Sell Shit

Chapter 5 Sell Shit Nobody Buys the Thing The first time I understood something useful about selling, I may have used a senior’s acne against him. This is not my proudest opening sentence, but it is accurate. In undergraduate college, I took student clubs far more seriously than I took many of my actual subjects. My favorite was DebSoc, the debate society. The members seemed sharper, more confident, more street-smart, and generally more capable of surviving a room without hiding behind an engineering textbook. Getting into the club felt important to me, although student clubs have a wonderful way of making nineteen-year-olds behave as if they are applying to run a small country.

My interview took place after college hours, out on the sports field. A group of seniors asked me questions, tested my ability to argue, and enjoyed the temporary power that comes from being two or three years older than someone. Then one of them pointed toward something lying on the ground.

It was animal dung. Cow dung, horse manure, something similar. I did not conduct a forensic investigation. It looked like shit, smelled like shit, and had clearly completed its original purpose.

They asked me to sell it.

This was basically the Indian undergraduate version of “Sell me this pen,” except Leonardo DiCaprio was nowhere around and the product had recently exited a farm animal.

I looked at the thing on the ground and had absolutely nothing useful to say about it. I could not praise its design. I could not discuss the craftsmanship. There was no premium packaging, no origin story, and no founder explaining how his family had been disrupting manure for three generations.

Then I looked at the seniors interviewing me.

One of them had acne.

Not terrible acne. Not something a polite person would have mentioned. But I was an undergraduate boy trying to get into a competitive student club while standing next to animal dung. Politeness had already left the sports field.

I asked him whether he wanted clearer skin, better looks, and more confidence. I do not remember the exact pitch after all these years, but I remember the direction. The dung became some miraculous natural skincare product. I probably spoke about traditional remedies, skin purification, rural wisdom, and whatever else entered my head with enough speed to sound almost intentional.

The room laughed. The senior laughed too, thankfully. Without that detail, the story could have ended with a complaint to college administration instead of a lesson about problem solving.

I received the call to join DebSoc. I eventually chose not to join, which is another story and probably not an interesting enough one to deserve several pages. But I remembered the interview because I had stopped looking at the object and started looking at the person in front of me.

There was very little I could say about the dung itself. The moment I connected it to something the interviewer cared about—even in a ridiculous, improvised student-club performance—I had a pitch.

Years later, shortly before I moved to the United States in 2010, I found myself trying to sell something to a much tougher customer: my father.

I had decided he needed his first smartphone. I considered it a farewell gift, although he paid for it himself, which may make it less of a gift in the conventional sense. In an Indian middle-class family, however, emotionally pressuring your father to purchase something for his own good can still count as an expression of love.

My father did not immediately share my excitement.

He looked at the phone and asked, “Where are the buttons?”

This was a reasonable question. Until then, phones had buttons. You pressed them, numbers appeared, and the phone behaved like a phone. Now I was presenting him with a dark piece of glass and expecting him to trust the future.

He also wanted to know whether it had Snake.

For younger readers, Snake was a game in which a line moved around the screen eating dots while growing longer until it crashed into itself. That was the entire game, and we were happy. We did not need cinematic graphics, global multiplayer tournaments, downloadable costumes, or in-game purchases designed to bankrupt a twelve-year-old. We had a snake, some dots, and peace.

I explained the touchscreen. I explained apps, internet access, the camera, maps, music, messages, and all the other things the phone could do. None of this impressed him because his existing phone could make calls, send texts, and play Snake. From his point of view, technology had already reached civilization’s natural conclusion.

Then I told him about Skype.

I was about to move from India to the United States. With Skype, he would be able to call me and see me without paying for an international phone call every time. We could speak regularly. The distance would still exist, but it would not have to feel quite as large.

Also, I used the word free.

For an Indian middle-class father, “free” is not a product feature. It is a spiritual experience.

Now the phone made sense to him.

Nothing about the hardware had changed. The buttons were still missing. Snake was still unavailable. The apps had not become easier to understand. But the phone had entered his life. It was no longer a strange piece of technology his son had become excited about. It was a way to remain connected after that son moved across the world.

When I think about the DebSoc interview and my father’s phone, I do not think they are morally equivalent lessons in sales. One was a ridiculous performance conducted beside manure. The other was a conversation between a father and a son preparing for distance. I do not need to force them into a clean comparison.

What connects them is the moment the object stopped being the center of the conversation.

We often become so attached to what we have made, bought, designed, written, or discovered that we assume the other person will automatically see what we see. We describe the features. We explain how it works. We point out how innovative it is. If they remain unconvinced, we explain the same thing again, only louder and with more slides.

I have done this with workshops, programs, courses, ideas, and probably this book. I become interested in the structure, the methodology, the sequence, the activities, and the clever little detail that took three days to get right. Then I speak to someone who has none of my emotional history with the thing. They did not watch it develop. They do not know what it cost me. They have not been awake at two in the morning changing the subtitle.

They are meeting it for the first time, and somewhere inside their head is a very reasonable question: What does this have to do with me?

That question can feel insulting when you love the thing. You want to say, “Did you not hear the part about the methodology?” They heard it. They simply do not wake up in the morning hoping to purchase a methodology.

My father did not want a touchscreen. He wanted to know whether he would still be able to speak to his son. The touchscreen mattered only after that.

This is where the chapter can easily become a sales-and-marketing lecture, so let me save both of us from that. I am not going to tell you to define your funnel, optimize conversion, overcome objections, or close more aggressively. There are enough books explaining how to turn every conversation into revenue. Some of them are excellent. Some make you feel as if you should not speak to another human being without first entering them into a CRM.

I also do not believe every human interaction is sales. That is a bleak way to live. Your spouse is not a customer segment. Your child is not a lead, although getting a child to wear shoes before leaving the house requires negotiation skills that would terrify many procurement departments. Friendship should not have conversion metrics. Love should not require a quarterly pipeline review.

But whenever you want another person to care about an idea, try something unfamiliar, adopt a solution, support a project, learn a skill, or take part in a change, the thing cannot remain only inside your world. At some point, you have to understand theirs.

That does not mean inventing a fake emotional story because the actual product is useless. It does not mean staring at somebody’s insecurity and immediately asking how it can improve your revenue. The acne strategy was acceptable during a student-club improvisation exercise. It should not become your operating philosophy.

Understanding what someone cares about gives you power, and power is where things become complicated. The same observation can help someone or manipulate them. You can discover that a person fears being left behind and help them learn something useful, or you can use that fear to sell them rubbish. You can understand a parent’s concern for their child and design a better service, or you can attach that concern to something the child does not need. Advertising, politics, religion, business, and social media have all demonstrated that human longing can be converted into almost anything if the speaker is confident enough.

I have almost certainly oversold things at times. Not by knowingly lying, but through enthusiasm, optimism, and the founder’s dangerous ability to describe the future as though it has already signed a contract. When you believe deeply in an idea, the distance between what exists today and what you hope it will become can get blurry. You are not necessarily trying to deceive anyone. You are speaking from the version in your head while the other person is purchasing the version that currently exists.

That gap deserves attention.

The person should not have to become disappointed later in order for you to succeed now. If you attach your product, program, idea, or promise to something they genuinely care about, the thing should have a reasonable chance of helping with it. Otherwise, you have not entered their world. You have used it as decoration for your pitch.

This is why listening matters before explanation, although even that sentence sounds dangerously close to something printed beside a photograph of two hands shaking. Let me put it differently: many of us start speaking too early.

We see the product, so we begin describing it. We hear an objection, so we prepare a response. We assume the other person does not understand, when perhaps they understand perfectly and simply do not care about the same part we care about.

My father’s question about buttons was not only about buttons. It was also: Why should I relearn something that already works? Why should I enter this unfamiliar system? What will I gain that is worth the irritation?

I answered those questions badly at first because I was busy demonstrating the phone.

Skype answered them better.

There will be moments when you understand the person correctly and they still say no. That does not mean your listening failed. They may not need the thing. They may not trust you yet. They may not have the money, time, energy, authority, or desire. They may be right. Seeing another person clearly does not entitle you to their agreement.

It does, however, give your idea a fairer chance of becoming relevant.

The phone eventually became part of my father’s life. He learned to use Skype, and later came WhatsApp, Facebook, and the usual consequences of introducing parents to the internet and then acting surprised when they begin using it more enthusiastically than you do. I do not believe he ever got Snake back, which remains a failure of technological progress.

But he did get the thing he cared about.

Before I left India, I thought I was persuading him to adopt a smartphone. Looking back, that description gives the device too much importance. I was trying to make the coming distance between us a little easier to live with. Once I understood that, I finally knew what to say.

That is usually the part worth noticing. Not only what the thing does, but what it becomes when it enters someone else’s life.