To Influence Others - Listen!

In 2001 I helped launch a group called the Applied Improvisation Network, a global network of business consultants and educators who show organizations how skills and concepts derived from improvisational theater can improve their organizational performance. During several annual AIN conferences since then, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Cathy Salit, whose company, Performance of a Lifetime, consults with major corporations to help them reap the benefits that improv can offer – such as better collaboration and communication, improved adaptability to change, and more creative thinking.

I was delighted to see Cathy’s work with Performance of a Lifetime serve as the focus of an entire chapter of Dan Pink’s outstanding new book, To Sell Is Human. As I mentioned in my previous article, Pink’s basic message is: Everybody sells! That is, almost all jobs involve “moving” (i.e., influencing) others to take some sort of action, such as buying a product, supporting an initiative, contributing resources to a project, or learning and applying a new set of behaviors. And as Pink points out in his description of Cathy Salit’s work, one of the primary tools available to help move others is improvisational theater (or improv).

So how can improv help people sell? Is it all about learning to be more extraverted, to entertain people and wow them with a seamless pitch and line of patter that wins them over every time?

Hardly. As Cathy Salit notes, the true power of improv lies in a simple yet vital skill that very few people are ever taught: Listening with intense curiosity.

On the improv stage, where everything – everything – is totally made up in the moment, “listening curiously” means more than just hearing the words: It means being totally immersed in what your onstage partners are saying and doing at all times. Salit says that the performer’s job is to “take in anything and everything someone says as an offer you can do something with” in order to move the scene forward.

Similarly, a person who wants to “move” someone in a certain direction must listen intently to the other person in order to acquire valuable information about the person’s wants, needs, and motivators. But even more, says Pink, listening with curiosity will help you “quickly realize that what seem outwardly like objections are often offers in disguise.” If a person responds to your request for a $200 charitable donation by saying, “No, I can’t give $200 now,” you can hear this less as a rejection, more as a potential offer to: 1) Give $100 now, or 2) Give $200 later, or 3) Donate time rather than money, or 4) Engage in any other creative combination of solutions the two of you can collaboratively devise. Yet you can only discover and develop these options by hearing the “No” statement as an offer, being intensely curious, and jointly exploring the possibilities with the other person.

“Offers come in all shapes and sizes, “ says Salit. And, adds Pink, “the only way to hear [offers] is to change the way you listen and then change the way you respond.” And “the way you respond” is by asking powerful questions.

As I mentioned in my articles on The Tradeoff Triangle and the SCAMPER technique, asking questions greatly expands the collaborative playing field upon which two people (in this case, a seller and a buyer) can find a mutually beneficial solution.  In addition, a seller who conducts a sale by using a questioning approach – who acts as a consultant rather than a product-pusher – is more likely to create a satisfied buyer who feels that his purchase was freely made, based on a full vetting of his real needs.  (Contrast this with a purchase made from a “pushy” salesperson, which often leaves the customer waking up the next day with a sense of buyer’s remorse and a feeling of having been taken advantage of.)

Any seller who wants to adopt more of a consultative approach will find that the world of improv can help here too. As Salit notes, one of the basic tenets of the improviser’s art is: “Make your partner look good.” An improviser is taught to support her partner at all costs by (again) listening intently, responding positively to her partner’s offers, treating the scene as an equal partnership, and above all refusing to steal the spotlight or push (that word again!) the scene in a direction the partner hasn’t offered. Similarly, a seller can see her interaction with a buyer as a joint search for a solution that will make the buyer/partner look (and feel) good while also benefiting the seller.

“In improv,” says Salit, “you never try to get someone to do something. That’s coercion, not creativity. You make offers, you accept offers – and a conversation, a relationship, a scene, and other possibilities emerge.” In the consultative selling context, those possibilities include loyal customers, positive word-of-mouth, and long-term relationships.

Ultimately, effective improv and effective selling are both about saying “Yes And.” Saying “Yes And” (to use my definition of the term) in the context of selling involves:

·         Accepting the Person (by listening curiously and seeking first to “see the world through his eyes”);

·         Acknowledging the Possibilities (by treating his responses as offers and exploring them through powerful questioning); and

·         Advancing with Positive Purpose (by seeking an outcome that makes the other person look and feel good and that benefits you both).

“’Yes And’ isn’t a technique,” Salit says. “It’s a way of life.” And the more you adopt a “Yes And” attitude in all of your interactions, the more authentic – and credible – you’ll be when you find yourself in the “selling” role.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

In To Sell Is Human, Pink describes several improv exercises that Salit conducts with corporate clients to help them embed listening, questioning, and partnering skills in their muscle memory. I’ll describe two of them here. What would happen if you adapted these activities to your own work environment and conducted them with your team?

1) I’m Curious. In the “I’m Curious” activity, workshop participants form pairs. In each pair, one person chooses a side of a controversial issue and tries to persuade his partner to see his point of view. The partner can respond – but only with questions! (True questions - not opinons-disguised-as-questions such as “How can you say that?”) After the first person responds, the only permissible reaction from the partner is either: 1) Another question, or 2) Silent reflection. “The idea here isn’t to win,” says Pink. “It’s to learn. And when both parties view their encounters as opportunities to learn … [t]he conversation becomes more of a dance and less of a wrestling match.”

2) Time Traveler. One person in a pair plays the role of someone from the 18^th Century who just arrived in the present day using a time-traveling machine. Her partner must describe an everyday action – say, putting gas in a car – to the “time traveler.” “This is more difficult than it sounds,” says Pink. “That person from 300 years ago has a perspective wildly different from our own.” Even simple concepts such as “gas,” “car,” and “debit card” must be fully explained in terms the time traveler will understand. “The exercise immediately challenges your assumptions about the understandability of your message,” says Salit. “You are forced to care about the worldview of the other person.” In other words, you must see the world through his eyes – an essential part of consultative selling.