Hey Salesperson, Take a Breather

I watched President Obama’s Oval Office speech on June 15 concerning the eternally gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. And it reminded me of my long-held instinct about the importance of stillness to the salesman.

My feeling about this is a close corollary to my blogs on Silence and Simplicity. But the value of stillness is one more of drama than of essence.

President Obama’s speech, in addition to being vague and confusingly convoluted, was uncomfortably twitchy, and physically frenetic. It was an uneasy and distracting thing for me to watch. How ’bout you?

In the June 19 edition of the Wall Street Journal,  Peggy Noonan describes the speech thusly:

“Throughout the speech the president gestured showily, distractingly, with his hands. Politicians do this now because they’re told by media specialists that it helps them look natural. They don’t look natural; they look like Ann Bancroft gesticulating to Patty Duke in ‘The Miracle Worker.’”

When dealing with a catastrophe, people want assurance about the immediate crisis, not a hypothetically global analysis of the environment.  One way a good salesman–and Obama was a salesman for his administration last Wednesday evening–assures a client is by not overdoing it. A good salesman abjures excess fussiness and flummery. He gets to the point with cleanness and clarity. If you try to sell everything you sell nothing.

One technical example of this is Ms. Noonan’s apt description above of Obama’s excessive use of his hands. It seemed like every other word was emphasized with a hand chop. If every phrase is so emphasized, there is only a distracting mannerism with no meaning. It vitiates everything.

More is not better.

Better is to say less and say the important things with a still simplicity, especially when trying to make your client feel secure. For the salesman it’s ideal to say what’s important and then be still.  Stillness does not mean a de-energized inertia. It means a focused, quiet, rooted presence. Effective stillness comes when you are secure. It is the ideal completion of the dramatic arc of the sale.

Mark Twain once said, “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” Thanks, Mark.