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Other essays in this series:

A Peddler's Tale

The First Rule of Selling

This essay is part of a book I'm writing on sales. I can't tell you when or if this will be published in book form, but I thought you might enjoy watching it emerge in real-time.

It's not that there aren't a trillion books out there on selling. There are (well, certainly hundreds). So if you're thinking about jumping to another page because you're pretty sure you've read everything there is on sales, I understand. But having been at selling and teaching others to sell for nearly 25 years, I've convinced myself that I have something useful to say on the topic, particularly if you're new to selling.

This is the third chapter I've posted. 

When Harry Meets Sally For the Very First Time

 

Lesson x: You’re afraid they won’t buy, and they’re afraid they will. Dealing with that dynamic will deliver a happy outcome 95% of the time.

Lesson x: The all around winning strategy when initiating a sales conversation with a stranger, is to turn the inevitable transaction dynamic on its head. Pick the Not OK position on purpose.

As I have already mentioned, my first outbound sales job was working for a consulting firm. I was hired to do “business development,” a euphemism for cold-calling twenty five small businesses a day, trying to persuade the business owner to come to a workshop on making his or her business more successful. Since then I’ve learned a lot about small business and have run a few myself. But back then, I knew almost nothing about how a small business worked, what a business owner thought about, what challenges he or she faced, and most importantly, how, what, and why he or she bought. All I knew was that I was supposed to walk through the door dressed in a dark suit, stick out my business card, and ask to see the owner or manager.

“Hi, is the owner or manager here?”

If you’ve never done walk-in cold calling, you’ve really missed something. People don’t want to see you. They don’t even want you coming through the door as evidenced by the “no solicitor” signs and the hostile reception you almost always get from whomever you meet first.

During the four months I did the job, I had dogs chase me. I had people slam doors on me. Some people swore at me. I heard “go away” more times than I can remember. And I heard plenty of flat out lies.

“Nope, he’s not here!”

Don’t hear any of that as a complaint. It’s not like I was special; it just goes with the territory. Actually, I am complaining. I hated every minute of it. In fact, most salespeople I know would rather have a root canal than spend a day cold-calling.

Somewhere in the midst of my sixteen week immersion into the joys of rejection the most remarkable thing happened. I was cold-calling my way down yet another street wondering at the misery that had befallen me. As I approached an intersection I saw one of my fellow cold-callers crossing the other way. Even from a distance I could see he was having a great day and I found myself hoping it was something that wasn’t illegal or illicit that was putting a hop in his step, because I sure was feeling I could use some too.

I called out to him and the conversation went something like this.

Him: “The other day I was feeling sick as a dog. I made about ten calls and they were all terrible. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore so I went home to bed.”

Me: “I know how that feels.”

Him: “So today, I decided to go back to all the places I called on that day.”

Me: “Uh, huh.” You have to imagine the skepticism in my tone.

Him: “So I’ve been walking in and saying, ‘I was in here the other day. I wonder if I can ask you a favor. I was feeling really ill that day and I’m afraid I wasted your time because I did such a poor job describing what my company offers. What I wanted to ask is if you’d let me try my presentation again. You don’t have to buy a thing, but I would at least like you to see the presentation done properly.’”

Me: “And??????”

Him: “I’ve gone six for six. Six presentations, six sales [if you’ve read “The Peddler’s Tale” elsewhere, you know that a sale at this point was an appointment set, but for the purpose of the narrative, “sale” is accurate enough.]

Needless to say I was stunned. Six for six. Six presentations, six orders. How did he do it?

It wasn’t until some years later, and after much reading and reflection, that I realized that I had just learned the rule of OK/Not OK, one of the most important insights into selling that anyone can learn.

Ok Not Ok

The concept of Ok/Not Ok comes from transactional analysis, a psychological framework first put forward by Eric Berne who laid out his thinking in a book called Games People Play—one of the first books to popularize academic theories about psychological health.

Berne’s contribution to psychology was to turn Freudian thinking upside down—no small thing given that Freud’s framework dominated the field at the time. Freud saw the world as centered on the individual. Other people were a sideshow when it came to mental health: They were nothing more than one’s “object relations.” In other words, all the action was inside and the only way to fix someone—a term psychologists generally deplore—is through psychoanalysis. Thus the popular image of the patient on the couch and the shrink sitting nearby asking about what happened with mom.

Berne saw things differently, becoming convinced that understanding how people relate to or transact with others was the missing key to analysis. Instead of asking a subject about him or herself, the analyst would seek to understand the problems simply by watching the words and dynamics that surface in a transaction between the subject and the people he or she interacted with.

As you might expect, Berne points out that these transactions have a way of repeating themselves, varying only in detail even though the people change. For example, you might interact in exactly the same way with your sister as you do with some salesperson that just walked through the door even though the two people have nothing to do with each other. But something triggers a familiar pattern and you just play out your side even though you may never have met this person before.

Berne called these repeating transaction patterns the “games people play.” These patterns get laid down and stored in childhood, and keep looping and looping, playing and playing like a song you can’t get out of your head. As self-destructive as they might be, they form a comforting and familiar shield that absolves us of the need to confront unresolved psychological issues.

Dr. Thomas Harris was a protégé of Berne’s who took Berne a step further. Instead of looking at the games we play, Harris focused on the inner mental tapes that drive the external transactions. He saw these as three competing internal voices that speak to us all the time in the form of archetypal characters: the Parent, the Adult and the Child. He called this the PAC framework. We’ll look at this later.

Harris’s book became a landmark of sorts. I'm OK-You're OK, which was first published in the late 1960’s, was one of those books that everyone seemed to be reading when it came out. In fact, it is fair to say the book was one of the early pillars of the pop-psychology movement. It has sold over 10 million copies which puts it in rare company. Over time, it like so much else from that era faded from view. But that doesn’t mean that what Berne and Harris put forward isn’t useful.

OK, Not-Ok Meets Selling

From what I can tell, neither Berne nor Harris had even the slightest interest in sales or selling. But their focus on understanding the dynamics behind human transactions provides tantalizing insights into what happens when a sales person meets a prospect for the first time.

Start with a simple thought, that there are two basic postures or positions: OK and Not OK; feeling good about what’s going on and not feeling good about what’s going on.

There are several important conclusions or rules that we can draw from that simple insight.

Rule 1: Most of us, most of the time would rather be “OK”

Leaving aside all the possible ways to grade levels of happiness, I think we can all agree that reasonably normal, mentally healthy people are mostly happy and would rather stay that way. We can deal with some stress, but we don’t want a lot. We can handle set-backs when we have to, but prefer not to if we don’t. We avoid fights and arguments unless we can’t. We’d rather laugh than cry. That sort of thing. It’s probably more complex than this, but for our purposes, this is close enough.

There are exceptions to this and every rule. If you give it a moment, you can probably name at least three people who only seem happy when they’re miserable. And if for some reason things seem to be going along decently well, they’ll do something to sabotage what you and I might regard as an agreeable state of affairs. It’s not that they do this consciously. It’s just that they have some seriously warped tapes that cause them to distrust happiness.

You can do what you want about those sorts of people, but I stay as far away from them as I can. They’ll drain the life energy out of you and leave you limp before you know it. If you like those sorts of people you should seriously consider becoming a psychiatrist. It takes more education than working in sales, but you’re much more likely to get paid for dealing with those unhappy people.

But mostly people would rather be OK. It feels better feeling good.

Rule 2: We all flip between OK and Not OK

As much as we’d like to stay positive and upbeat, things happen. Some of those things seem especially good. Some don’t matter one way or another. Some really bother us.

When you get bothered, what happens? I find that as I’ve gotten older and maybe wiser, lots of things that bothered me before don’t. But other things do. Does that make me good, bad, better? No. It just means I’m different than I was, and maybe different from you. Not better, just different. Just like you’re different in that regard from the people you know.

But what makes us similar is the fact that we all have some limit past which we’re going to flip out of a normal, decently-OK state.

For some people, this flipping from OK to Not OK happens infrequently. Other people behave like emotional ping pong balls and cover miles of psychological real estate before lunch. What’s important to remember if you come into contact with someone who is firmly into the Not OK position is that the their “Not OK” is all about them, not you. In other words, it’s their tapes that are playing in the background that are causing the move into Not OK. The thing that set them off is only a trigger. The move to OK comes from inside.

This is an important point to remember. People flip back and forth between OK and Not OK just because they’re people, and that’s what people do.

Rule 3: Most people will do whatever it takes to return to OK as quickly as possible

Assuming you have decent mental health, you’d rather be OK, and you’ll do what it takes to get back to that state as quickly and as easily as possible. Quick and easy are relative terms, and there are times when wallowing in self-pity feels very satisfying. But mostly we look for ways to bounce back. Our systems are tuned to handle a certain amount of stress, and feelings of Not OK qualify as stress. When we exceed that limit by too much or too long, our system begins to seek balance.

From a purely metaphysical standpoint, the path to true peace and happiness takes us on an inner journey. I can’t think of an eastern or western spiritual tradition that isn’t built on that idea. At some level we all know this, and depending on your preferences, you may put that knowledge into action through prayer, meditation, yoga, tai chi, reading spiritual works, and so on.

But there are other ways of dealing with feelings of Not OK besides the inner journey. Some of the more socially acceptable are exercise, eating, and sex. Or you might like to go to scary movies. Or go bungee jumping or some other type of thrill seeking.

Further down the scale of stress relievers are alcohol or drug abuse. Way out at the other end you can release your extreme feelings of No OK through various forms of pathological and anti-social behavior. Despite what you may think personally about each of these, they are all psychologically recognized mechanisms for releasing stress and feelings of Not OK and for bringing a person back to some sort of emotional equilibrium.

One of the overlooked balancing mechanisms is the distinctly human tendency to use comparison to others as a way of creating personal validation and therefore feelings of OK. In other words, we work our way back from Not OK to OK at the real or imagined expense of someone else. Seem harsh? Think about it.

When you’re feeling stressed out and angry, do you ever find yourself taking it out on someone else? Sure you do. And maybe you even feel guilty afterwards, but deep down in side, what was happening? By venting your emotions, you released the stress. That feels better. By making that person feel Not OK, deep down inside, you validated that at least at that moment, and in comparison to that person, you were OK.

Here’s another example. When I was growing up I used to watch The Three Stooges every Saturday morning. Why? They were funny? Why? Because for 30 minutes a week I knew for certain that I was more OK than Curly, Moe, and Larry (or Shemp). The same was true with Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote. Every time Wiley got slammed by a falling piano or run over by a train, we all laughed until we cried. At that moment, we knew there was someone else less OK than we were. Even if it was a cartoon.

Here’s a third example. Why do people read People Magazine, or US, or any of the gossip tabloids? Same reason. We just love to cluck-cluck about the latest gaffe, screw up, box office bomb, legal dust up, or marital disaster that has befallen some big star. That even those blessed with supernatural beauty and obscene amounts of money can still act gallactically dumb is a terrific source of personal validation. At that moment, we can happily remind ourselves that we are more OK than Michael, Britney, or whomever.

Nature wants balance. We want to be OK. But sometimes we aren’t. Lacking some other mechanism to rescue us from feeling Not OK, we use our interactions with others as a way back to OK. We compare ourselves to others who have it worse than we do and we secretly feel good. We also dump on people as a mechanism to put them in a place less OK than we are. Both create a kind of balance that may look sick from out here, but works surprisingly well in here.

Rule 4: When two strangers transact, one side picks either OK or Not OK, the other side gets what’s left over

Sales interactions between two strangers—the standard situation in cold-calling—are classic OK/Not OK transactions. In my experience, one of you picks one of the positions, and the other gets left with the other.

This can be a hard notion to accept. Why does it have to be a zero sum game? Why can’t both people be OK? The answer is that they can be, but aren’t typically when the transaction begins.

The key here is the concept of “stranger.” Feeling OK when you’re around a friend or family member is one thing. But a stranger? We’re genetically encoded to fear strangers. The presence of an unknown person automatically activates deeply engrained feelings of fight or flight. People who didn’t get coded this way didn’t pass on their genetic material.

This genetic coding is reinforced from an early age by our parents with their words—“don’t talk to strangers”—and their deeds when they moved between us and unknown adults walking towards us or otherwise physically interceded when something felt wrong.

So the default transaction setting for the person being approached by a stranger is: Not OK.

So why don’t both sides pick Not OK? Well, they certainly can, but if they do, they probably won’t have much of a transaction. Think about it? If neither one of us trusts the other one, we’re not going to spend a lot of time talking. In fact, we might even avoid that possibility completely. That would certainly be true of a sales person. If cold-calling makes you excessively Not OK, you just won’t do it.

So there’s a subtlety here that helps us understand what goes on in sales: One side picks OK or Not OK, the other side gets the other.

Go back to the story of the young salesman walking into a small business, holding out his business card and saying, “Hi, is the owner or manager in?” Now add all the visual clues to your picture.

• Dark gray suit.

• Dark striped tie.

• White shirt

• Dark, over the calf socks

• Cap toe or Wing Tip shores (favored by bankers and officials of the court)

• Briefcase (I wonder what’s in there)

• Dress watch

In the 1980s, that was surely the prescribed attire on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, or the financial district in any big city you care to name. In fact, you were distinctly out of place in one of the big glass buildings if you weren’t dressed that way. But over on Main Street at Polly’s Flower Shop it was very threatening.

When discussing these ideas with a group of salespeople, I’ll usually ask right about now, “So which position did my employer pick for me? OK or Not OK?”

Depending on the person, they might say “Not OK” focusing on the stress and tension they knew I was feeling. Yes, it’s true. I felt massively Not OK. But that’s the wrong answer.

Now put yourself in the shoes of the small business owner and answer the question again. “Which position did my employer pick for me? OK or Not OK?” Or to put it another way. “Whom did the small business owner see walking through the door? Mr. OK or Mr. Not OK?”

The answer is Mr. OK. I was James Bond. I was the master of the universe. I was completely kitted out to impress, intimidate, and overwhelm with my downtown attire, secret agent briefcase, and steely gaze. All I needed was the hidden dagger, gold coins, and a Minox camera and I was all set.

The positioning made sense to my employer who wanted to project an image of executive credibility and blue chip stability. So in the door walked Mr. OK as evidenced by the presentation and demeanor. “Hi, is the owner or manager in?”

But where did that same “executive credibility and blue chip stability” leave the small business owner? Intuitively it just makes sense that at the very least they were suspicious—a definitely sign of Not OK. Some were downright hostile. More Not OK.

So now review what we have so far: 

That’s right, the quickest way back to OK was at my expense. By shooting me down, by making Mr. OK leave a failure—after all, I came there to sell something and I had obviously not done that—the prospect made me Not OK, thus creating emotional room for him or her to return to the OK position.

I made them feel bad

They made me feel bad.

I left.

They felt good about defeating yet another evil salesperson.

Does that feel severe? Then you’ve never done any cold-calling. If you don’t believe me, do an OK/ Not OK check next time a phone solicitor interrupts your dinner. How do you feel now? Still OK? And what do you say after you’ve slammed the phone down on that poor $8.00 an hour salesperson trying to pay her mortgage. Pity? Or do you give voice to your righteous indignation at being interrupted while secretly feeling better that you were able to reclaim mastery of your life by showing them who was boss?

I thought so.

None of this, by the way, is a comment on anyone’s mental health. Yes, some people are sufficiently secure that they simply don’t care what a person is wearing. And if you think this is about attire, you’ve missed the point. And yes, there are people who have nothing to do and are delighted to have someone to talk to. And all the other possible wrinkles besides these too.

But in the main, the approach of a stranger is cause for Not Ok unless that stranger picks the Not OK position first.

Rule 5: Pick Not OK on Purpose

So if the typical initial sales call is a transaction involving a seller trying to claim the OK position through attire or language designed to establish credentials and credibility, and a buyer feeling threatened by those same moves, what’s the alternative?

Let’s go back to the story that began this chapter.

Him: “The other day I was feeling sick as a dog. I made about ten calls and they were all terrible. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore so I went home to bed.”

Me: “I know how that feels.”

Him: “So today, I decided to go back to all the places I called on that day.”

Me: “Uh, huh.” You have to imagine the skepticism in my tone.

Him: “So I’ve been walking in and saying, ‘I was in here the other day. I wonder if I can ask you a favor. I was feeling really ill that day and I’m afraid I wasted your time because I did such a poor job describing what my company offers. What I wanted to ask is if you’d let me try my presentation again. You don’t have to buy a thing, but I would at least like you to see the presentation done properly.’”

Me: “And??????”

Him: “I’ve gone six for six. Six presentations, six sales.

What position had my friend established the second time through the door? Look at his language:

• Ask you a favor

• Feeling ill

• Wasted your time

• Poor job

• Ask

• Try again

• You don’t have to buy

• Like you to see

The man had turned himself into a walking supplication. Don’t imagine him whining or pleading. Just imagine a young fellow using language—unwittingly in this case—to concede what was not only true but desired by the business owner: Power. My friend was in effect saying, “You have the power to say yes or no to me. You know it. I know it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

Lesson X: The all around winning strategy when initiating a sales conversation with a stranger, is to turn the inevitable transaction dynamic on its head. Pick the Not OK position on purpose.

By taking the Not OK position, my friend created space for the prospect to take the OK position. In fact, he practically demanded it! It’s not so much that the prospect pitied him—though he may have—but with the threat gone, he was able to see the salesperson as a person.

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Last modified: 05/03/06