INTRODUCTION

Thank you very much. I am showing you these two book cover images not just to show the different title. People always think that British publishing must be this incredibly classy business. The American publishers came up with this rather nice wooden thing — art of the sale, subtle, discreet. (The other image) was what the Brits came up with, because they thought that it needs to really shout out from the airport bookstores. It needs to be bright orange.

I thought that I’d start by telling you a little bit about myself, and then we’ll get on to this man (Donald Trump). As Simon kindly said, I was a journalist for ten years — the first ten years of my career. Further back, I was born in England. My dad was a vicar — clergyman, pastor, whatever you want to call it — who believed that money was the root of all evil. My mother bought houses, rented them out and flipped them. She was highly commercial, so I was sort tortured even growing up. “What am I to make of all of this?”

I became a journalist, and was a foreign correspondent. Then at the age of 32, I was married with a child and living in Paris — a very enviable life in many ways. But I would be staring at the ceiling night after night thinking that the newspaper business is finished — the newspaper business is finished — and I’ve got to get out before it crashes around me.

I didn’t really want to be a businessperson. What I wanted to do was to do what I wanted to do and not go broke doing it. I wanted to figure out business and finance and all of this stuff sufficiently so that I could continue to be a writer and do interesting things — kind of fund my interesting life — the life that I had as a foreign correspondent, and to do so in a sustainable way and satisfy all of my middle class aspirations.

Off I went to Harvard Business School. I spent two years there, and to the dismay of my family and friends, I came out of it realizing that I didn’t really want to be in business. I had a large bill, a degree, but no job at McKinsey or a hedge fund or any of these other things you’re meant to do.

I wrote a book about it all, which did rather well, and then I was thinking to myself, “What was missing from that whole experience?” I learned a lot. I learned how to build a spreadsheet. I learned how to build a strategic presentation. I learned the importance of alumni networks and all of this kind of stuff, but one thing that they didn’t teach was selling.

In my experience, there were a lot of clever people I knew who could do everything else in business. They could make your spreadsheets dance, and they could do these beautiful presentations and they could have brilliant ideas. But if you ask them to sell, you’d hear a whoosh of air and they’d have disappeared from the room. They didn’t want to pick up the phone and cold-call people, and they didn’t want to expose themselves to the rejection and the thought of people actually saying no to them. They were really terribly scared of selling — and at Harvard Business School they didn’t even teach it.

The reasons for this are many. One is that business schools are essentially very insecure institutions. For many years, they felt very insecure within academia. Then, in about 1950, they tried to make the subject of business very scientific. They broke things down into finance and accounting and strategy — the more quantitative it sounded, the better. Sales got shunted aside. It’s never really made its way back in.

If you want to be a professor at a business school, you have to be published in certain journals, like Journal of Marketing and The Journal of Finance. There are journals of selling, but they’re considered the academic equivalent of the “journal of bass fishing”. No one really wants to be published in them, if they seriously want a career in business academia.

I remember asking professor at Harvard, “Why don’t you teach sales? It’s so basic and so fundamental.” He said, “If you want to learn this, go to a two-week course at Dale Carnegie or something.”

So I started to look around and I thought to myself this is fascinating. You go anywhere in the world — you go to a French medieval town, or you go to Athens you see the Agora, or you go to Rome and you see the Forum. At the center of all of these places are marketplaces, places where people go and buy and sell.

Long before there were strategic planners there were merchants buying and selling; yet, when I went around and looked at all of the literature, academics didn’t really study it. It was basic psychology and when you looked at bookshops this is what you found — (Donald Trump’s) Think BIG and Kick Ass. You found a lot of books with ten tips of how to sell, which are kind of cheesy. They suggest that the main thing is to have a cute business card and to show up to meetings on time — to tell jokes and to offer a firm handshake — but it was nothing very revealing.

What I wanted to try and do was to get out into the world and really understand what salesmen actually did, because I found that there was no one really telling me. I would just be getting either these hideous clichés or this very aggressive — frankly depressing view. I knew that I needed to sell, but I couldn’t really find anyone who would tell me how I was actually going to do this in a way that made sense to me.

My approach, and you’re all anthropologists and ethnographers, but I was a journalist and so I did a bit of journalism. I was sort of journalistic in my approach. I majored in Classics at university and I had a wonderful professor there who said that the only way to write these kinds of books is outlined in the first paragraph of Herodotus’ Histories. He said to write about things that are “megala te kai thômasta” — great and wonderful, or big and amazing.

That’s all that my criteria really were, which was to go out into the world; be a journalist about things and to go and find people who seemed to me amazing in terms of how they sold.

THE TAKE ON SALESPEOPLE

When you start looking at selling — particularly in this country — the first thing that you come across if you’re a literary type is this incredibly negative view of the salesman. This is a quote from Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet: in a scene where one of the salesmen is talking about customers. “They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money. Are you going to take it? Are you man enough to take it?”

Glengarry Glen Ross is an incredibly depressing film / play and (in the film version) all of these terrifying salesmen being bullied by the Alec Baldwin character. It depicts sales as this awful test of manhood. If you fail you’ve failed entirely as a human being.

Next is a quote from Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller. “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away. A man is not a piece of fruit. After all of the highways and the trains and the appointments and the years — you end up worth more dead than alive.” Miller’s play – I recently saw a revival of it on Broadway with Philip Seymour Hoffman directed by Mike Nichols – It’s just so painful to watch still, sixty years after it was written.

Everything now, in all of the discussions we’ve had for the last five years about the corrosive effect of capitalism on the human soul, is laid out in this play through the personality of the salesman. I think that why playwrights and writers and poets always write so much about salesmen — and not so much about accountants though they write quite a lot about lawyers — is because these are the people that they come into contact with. These are the businesspeople that they see on a daily basis. They don’t see all of the people behind-the-scenes but they really see the salespeople, and so you get this very depressing view.

In this quote from David Ogilvy, the great advertising executive and founder of Ogilvy & Mather, he put this very bluntly when he said, “We sell or else.” Peter Drucker, the great management writer said, “Business basically comes down to two things: innovation and sales, and all of the rest is detail.” Someone has to come up with something — a product or a service being the innovator — and then someone has to go out and sell it. Everything else is parasitical on these two functions. All of the lawyers and accountants and strategists and everyone else is just feeding off the host of the inventors and the salespeople. It’s vital in its function, and it’s important.

Again, in the U.S., and in the American tradition you have the Horatio Alger myths, the Log Cabin to White House stories. They’re these amazing stories of selling and how if you can sell you can move like a hot-knife through the butter of society. If you can sell, it doesn’t matter where you came from but you can rise to the top. So you have in sales the very negative and the very positive — this is absolutely terrific if you’re a writer.

And then this quote, which of course I hope is haunting to everyone in this room, and it was certainly haunting to me — Walker Percy, the great novelist, “You can get all A’s and still flunk life.” People with tremendous educations would come out of these business schools and come out of great universities —spun out into the world with all of these wonderful qualifications — and suddenly the real world hit them in the face and it was a disaster. What was going on?

It seemed to me that sales was one of these areas which people constantly underestimated. They thought that if they could do everything else, everything would fall into place. But if they weren’t selling well, things weren’t going the way that they wanted It’s terrible and it’s grim — it’s uplifting, and it’s fantastic material.

I started traveling around and one of the first men I met was this guy called Tony Sullivan. He’s a Brit and I’m very proud of him. He lives in Tampa and is America’s most successful infomercial pitchman. He grew up in Devon, the west of England. His dad used to rent slot machines, one-armed bandits to pubs. He said that the first sale he ever made was when he was nine years old and he sold his parents’ house for them. The story he tells is that the realtor came around with a couple, and Tony’s parents weren’t there. He started taking them around the house. He said, “This is the attic. I love coming up here and playing with my train set.” He took them out to see the tree house and the garden. He said, “I love riding my bike.” The point was — he didn’t know this, but the couple had a child that was six or seven years younger. The enthusiasm of the young Anthony for his parents’ house persuaded this couple that this was the house that they wanted to raise their family in.

He said that one of the other big lessons he learned was from his father’s secretary, Angie. She used to send him out on collection calls when he was about sixteen. He said that it was quite terrifying. You would go to these pubs and publicans tend to be these larger-than-life characters — bar owners. You’d often interrupt them sort of in the backroom with someone that they shouldn’t be with, and they’d shout at you and they’d scream at you. Angie taught him, she said, “You must never ever be afraid of asking for money. If someone owes you money, just go out and get it.”

He came to the United States and started selling in marketplaces and is now this extraordinarily successful man. He told me the story about how he really figured out his particular mode of selling. He was standing in a market in Devon when he was 20 or 21. His first sales job was selling t-shirts. He would stand behind a table of t-shirts stacked up and would wait for people to come and say, “I would like one of your t-shirts.” He said that he would stand there and he would sell five or six t-shirts.

Then one day came this guy who was selling something called the Amazing Washmatic, which is a device for cleaning your car. “The faster you go, the faster it flows. When you stop, it stops.” He had this whole patter that he can still recite. He said that he realized that this guy was actually pitching. He wasn’t standing there with his stack of goods waiting. He was drawing in an audience with his story, which he kept repeating. It was just a rote story, a rote display.

Tony went home and about three weeks later got the pitch from the guy who did this. He learned it and would stand in front of the windows of his house and practice this thing until he had it absolutely down cold.

All of his life he has been doing the same thing. He’s this wonderful pitchman. He lives in Tampa, as I said, and he lives ten doors down from Derek Jeter, the Yankees shortstop, who has a $30-million dollar house. Tony’s house is pretty big. He’s got two Range Rovers and a large speedboat. He has no formal education but has an acute understanding of people and selling.

A depressing thing that he told me, he said that he doesn’t think that sales can be taught — either you’ve got it or you haven’t. He said, “I know people in my office who know everything that there is to know about sales; yet, there are kids on YouTube who are thirteen years old who are getting millions and millions of hits.” He said, “The truth is once you get past a certain age, there is nothing you can teach. Ultimately, you’re always being pushed back into a kind of fight-or-flight scenario in selling, and your natural instincts come out.” He said, “What are you going to do in a fist fight? It’s those instincts that are inculcated very early on that matter. You can’t really teach it.”

What’s to be done? The idea is that none of us here, if you can’t sell now you’re done for — which of course is very, very depressing.