Salesmen
As we complete this series on the three types of people it takes to create an idea virus (this idea could by your business, your cause, or just a social trend) let’s take a brief look back on the first two types of people.
Connectors are the carriers in an idea virus. They have the social influence and inherent social skills to carry a message far and wide.
Mavens are the hosts of the idea virus. As information brokers, they usually DISCOVER the original idea or trend through their extensive research skills and abilities as information peddlers.
But the thing is, these two types of people are not persuaders by nature. They are merely hosts and carriers. Their role is not to convince people to accept their way of thinking.
Their roles exist only to present their ideas to help others (Mavens) and to bridge the gap between different social circles and people (Connectors).
So when an idea gets caught with skepticism or doubt within a social group, it is the Salesmen that get the idea virus spreading again.
And that’s who we are going to talk about right now: Salesmen.
First, as with natural Connectors and natural Mavens, there are undeniable, inherent skills that make Salesmen, Salesmen.
And as with Connectors and Mavens, it’s not that you can’t learn these skill sets, its just that natural Salesmen exhibit these skills effortlessly.
So what are the qualities that natural Salesmen have that make them so darn persuasive?
In “The Tipping Point,” there are a couple of eye opening case studies that attempt to give us the answer to this very question.
In the 1960’s a social scientist named William Condon spent a year and a half analyzing 4 and a half seconds of film, where a woman tells a man and child over dinner, “You all should come around every night. We never have had a dinnertime like this in months.”
His research and further study created a strain of analysis called “cultural microrhythms”.
And his results in this particular case study were fascinating. According to Condon:
“Their conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension.
Each person would, within the space of one or two or three 1/45th-of-a-second frames, move a shoulder or cheek or an eyebrow or a hand, sustain that movement, stop it, change direction, and start again.
And what’s more, those movements were perfectly in time to each person’s own words – emphasizing and underlining and elaborating on the process of articulation – so that the speaker was, in effect, dancing to his or her own speech.”
Think about that for a moment.
Dancing and psychological harmony through body language.
And further research has proven that this isn’t just the case with body language, but with spoken language as well.
You will notice it yourself the next time you speak to someone.
When 2 people talk, they naturally fall into what social scientists call “conversational rhythm,” where their cadence, pitch, and rate fall into harmony as the conversation progresses.
What does this have to do with the skills of natural Salesmen?
Natural Salesmen perform these actions on a subconscious level.
As Gladwell describes it, “What we’re talking about is a kind of super-reflex, a fundamental physiological ability of which we are barely aware. And like all specialized human traits, some people have much more mastery over this reflect than others.”
Here’s the revealing, second case study that supports this fact.
People are naturally emotionally contagious.
Put a picture of smiling children playing in the sunlight up to someone’s face and most likely they will smile as well.
Put a picture of crying, starving children up to someone’s face and chances are they will frown or furrow their eyebrows.
Along the same lines, some people are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that they are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.
Psychologists call these people “senders.” And the fact that senders are far more emotionally sensitive than non senders is actually a medical certainty, having to do with the location of their facial muscles, their form, and even in their prevalence.
To further test this fact, Howard Friedman, a psychologist at the University of California at Riverside developed what he calls the Affective Communication Test. It’s purpose was to measure this ability to send emotion, and to be contagious.
“The test is a self-administered survey, with thirteen questions relating to things like whether you can keep still when you hear good dance music, how loud your laugh is, whether you touch friends when you talk to them, how good you are at sending seductive glances, whether you like to be the center of attention.”
Then Friedman took it a step further.
He took people who scored highly on the test, and broke them off into pairs with people who did poorly on the test.
Friedman had the test subjects sit in a room, told them they couldn’t talk, and could only look at their partner’s faces.
The results were fascinating.
Within two minutes, without a word being spoken, the low scorers had adopted the moods of the high scorers.
If the charismatic person (the “sender”) was unhappy, the non sender ended up unhappy.
If the charismatic person was in a good mood, the non sender brightened up considerably.
But never the other way around.
Senders, then, are naturally persuasive because of their physiology and natural abilities.
They infect people with their persuasiveness on an almost unnoticeable and subconscious level, and in many different degrees.
And what results is that natural Salesmen pull people into THEIR rhythms, and dictate the terms of the interaction. Never the other way around.
It is a seduction of sorts that almost forces people that Salesmen speak to or interact with to fall in sync with them.
It is their natural gift.
Just as a gifted public speaker knows when a crowd is in or out of sync with her.
Just as a talented conductor can feel when one instrument, out of the dozens playing, is out of sync.
Gladwell experienced this when he visited a financial planner by the name of Tom Gau in Torrance, CA.
Despite all the research that he had done to prepare for this meeting, and despite his best efforts to repel whatever “techniques” or “sales tactics” that Gau might throw at him, Gladwell couldn’t help but find himself being drawn into a sense of comfort, genuineness, and familiarity with him, within the first few minutes of their meeting.
Again, the inherent power of Salesmen is that on some levels, they CANNOT be resisted. And in most cases, they can establish rapport and trust far quicker than non Salesmen.
And the fascinating thing?
If you are being seduced by a Salesmen you probably wouldn’t even know it was happening.
But if you taped your interaction, broke it down into micro seconds, and knew where to look, you WOULD notice your facial expressions, body shifts, and vocal intonations, sliding helplessly and surely into harmony with the Salesman’s.
Not because the Salesman was necessarily TRYING to do the Jedi Mind Trick on you (Or the NLP concept of “mirroring”), but because that’s the way they’re hardwired.
To persuade.
-James D. Lee
PS – The last thing I’ll say on this matter is this:
As Internet Marketers, we often find ourselves having to play all three of these roles.
Despite the popularity of this book, it’s definitely NOT a full proof formula for success.
However, what it DOES do is let us recognize and compartmentalize some of the different skills needed for our success.
But it’s just another lesson in our never ending quest for answers.
In fact, my Maven friend just sent me a recent article debunking “The Tipping Point” theory.
You can read it here.
But I hope you enjoyed the series.
Let me know how it resonated with you.
-J
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