It’s easy enough to see that in a selling scene, a Customer is your Audience. You, in your role as Seller (and make no mistake about it, everyone in this world sells something) need the customer/audience to support you at the boxoffice, the gift shop, the showroom, the supermarket, the website, or anywhere else you can translate their ‘applause’ into revenue. This has been true since studly village smithies were putting on a good show by hammering out horseshoes under the spreading chestnut tree. A good performance gets rewarded by the audience. Selling doesn’t get any simpler than this.
It does, however, get a lot more complex, and in a hurry. Here’s why:
In selling scenes, the customer plays two roles: Audience and Scene Partner. You, as a seller, co-create your selling scene with your customer as your scene partner. He or she will then, stepping into the role of your audience, pass judgment on your performance. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Worth the price of admission or not? Good collaboration or rocky relationship? Will you generate positive word of mouth or negative reviews? Your earnings depend on how your performance is received.
There’s no script for these scenes–at least not one your customer is going to be memorizing and reciting verbatim anytime soon. You’re going to be improvising. And this is a fact: The best salespeople are the best improvisers.
Here are some ways in which good salespeople collaborate with customers on scenes that get a thumbs-up from those same customers:
They keep their scenes lively. They keep the dialogue moving along at a productive tempo. They yes-and promptly. They heighten by upping the tempo, the emotional pitch, or both. They add useful information. They perform with the awareness that a ‘dead spot’ in the scene now will be judged harshly by the customer-as-audience later.
They make their customer the hero of the scene. An improvisational salesperson is a Sherpa to the customer with some kind of allegorical mountain to climb. The sales Sherpa has useful knowledge. Charts a practical course to the summit. Reads the weather. Calculates the odds. Comes well-equipped. The sales Sherpa gives the gift of support, and in doing so, makes the customer look good. The role of the sales Sherpa is not the same as playing a second-banana, a sidekick, a best friend, a wing man, a femme fatale or a fall guy. These are Hollywood movie roles. The sales Sherpa is exactly what the name defines: a Sherpa. It’s a Himalayan thing.
They listen. Wow, do improvisers listen. They hear things the casual listener doesn’t. They remember the nuances, and use the throw-aways. They know that the most important conversation of the day may happen on an elevator ride between the first and sixth floors before a sales presentation begins. They listen with more than their ears. They observe with all the senses. And then, maybe then…they speak. They understand that being silent and being mute are two completely different things, and that sometimes one sees more with one’s eyes closed than with them open.
They respect environment. In selling scenes, you, the seller, are usually a visiting performer in someone else’s theater. In many ways, the ‘theater’ of a customer’s company is like any other theater. Theaters have traditions and history that must be respected. They are influenced by politics and patronage and star players with competing agendas. They are invariably facing some kind of financial threat. They are only as good as their last hit, and they have ridiculously high hopes for the next project. They can be half-looney with romantic intrigue. The improvisational salesperson sees and respects the arena in which the customer operates. When performing at the Apollo, touch the Tree of Hope. When visiting Ireland, kiss the Blarney Stone.
They build relationships. Relationships are the basis of all improvisation. The relationships between players, between players and environment, and between players and audience, are all intertwined. The best way to move toward a sale, to generate positive outcomes regardless of the circumstances, is to build and nurture these relationships. Relationships will see you through the kinds of adversity, and capitalize on the opportunities, that no scripted sales program can predict or anticipate.
In selling scenes, the networked customer is a more potent player than ever. He or she often knows as much about your product as you do. Relationships with customers are frequently more sensitive, more fluid and more demanding than they were in the Industrial Age. Customers use social media to converse frequently amongst themselves in scenes to which you, the seller, are not invited. You can no longer impose your narrative on the customer, you’ve got to earn an invitation to participate in the customer’s narrative.
So be a Sherpa. Know the mountain, and your customer will see that the climb is impossible without you.
A friend of ours who works in sales gets honored often as a leading performer at his company, a large and established organization which is one of the 87 current members of the S&P 500 that have been members since its inception in 1957. The honoring happens at lavish banquets attended by the company’s top managers and featuring a pricey speaker.
Frames create focus. 
Brands who emphasize consumption contribute to obesity, both mental and physical. They represent an ever-larger drain on the planet’s resources. They introduce a lot of useless crap onto the world by manufacturing illusory needs. They associate levels of consumption with status. The biggest of this. The most of that. The hardest. The shiniest. The latest and greatest. These brands pay for the audience’s attention. Most significantly, they define the relationship between the brand and the audience using numbers.
I, Customer, am an individual. One of a kind. All my friends are one of a kind. I got my thing, you know, just like you got yours, just like everybody’s got their own. I am basically awake 24 hours a day, because I got plates in the air, you know. My homies in Bulgaria are coding some tracks we’re going to run off a honeypot server for which we are getting paid by a new label in Atlanta call Tso-Tso that does B-Boy tracks for mall shows and competitions all over the Southern U.S., Australia and the Philippines. Shit is off the hook. We get a dollar per download, and already this month we’ve made five thousand dollars. First thing in the morning, I am catching a plane to Fort Meyers to work with some friends down there who have a band and play clubs at night, and weatherize houses during the day for twenty bucks an hour. I’m producing their next album and they are paying me by getting me a job weatherizing houses for the summer. And on the weekends we take out one guy’s girlfriend’s family’s boat and party like animals. Any brand that’s down for this scene is welcome to roll with me.
This is from 
In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind. We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn. A strategy, 