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 working inside a large U.S.-based organization marvels at how much time gets wasted on what he calls Empty Arguments. Empty Arguments, he observes, result in too many unfocused meetings and conversations involving too many people, and require too much follow-up and clarification.
5. How to spin a story. Scripting, editing, re-writing, getting bottlenecked on approvals, and then spinning a narrative for your audience is a really Empty Argument. As much as I abhor her politics and her prideful ignorance, Sarah Palin gets a lot of credit as an improviser. The reason she can stay relevant and a beat ahead of the news cycles is that, unlike John McCain and most other politicians, she’s not scripting or trying to spin anything, she is relating to her environment in real time, in her own authentic way. It drives the liberal news spinners crazy. (President Obama does the same to the righties.) Nosy neighbor? Build a fence! When Palin makes notes on the palm of her hand during a speech, the Ivy League-educated (I do not include Brown grads in this) grademaking machines in the liberal media try to spin it as “Doesn’t do her homework.” Palin, however, knows intuitively that 90% of the people who see this image will have it made this move themselves. We can relate. The lesson: Living your narrative is more effective than trying to live up to a narrative you’ve scripted, then convincing others to buy into it, too (see Woods, Eldrick “Tiger”).
Every business conversation that’s unscripted–and that’s about 99% of them–is an improvised scene. How ably we improvise usually determines the success of the scene. In sales, the audience for the scene is the customer, and the ultimate ‘applause’ is a sale. Furthermore, in sales scenes, the customer is not just the audience, her or she is also a player in the scene. This is important for salespeople to understand, because it means you are asking the customer to judge their own performance in your scene together. If they they give their performance in your scene a thumbs-up, chances are you’ve got yourself a sale.
My longtime friend, Gary Stratman, an engineer for 
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There is a terrible rip in the fabric of the planet. The Earth has buckled under 