When I teach salespeople how to sell, I always start with a controversial introduction. It consists of several steps focused on understanding people. At first it doesn’t seem to have much to do with sales techniques, but it is the foundation for understanding people, whether we are talking about potential buyers, friends or people in general.
The first step is to completely tear down the world people believe they live in. The second is to show them that they are not as clever as they think, just as the customers they are going to visit are not as rational as they think. And the third is to show them that they have more potential than they could ever imagine.
All of us, without exception, are driven by the same instincts.
We are all driven by anger, revenge, ambition, fear and sex. A very religious person, or someone who believes in karma, might think they are free of the desire for revenge, but they are not. Saying “God will punish him for what he did” is basically the desire for revenge, just subcontracted to the Almighty.
That is why one of my first mentors used to say that “people are not rational, and if you treat them as if they were, you will be making a mistake.”
Some will find those words disrespectful, but I could irritate practically any reader just by criticising their religion, their political party or their football team. And that doesn’t make you more rational; it makes you weaker. It is a weakness we will leave aside in a sales meeting, but we will use it to our advantage whenever we find it convenient and worthwhile.
Numerous studies have shown that, as a rule, our decisions are based on instincts and emotions, with a very small share of reasoning.
Not being aware of all the biases that make you the person you are is what puts you at a disadvantage against someone who knows them.
How can you get to know people?
You will never be able to know people in their natural habitat, beyond the instincts mentioned above. A couple married for 20 years don’t really get to know each other until they separate. From that moment on, both can show their true selves and act in ways that would have been unthinkable until then. The question would be: are they really like that, or is it the situation that has turned them into what they are now?
A couple who promised each other eternal love could not foresee that she would leave him as soon as he lost his job. Until then, it was very hard to know that she had married him only for financial status, and not because she wanted to be with him for better or for worse.
You will never know a person until you see them under pressure. It is very easy to hold your course on a calm sea, but when pressure appears, our real decisions come to the surface, driven by ego and the survival instinct. And by fear, too. That is why companies hire an excellent manager when things are going well, but when difficulties arrive, you see what kind of manager they really are, because when a company is doing well, even an idiot can run it.
The human being
Humans are the most dangerous predator in the animal kingdom, because they are the only ones that kill not to eat or to survive. They are capable of killing purely for fun.
This killer instinct is the same one that shows up in our professional careers, and that is why there is a high probability that most of the people who work at your company would be quite capable of stabbing you in the back, for several reasons:
- For the simple sake of stabbing you in the back. Fun, envy, anger, revenge…
- Out of survival instinct. If I bring you down, I go up. Ambition, or fear of the competition.
Everyone can be bribed. You too
We can all be bribed. It’s a question of working out the price at which we would let ourselves be bribed. Believing that you can’t be bribed actually makes your price lower. Don’t agree? That’s because you haven’t stopped to think about what a bribe really is.
There is probably someone in the world who couldn’t be bribed. Their profile would be that of a rich person with no family, no friends and no love for life or for the world.
Bribes are not only about ambition, although ambition is behind 90% of them. For example:
- Doing something unethical out of fear of being fired, when you need that paycheck to put food on the table.
- Doing something to improve your family’s well-being. For example: “Let me build five more floors than the permit allows and I’ll hire your daughter.”
And my favourite: if your child were ill, and a company had the cure for that illness, but you couldn’t afford it because it cost millions of euros, and someone told you they would get you that cure if you simply signed a paper rezoning some land for development… would you do it? You don’t need to answer. I know the answer.
But you don’t need such extreme cases, because as a rule, someone who can’t be bribed for €10,000 can be bribed for €500,000. The fact that many other people have not been charged with bribery in Spain (and in part of the world) is because they have never been in a strategic position to be bribed. Ironically, others are not charged with bribery because the person responsible for charging them has probably been bribed.
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln
Everyone says they couldn’t kill, but…
I’ll be brief on this point. In a hypothetical world ruled by chaos, where the survival instinct prevailed, if you were the only thing standing between my children’s food and me, putting their lives at risk, I’m very sorry, but consider yourself dead. I heard this example in a film, and it sums up a reality perfectly.
But is there any clue about how to really know people?
Setting extremes aside, there is a line attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that goes something like this:
You can easily judge a man’s character by the way he treats people who can do nothing for him.
It is very easy to laugh when we are having fun, to love someone when that person is giving us fantastic sex, and even to give money to someone when we have money to spare.
Would you stay with your partner if an accident left them in a wheelchair for life? Would you put up a person who has lost everything in your home for a few days, knowing they will probably never be able to return the favour?
But above all, we can tell what people are like by the way they treat a waiter or a receptionist. When I meet a client for lunch, I know what kind of person I have in front of me from the way they treat the staff in a restaurant or café. Their manners tell me everything about them.
Above all, listen to people, whether they are clients, friends or partners. I promise you that they are constantly telling us what they are like, because if you let them talk, they will tell you what their values, worries and aspirations are.
The problem is that we don’t listen to what they tell us, but to what we want to hear.
I always give the same example: “When your partner cheats on you, they have sent you more than 50 signals that they are cheating, but you fooled yourself so as not to see them, so as not to break your false world of happiness.”
The business world is exactly the same: when a client switches suppliers, they have been sending you signals that something wasn’t right, and you should have seen those signals.
In short: now that we’ve explained how human beings work, expect anything from anyone until, over time, they prove otherwise. You can’t control what others are like, but you can control what you are like. So always be honest, work ethically and never do something expecting the favour to be returned, because you will be disappointed many times. Do it because you want to.
But don’t forget that we are still in the jungle, and that we are even more animal than the animals themselves. In this jungle of life, or of work, you will have to be ready to bare your claws and fight without giving up. When things get ugly, sometimes it is a matter of eat or be eaten. And in that battle you must give no quarter, whether we are talking about a sales career or the business world.
As I always say: “In a world of cats, the lion always wins, but in a world of lions, a cat will never win. And both animals are driven by the same instincts.”
Further reading
- 10 life lessons that go against popular belief
- 26 lessons to prepare your child for the real world
- Resilience: keys to success when things get tough
Featured image: Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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