Draft of opening to The Rainmaker's Laboratory
THE SALE
Salesmanship—as an art applied at the face-to-face level—is just as primitive today as it was 100 years ago. It works, but no one seems to understand quite how and why.
— The Mystique of Super Salesmanship
If we are each lead actors, dwelling in our own eccentric worlds—making beds, rowing dinghies, devouring days, craving sweets and secrets, preparing soil for a line of seeds—then in these inscrutable scenes—somewhere, sometime—who is not a salesperson? Who would not yell Jump! from a lifeboat below to a loved one left on the deck of a fast-sinking ship? Who has not coaxed a child to bed with the lure of a yarn? Traded trash for treasure, treasure for trinkets? Bartered for stakes.
Merriam Webster Dictionary defines ‘selling’ as:
1. giving or handing over (something) in exchange for money
2. persuading someone of the merits of
3. tricking or deceiving (someone)
Money. Trickery. Deceit. To sell someone a bill of goods is to make them believe a lie. To sell someone out is to commit an act of betrayal. No wonder sales have an unsavory odor.
Brian Tracy, a sales specialist, defines selling as the process of persuading a person that your product or service is of more value to him or her than the price you’re asking.
I define selling as a perversion of conversation: casting a spell, creating a little world within which logic and feeling attach to an object of desire.
As Paul Valery wrote about crime, Every sale has something of the dream about it. Sales determined to take place engender all they need: victims, circumstances, pretexts, opportunities.
A sale cannot be commanded but must be coaxed. It unfolds with the dramatic tension of a quest, an agōn, a mystery. When we make a face-to-face sale, we make something that has sequence and presence; we are makers.
This scrap of human drama is rooted in a marketplace scaled to human gestures and human voices. I say my lines; you say yours. We may haggle a bit.
As actors in live theater, we improvise our scripts, investing our tales with our hearts as we tell them. The role of my character, costumed in a smile, is to slip you product. That is the show. If I succeed, it is comedy; if I fail, tragedy. The play is as dramatic as people are canny, innocent, and wild, and is as deep as the stake of desire is driven into the hearts of the players.
The language of a sale never erodes its form. The nature of its communication is a special kind of intention designed to be recognized by the recipient. We may mime simple sales—witness the pantomime in a foreign bazaar—but salesmanship is dialogic, an oral art, and the more complex the sale, the more words matter.
Sales are vanishing acts. They happen between people, inseparable from forward motion, yet as perishing things they dissolve as they are consummated, gone as soon as they have been closed. For the career salesperson, every sale creates a void, a Sisyphean need for eternal recurrence, each sale entailing its successor, as with breath.
A sale is an event; a puzzle; a treasure hunt; a consummation; a pressure of circumstances; a communicative relationship; a method for distributing goods; a circulation system; a musical score, fully orchestrated, sung to laws beyond harmony and dissonance.
A sale swings on a hinge where things can come together or apart.
Rhythm, form, and content are the time, space, and matter of a sale.
A sale has three stages: opening, making, and closing. A simple sale compacts these into a single brief encounter, while a complex sale elongates them. A virtuoso salesperson compresses and stretches, prolongs and plays the phases like a deft accordionist.
I have a sensitive sales detector, like a Geiger counter, that ticks...ticks...ticks... when I hear sounds of selling—the whiff of a wheedle, the hum of a hustle. While the boundaries of a sale are fluid, I believe even a small child and a dog can feel when they are being sold. It is why parents put on pretend voices to disguise their intentions.
Our sale detectors malfunction when we are paranoid, a deficiency of trust triggering them inappropriately, as well as when we are naive or half asleep and fail to discern a trawling sales pitch netting us.
But there are also ambiguous cases, where “it depends” is an accurate response to the question of whether something is a sale, where context is determinative.
And there are cases we would hesitate to call sales that nonetheless contain some elements that define a sale, but one or more of them are missing, compromised, or violated.
Here is where Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances comes into play. In the Philosophical Investigations, he posits that things may be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no single feature is common to all the things.
Will it astonish you to consider how many common actions touch the act of selling? If I were to heap up a pile of verbs that have family resemblances to selling, I would include bribing, threatening, extorting, forcing, commanding, bossing, parenting a young child, advertising, marketing, begging, snake-charming, hypnotizing, arguing, gifting, bullying, teaching, educating, fishing, hunting, trapping, stealing, choosing, seducing, suggesting, advising, helping, sharing, consulting, brokering, compromising, arbitrating, debating, marketing, legislating, instructing, ministering. A plea bargain. A hostage negotiation.
Within these relationships, little acts of selling may occur, but we identify them as ‘not-sales’ because of the lack of ground for which the selling element is figure.
A sale wrapped in a threat: My father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse… either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
To call someone to dinner is a petite sale when the other person is otherwise engaged and reluctant to stop. I’m not hungry may be to refuse to buy.
When a pedophile entices a child into a car, has he made a sale?
If your argument changed my mind, have you made a sale? Does my writing itself consist of an act of selling? These questions weary me…
Everybody sells, but nobody likes being sold. A sale occurs between people, and almost always involves an ambiguity of exchange. The acts of buying and selling mingle. Is it one act or two? Did I buy or was I sold? Did I act freely or was I acted upon? Am I the subject or the object, agent or recipient, perpetrator or mark, chooser or persuaded, or an indeterminate mix. Where does my will begin, untainted by the salesman’s breath.
Up and down! Up and down! I will lead them up and down… Shakespeare’s Puck has not exactly made a sale.
Can you imagine a teacher working on commission for each bit of knowledge she sold you…
Salespeople corner their prospects the way one might say a syllogism corners a conclusion, but a syllogism is not a sale.
Selling is integral to the work of contractors and engineers, doctors and lawyers, anyone who persuades others to enact what they desire. Advising often teeters into selling. Are we not all nails to professional hammers?
Preaching is selling—and the currency is my soul…
Can buyer and seller be the same person? There is an internal scale where I weigh costs and benefits, bringing different selves to the fore, and more than once I discover I have sold myself short, the price too dear for the gain. But wrestling with my conscience, even when dialogic, does not feel exactly like a sale, nor does coming to a conclusion, which can sometimes feel like finding footing along a pirate’s plank.
Are sales only a human thing? Sometimes when I slip my dog a tidbit from my plate at the dinner table, unable to resist her entreaties, I feel as if she has made a sale, even a sucker, of me.
Little sales pepper conversations. We all sell and buy more than we realize. Circulating desire, commerce, is at the core of being alive.
As I ask these questions—which are rarely rhetorical—I also keep asking myself: Am I plowing a field, turning over earth to some purpose?