Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [35]
When I met Golomb, he took out a thick three-ring binder filled with the mountain of letters he had received over the years from satisfied customers. “Each one of these has a story to tell,” he said. He seemed to remember every one. As he flipped through the book, he pointed randomly at a short typewritten letter. “Saturday afternoon, late November 1992. A couple. They came in with this glazed look on their faces. I said, ‘Folks, have you been shopping for cars all day?’ They said yes. No one had taken them seriously. I ended up selling them a car, and we had to get it from, I want to say, Rhode Island. We sent a driver four hundred miles. They were so happy.” He pointed at another letter. “This gentleman here. We’ve delivered six cars to him already since 1993, and every time we deliver another car, he writes another letter. There’s a lot like that. Here’s a guy who lives way down by Key-port, New Jersey, forty miles away. He brought me up a platter of scallops.”
There is another even more important reason for Golomb’s success, however. He follows, he says, another very simple rule. He may make a million snap judgments about a customer’s needs and state of mind, but he tries never to judge anyone on the basis of his or her appearance. He assumes that everyone who walks in the door has the exact same chance of buying a car.
“You cannot prejudge people in this business,” he said over and over when we met, and each time he used that phrase, his face took on a look of utter conviction. “Prejudging is the kiss of death. You have to give everyone your best shot. A green salesperson looks at a customer and says, ‘This person looks like he can’t afford a car,’ which is the worst thing you can do, because sometimes the most unlikely person is flush,” Golomb says. “I have a farmer I deal with, who I’ve sold all kinds of cars over the years. We seal our deal with a handshake, and he hands me a hundred-dollar bill and says, ‘Bring it out to my farm.’ We don’t even have to write the order up. Now, if you saw this man, with his coveralls and his cow dung, you’d figure he was not a worthy customer. But in fact, as we say in the trade, he’s all cashed up. Or sometimes people see a teenager and they blow him off. Well, then later that night, the teenager comes back with Mom and Dad, and they pick up a car, and it’s the other salesperson that writes them up.”
What Golomb is saying is that most salespeople are prone to a classic Warren Harding error. They see someone, and somehow they let the first impression they have about that person’s appearance drown out every other piece of information they manage to gather in that first instant. Golumb, by contrast, tries to be more selective. He has his antennae out to pick up on whether someone is confident or insecure, knowledgeable or naive, trusting or suspicious — but from that thin-slicing flurry he tries to edit out those impressions based solely on physical appearance. The secret of Golomb’s success is that he has decided to fight the Warren Harding error.
4. Spotting the Sucker
Why does Bob Golomb’s strategy work so well? Because Warren Harding errors, it turns out, play an enormous, largely unacknowledged role in the car-selling business. Consider, for example, a remarkable social experiment conducted in the 1990s by a law professor in Chicago named Ian Ayres. Ayres put together a team of thirty-eight people — eighteen white men, seven white women, eight black women, and five black men. Ayres took great pains to make them appear as similar as possible. All were in their mid-twenties. All were of average attractiveness. All were instructed to dress in conservative causal wear: the women in blouses, straight skirts, and flat shoes; the men in polo shirts or button-downs, slacks,