Why He Won’t Sign
In 1863 a Frenchman, Marc Monnier, published a book on the Neapolitan Camorra, and in it he set down the complaint of a cab driver. Here it is almost in full, because nobody could put it better.
“I am a ruined man. I have bought a dead horse. It doesn’t know the way, it only goes where it pleases, it slips and falls on the slopes, it takes fright at firecrackers and church bells, and yesterday it shied and ran straight into a flock of sheep. The camorrista who protected me and kept the horse market would have saved me from such a crime. He watched over every deal and took his share from the buyer and the seller alike. Last year I had to get rid of a blind horse, and he helped me sell it as a sound one, because I was under his protection. Now he is in prison, and without him I had to buy a bad horse. He was a great gentleman!”
Gambetta opens his book on the Mafia with this complaint, and I understand why. In three lines it holds the whole question of why a man doesn’t buy. The cab driver is afraid of buying a “dead horse”. While there was a guarantor nearby, he bought with an easy mind, even though the same guarantor had helped him cheat somebody else the year before. Once the guarantor was gone, every deal became a lottery, and he lost.
The moral about a guarantor who helps honest men and crooks alike we’ll leave on the Neapolitans’ conscience. What matters to us is something else: it isn’t the price that stops people buying. It’s fear.
Five Reasons to Say No
Anyone who has ever sold anything has heard the same five excuses. Learn to tell them apart, because behind each one there’s a different fear and a different cure.
“It’s too dear.” The money a man hands over feels like a loss; the gain you promise feels like a hope. The loss weighs more. Sometimes it really is too dear, and then you picked the wrong client. But more often the man can’t see what he’s paying for. Show him what he gets and how much he loses without it.
“It doesn’t do what you say.” He doesn’t believe the thing does what you promise. The cure is proof: a trial, a sample, a man who already uses it.
“Maybe for others, not for me.” He believes the thing is good but thinks his case is special. The cure is an example just like him: the same kind of restaurant, the same kind of hotel, the same kind of fool who had his doubts.
“I’ll wait.” He’s in no hurry. The cure is to show him, honestly, what he loses every week he waits. Honestly, mind you: invented “last three left” works exactly once.
“It’s too complicated.” He’s afraid of the bother: learning again, changing habits, explaining to his boss. The cure is to make the first step ridiculously simple and take the bother on yourself.
A good salesman doesn’t argue with an excuse. He asks what’s behind it and works with that. A man who is talking to you at all already wants something, or the conversation would never have started.
One Sentence Instead of a Guarantee
Now for the strongest cure of all: shifting the risk. If a man is afraid of losing, take the loss on yourself.
A guarantor is exactly that: someone who shifts the risk. The camorrista at the horse market took the buyer’s fear upon himself, and the deal became possible. More than a hundred years later the same mechanism was at work in Palermo. Stefano Bontate, one of the most powerful bosses of the seventies, often acted as a guarantor. Once a used-car dealer sold a faulty car to a man from Bontate’s district and flatly refused to replace it. The buyer went back and, as he had been told, said just one sentence, more or less this: Don Stefano Bontate says I’m to give you back the keys to the car. The car was replaced without another word.
You don’t get a sentence like that, and thank God. But you have something better: your own promise. Don Vincenzo gave the hotels a written guarantee: for every sheet lost, the laundry pays double. The managers laughed. Vincenzo, you’ll ruin yourself. In the first year we paid for four sheets. And more than a dozen hotels signed with us precisely because of that one line. The promise cost us eight sheets a year and brought in contracts we would never have got otherwise.
Why does it work? Because a guarantee says two things at once. First: if it goes badly, the client loses nothing. Second, and more important: you’re sure yourself it will go well, or you wouldn’t be risking your own money. The buyer reads the second line even more closely than the first.
Of course there will be people who try to abuse the guarantee. There will. There’ll be fewer of them than you fear, and more honest buyers than you think. Count the buyers, not the crooks.
Tell the Bad News First
There’s one more cure, the least expected: admit the shortcomings before the client finds them.
Francesco Marino Mannoia, a mafioso who later turned informer, remembered teasing one of his comrades, Giuseppe Contorno. Contorno collected a monthly protection payment from a shop, and the shop was robbed practically every day. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Mannoia would say. Contorno replied that at least the shop didn’t suffer from extortion or other, more serious crimes.
Perhaps Contorno was telling the truth. But he told it too late. If he had said to the owner on the first day, “I protect you from extortionists, not from thieves,” the man would have known what he was paying for. As it was, the owner thought he had bought protection from everything, and every robbery was proof to him that he’d been cheated. A limit you don’t mention in advance, the client takes for a swindle, even if you never promised a thing.
When Don Vincenzo offered oil to a new restaurant, he started with the bad news. We don’t deliver on Sundays. The first tin of the new season can be a touch more bitter than the old; after two weeks the oil settles down. If there’s a strike at the port, the delivery will be three days late, and we’ll warn you. The cooks were surprised: what, are you talking me out of it? And after that they believed everything else he said. A man who names his own weak points won’t lie about his strong ones. Every buyer reasons like that, even if he never says so out loud.
Someone Else’s Name on the Gate
One last thing, about the most important question a client asks himself in silence: can I trust you?
Stefano Calzetta, a witness at the Palermo trial, told the court about two of his brothers. They had a small business making concrete blocks, and they paid the mafioso Pietro Vernengo three hundred thousand lire a month. Not for protection against fire, but for the use of his name: it made it easier to convince buyers that they were the best suppliers around. The brothers bought someone else’s reputation, because a small firm didn’t have one of its own yet.
That’s the dirty version of what honest people do every day. A testimonial from a well-known client, a recommendation from a respected man, “trusted by so-and-so”. Someone else’s name takes away the fear while your own still means nothing. Only remember the difference. A recommendation comes from people you’ve helped, and it’s free. A name you rent has to be paid for every month, and one day the man it belongs to will come for something other than money.
To sum up. A man doesn’t sign because he’s afraid. Find out of what. Take away the risk if you can: with a guarantee, a trial, an example. Tell him the bad news before he finds it himself. And build up your own name, so that one day it works in place of a guarantee. Then, like Don Stefano, you’ll need only one sentence. Except yours will sound different: “This comes from us.”