully, Barrows says, you need to understand what your prospects hope to get out of the experience of doing business with you.
You must consistently apply this understanding from the beginning of their purchase process to moment you deliver the final result they want or expect. If you fully understand their fears and desires, you can provide appropriate reassurances throughout your sales process.
Create Your Scenes Like a Screenwriter and Choreographer
Once you understand these essentials, Barrows suggests that you develop a “script.” The script is a document that tells your story, describes the setting, fleshes out the characters, and contains dialog. The dialog suggests specific information you will cover during your sales process and how you will say it.
Barrows’ idea of scripting an ideal sales encounter was the hardest for me to accept. I’ve sold complex, high-end capital goods for many years, often with demos that last for days and sales cycles last six to 12 months. I’m inclined to shudder at the thought of any sales behavior that appears canned or scripted.
As Barrows and Kennedy use plenty of examples to illustrate the value of following a well-choreographed sales design, it becomes clear that scripting itself isn’t likely to be the problem. Appearing to be following a script is the problem, and you can overcome it through rehearsal, good direction and some talent for acting.
The subhead “When It Feels Right, They Will Do It” introduces a brief discussion about the importance of assuring your customers on an emotional level that you will deliver the experience they’re looking for. This involves great attention to detail and careful management of all elements of their purchasing experience.
Barrows recommends that you constantly monitor your selling processes for any inconsistencies between what your customers want and the experiences you actually provide.
If you reliably deliver the products and experiences that consistently exceed expectations, she says, you will inevitably cultivate long-term customers.
Authors Demonstrate How Well Sex Sells
Barrows and Kennedy knew their first challenge was to attract your attention in a marketplace crowded with such dry titles as the classics Solution Selling and Strategic Selling. Barrows and Kennedy deserve high marks for showmanship, if not for delivering what the book cover teases you to think you might get. You may feel taken in.
The book is not so much about using sex to sell as much as it is about the artful use of illusion. The more nearly perfect illusion commands the higher price.
Illusion, Deceit and Showmanship
Barrows does not advocate deceit. Are excellent magicians deceitful? Everyone knows what’s going on, and we’re willing to pay for the show because we’re intrigued to watch how they do it.
Although she concedes she’s told a few white lies to enhance her illusion, Barrows is much more inclined toward euphemism and exaggeration. It’s all about maintaining the huge perceptual distinctions between a gentleman and a john, a working girl and a whore.
Like a professional magician, she builds and maintains her through rehearsal, deep understanding of human nature, a meticulously crafted environment, a careful choice of words and the artful direction of attention.
I half expect for Dan Kennedy to co-author a book on the “magic of selling” with David Copperfield or Seigfried and Roy.
Apart from Barrows’ use of suggestive examples, metaphors and word play, the author steers clear of any explicit content most readers are likely to find offensive — unless you’re put off by the very idea of her “guys” paying for the illusion of intimacy with her “girls.”
If you’ve already read a fair amount about sales and marketing, you probably won’t find as many radical or new ideas as the book cover suggests. The authors do deliver an engaging and interesting treatment of well-established principles from an unusual perspective.
In fact, most books about sales and marketing contain few deep, profound or innovative insights. With hundreds of such books already on the market, there’s simply not much new for most authors to say.
Yet many sales people, like many golfers, (and I include myself here) obsessively look for new ways to absorb and apply what we expect to be the same old stuff.
The Power of Vivid Metaphor
When you’re trying to learn a challenging sport such as golf or skiing, your instructor may say the same thing over and over again in many different ways before you get it. Often you can’t understand a key idea until a particular metaphor or mental image clicks for you. When you finally see it clearly, your new vision has the power to change your performance dramatically and almost instantly.
Maybe this book can work for you in a similar way.
It is generally well written and readable — if a little forced at times. Barrows is confident and open, with no shyness or apologies about her past. And she clearly has good business sense. You’d have to work at not liking the persona she presents.
I don’t resent that she’s used the 15 minutes of fame (or at notoriety at least) that she earned in the mid-eighties to boost a legit consulting career decades later. Her book contains solid and useful insight that many readers – especially those early in their sales and marketing careers – will find enlightening.
Artistry and the Two Oldest Professions
Kennedy notes that Barrows’ main contribution is her introduction of an element of artistry to the sales process. For me her single most impressive trait is her obsessive attention to seemingly small details that pay huge rewards by making customers feel comfortable about giving you their money.
Because most competitors routinely neglect such insights, Barrows points to many ways you can achieve dramatic differentiation without a great deal more cost or effort.
Much of Barrows’ and Kennedy’s advice is likely to be more useful to business owners than to individual sales people. While you can always work toward better control of your own behavior, you may not be able to influence the way your company answers its phones or otherwise presents itself to prospects and customers.
Secrets of Superior Performance
Kennedy’s chapter on sales professionalism is strong. After noting the huge income gap between the most professional and the “mediocre majority” of sales people, he observes that elite sales people have often overcome more handicaps than their mediocre counterparts. Having paid bigger dues to develop their skills earlier in their careers, the top performers often maintain their success with less work.
“They earn so much more,” Kennedy says, “because they make themselves into consummate professionals, go about their business with a commitment to professionalism, and present themselves to their clientele as a pro.” As a result, they get better access and more acceptance, trust, respect, appreciation and referrals.
I don’t know a single salesperson who wouldn’t benefit from reading that chapter once a year.
The book also contains chapters or sidebars by Bill Glazer, Ari Galper, Alexandria Brown and other self-promoting stars from the Glazer-Kennedy galaxy of entrepreneurs.
If you’re familiar with Dan Kennedy and the Glazer-Kennedy style of sales and direct marketing, you’ll recognize the good-natured schtick the authors often deliver with a wink and a nudge.
X-Rated Selling and the Feejee Mermaid
In P.T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman, the authors describe how the famous 19th century showman and circus impresario once promoted a “Feejee Mermaid” to attract crowds to his new museum. His ads showed drawings of a live, full-sized, bare-breasted beauty with flowing hair.
Ticket buyers were shocked to see a shriveled black monster less than a yard long. It looked as if it had died in terrible pain. It appeared that a very skilled taxidermist had sewn together the tail and body of a large fish, with the torso, arms and large breasts of an orangutan and the head of a baboon.
Curious crowds who had heard of the hoax continued paying the price of admission to form their own opinions. A similar fascination, not grotesque but maybe as provocative, is likely to drive sales of Barrows’ book.
For Further Insight on Related Topics
Are you interested in the details of Barrows’ escort service? If so, you’ll find more in her 1986 account Mayflower Madam, a former New York Times best-seller. The book is out of print, but used copies are available through Amazon.com.
If you’re looking for an in-depth treatment of seduction as a means of persuasion, check out The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene. More on that in a future post.
Ms. Barrows, for you and your former associates I suggest any of the books of Erving Goffman, a sociologist who studied way people present themselves to others. You might especially enjoy his book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identify.
Stay fresh.
– Scott Silverback