"I No Get. Too Deep. Goodbye"

by Graham Denton

It took me almost a year to buy a computer. I knew I needed one. I knew it would help me run my writing business better by making me more efficient at producing documents. But I couldn't decide on a system that I wanted to buy, because in twelve months of shopping, I never met a salesperson.

Oh, I met plenty of people who called themselves salespersons. They hung around on the floors of computer retail outfits, fingering their pocket protectors and waiting for prospects. But when I tried to talk with them about their products, it turned out they weren't salespeople at all. They were professional "de-facilitators" of the buying process, people whose role was to get in the customer's way. I had this same reaction a dozen times. I would walk up to one of these clerks with a hopeful gaze and ask him what I considered a sensible question. Since I wanted a computer mainly for word-processing, it was usually something like "How quickly can I edit documents on this machine?" He would roll his eyes and give me one of these responses:

1. "The 3001LS has 256K of ROM and an upgradable CD-ROM capacity of an extra 64K. Plus there's an inbuilt _
2. "Are we talking AFSCE, HTML, MS Word, file documents, or _
3. "Are you from Mars?"

This last response was infrequent, but it hardly mattered, because even when I got the ostensibly less condescending answers 1 and 2, I didn't understand them. I was completely ignorant about computer language, and the only ROM I knew about was in Italy. None of this seemed to matter to the computer clerks. At their level of expertise, they were monolingual in technobabble, and if a prospective buyer didn't speak it, that was his problem. It wasn't their job to educate computer illiterates.

Which is why none of them ever made a sale. At least not to me. And not to any other customer who was intelligent but ignorant, who supposed that the job of a professional was to help him understand.

The lesson is relevant to far more than computer sales. Any time you're selling a product that is technologically sophisticated-or, more to the point, a product that a prospect perceives as technologically sophisticated-it's your responsibility to translate your vocabulary into a language that he or she can relate to. The only times you can ignore this advice are when the prospect is as fluent as you are in your industry's jargon, or when you just flat out don't want the sale.

Eventually I bought a computer from a family friend. The price was right, but that's not why I chose him over the "professionals." I chose him because he sat down with me for two hours and explained, in everyday language, what the machine could do. The esoteric term "edit" didn't seem to throw him, and he walked me through the training session without ever saying "ROM." Finally, outside of the stores, I had found a salesperson.

Charles B. Roth, one of the granddaddies of modern selling, tells a related anecdote in his Secrets of Closing Sales. The foundation of all good selling is customer understanding, he says. In his early days, before he grasped that fact, he made a presentation to a foreign-born prospect whose business savvy was better than his grasp of English. "I wasn't smart enough to fit my presentation to his mental capacities, and at the end of five minutes he said to me: 'I no get. Too deep. Goodbye.'"

The next time I meet a techno-babbler, I'm giving him that line.