Richard's blog

Yesterday I was rung by a lady from a healthcare website to offer advertising to the company I work for. She’d done her homework a bit, got past the gate-keepers by claiming she’d gotten my number from one of our reps at a recent conference. I didn’t realise when I was calling her back that she was trying to sell me something. I thought she was a clinic trying to buy our products.

Anyway, she launched into her sales spiel. The site had 175,000 users and half the doctors in Australia used it, she said. (I personally doubt the veracity of these figures, but anyhow. The website looked dodgy and devoid of interest.) She was trying to paint the picture of an opportunity for me to place articles on this popular website, at the same time as trying to close an appointment with me quite aggressively… “I’m in town on the 12th of June and I’d like to make a time to talk to you about it… how about 2.30?” She didn’t mention advertising (what she was really selling) once at all. So, perplexed by this stage as to the exact nature of the call,  I asked her straight out if the meeting was about advertising. Finally, we understood each other.  I quickly disavowed her of the notion that we would be interested and terminated the call.

I work in a company that sells, so it’s often my position to muse over the sales process. I’m sure there are whole libraries devoted to the subject. Here’s my embryonic take.

Desire in a surfeit capitalist culture is dominantly irrational. Physical hungers are largely catered for; emotional and symbolic functionalities (and increasingly whimsical ones) predominate. Desire usually precedes functional need too, which is often overlooked. I WANT a computer, and IF I want a computer then that computer needs to be fast and stylish. I WANT to look young, and IF I want to look young, my plastic surgeon needs to be the best there is. So then we come to choice. Choice is notionally rational but usually overwhelming to the point of stretching our ability to be rational, since there are so many permutations. (Back to the computer – style, OS, size, RAM, there must be literally hundreds of permutations: Apple brags that their desktop Macs have millions of possible permutations.) And thus the moment of deciding to possess a particular thing, consisting, I guess, of desire+choice, contains large amounts of irrationality and is a moment of confusion subject to further irrationality and manipulation.

My suspicion is that I (and plausibly others) regard attempts to manipulate or subvert my desire at the point of sale with intense distrust. My suspicion is this: desire is pre-formed and eminently egotistical (desire to possess – I want it to belong to ME and be MINE). Suggestive manipulation, with polished spiels and alike, presents as an affront to the ego, inasmuch as it presents a challenge to my existing desires. Your list of desires is incomplete, it says, you want what I have, not what you actually want. It affronts ego with ego because its goal is transparently avarice, rather than the empathetic satisfaction of the desires of the other. It creates a negative, combative space. Aggressive sales, therefore, is more likely to get you dis-satisfied customers or non-committal customers than spirited, willing, self-closing, brand-loving customers.

The time when zealous sales can sometimes work is when the seller successfully invokes authority. In this case, the ego of the buyer willingly concedes to the seller. But this has to take place in a context of openness and also loving-kindness. The seller confidently shares her secret with the buyer, and the buyer accepts. This happened to me in a restaurant recently. The owner suggested us an amuse-bouche to start, quite confidently, almost in the form of a secret – it was an ornate-sounding thing with fish eggs and shaved truffle. He shared it with us rather than sold it to us. He knew it was good and wanted us to have it. This is quite a different mindspace from pushy sales.

Companies create objects or services that they hope consumers will desire. They also must create, to truly succeed, a space, mental and physical, for the potential client to form a desire. The easiest way to do this is to understand desire at the conceptual stage of the project and push to match that desire. It’s remarkable how often exigencies distract from this process. In the space of desire, there are still many unfilled holes. The ideal mobile phone for instance. While perfection is asymptotic since desire is never satisfiable (whatever you are presented, desire is always elsewhere) bring on the businesses that shoot for what the consumer wants to buy, not what can merely be sold.