Sales: The Honest-to-Goodness Technique for Explosive Sales
As Taught by the World’s Most Honest Girl Scout
Think of the last time you described your suite of products or services to a prospect. How honest was your assessment? What truth did your prospects hear from you?
Funnily enough, people hate to be lied to. I know, it’s a wild concept. And yet, we’re bombarded with advertising messages all day long that promise the world—and we eat that shit up with a fork and knife. If you just buy this car, you’ll instantly be more sophisticated! If you only buy this face cream, you’ll instantly be more beautiful! Curiously, we all know these promises are false, yet we succumb to them. We succumb because we hold out hope . . . that maybe, just maybe, this product will actually fulfill our dreams of making us feel better. Because make no mistake; unless we’re talking about a necessary purchase, like tires, feeling better is what buying is all about. Smart sales folks and marketers know this, and they use it to overextend the promise of their products and services.
Like sheep, many of us follow, myself included. But less so these days, given our rising societal skepticism. Brands are getting put into their own mini-movie version of Backdraft, where consumers play the firefighters and the brands play the fire that’s roaring along just fine until it gets put out by a deluge and the CEO is forced into “early retirement.” Just as I was editing this chapter, I got an email from JUST Capital’s Martin Whittaker that highlighted a few instances of communications hypocrisy: Adam Neumann of WeWork claimed his company would “elevate the world’s consciousness” before he was forced out after chicanery was exposed in their botched IPO; and Volkswagen chief executive officer Herbert Diess, chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch, and former CEO Martin Winterkorn were charged with stock market manipulation despite emphasizing during Climate Week that VW is accountable to “future generations to find the right answers.”1
I guess the SEC didn’t agree with the answers VW found.
Social media backlash against wayward marketing comes swiftly for the unscrupulous and even the unaware. Remember when Pepsi put out a commercial in which Kendall Jenner magically resolved a conflict between protesters and cops by handing a Pepsi to one of the police officers? I mean, Pepsi’s tasty, but that might be a stretch for its capabilities. And what about Unilever’s Dove brand ad, in which a black woman takes off her shirt to reveal a white woman? Ouch. We can only imagine what they were attempting to say about their soap’s capabilities. (If you figure it out, please let me know.) And it’s a shame, because Dove, with its “Real Beauty” campaign, has done some other things that are truly amazing, like remind us that real beauty is a state of mind rather than a reflection in a mirror.
In general, many marketing campaigns overstep. Pepsi can’t stop riots any more than soap can turn people different colors. And on some level we sort of accept it as the entertaining hyperbole it is. I mean, who’s giving up Pepsi because it’s overreaching with its brand promise? Behemoths like Pepsi and Dove have size and momentum on their side, which provide some form of insulation against exaggerations and missteps. But open your Twitter app for a hot second and you’ll see why even big-company insulation isn’t always enough protection against social media: our online communities not only expose even the slightest untruths but they also actively hunt for deception to use in the latest round of clickbait blogs and viral memes. New brands without mega-budgets to recover from such exposure can sink their entire operations by attempting to mislead an already skeptical population. We all know this, yet I’ve repeatedly encountered the belief that organizations must lie to their own customers to keep them happy and keep them buying. What I’d like to suggest is that those organizations shoot themselves in the foot by not realizing that today the opposite is true: being honest with your customers will positively blow up your pipeline in a way that no other strategy can. Want some proof? How about nearly thirty thousand boxes of cookies to please the palate of your sales projections?
HOW BEING HONEST ABOUT YOUR ENDGAME CAN BLOW UP YOUR SALES (IN A GOOD WAY)
“I have a letter that simply must be shared with you right away,” said Mike Rowe, famed television host of Dirty Jobs, on a video blog post he recorded on January 26, 2017. “If there’s a Girl Scout in your life,” Mike continued, “you’ve already been hit up for cookies—but not like this.”2 Those were the words that kicked off a media firestorm for an unsuspecting eleven-year-old girl named Charlotte McCourt—a storm that would involve Mike Rowe, a venture capitalist, and CBS Sunday Morning.
Of course, this being a book about honesty, all sides of the truth must be told—including the honest motivations of this particular Scout and the overall context of her story. So, before we examine this in full detail, know up front that one of Charlotte’s guiding factors was that mother of all business pursuits: sales. Don’t for a second think that this is anything but a capitalistic technique that created shocking sales success.
Now, some context: the winter of 2016–2017 was one of the most divisive in the history of the United States. With the presidential election decided and the inauguration just having come to a close, honesty was perhaps far from the minds of many. In fact, subverting the truth in favor of “fake news” seemed to rule the day, or at least to have become part of the fabric of a nation that was tearing apart at the proverbial seams. Meanwhile, a little girl from New Jersey was perhaps unaware—or perhaps very aware—of the world in which she was growing up.
But all the same, she was intent on her own, very important, goal: sell at least three hundred boxes of Girl Scout cookies. And although she wanted to raise money for the Girl Scouts, and of course she wanted her cookie customers to buy and enjoy the baked goods, she most of all wanted her customers to buy and ship those cookies to troops overseas to give members of the armed forces a little respite from their duties. As Charlotte’s father, Sean McCourt, explained to me, “When you’re overseas and you get this sleeve of cookies, it’s an incredible piece of home.” So Charlotte had a checkbox on her Girl Scouts order form that could be marked for this purpose.
But the question remained: How would Charlotte manage to sell a few hundred boxes of cookies and get some shipped to a farflung locale halfway around the world? Well, Charlotte had the same idea that many of us have when it comes to starting and growing a business: follow the money! Luckily, McCourt told his daughter that he had a wealthy friend who might be interested in buying lots of Girl Scout cookies. So, with that hot lead in hand, Charlotte wrote a letter to her father’s wealthy friend, a venture capitalist by the name of Jason Mendelson.
Here is the email Jason received on January 23, 2017, exactly in its original text (typos and all):3
Dear Mr. Mendelson,
I am Sean Patrick McCourt’s daughter. The only time I ever met you was in Disney World. I have been informed that you may want to purchase a few Girl Scout Cookie boxes for the troops, fighting overseas. Your donation is greatly appreciated by the men and women sacrificing their time and lives for our country. Do feel free to purchase other boxes for yourself, friends, family, coworkers, and other people in your life.
I would like to give you some information on my selling and my troop. I belong to troop 22918. We are a minuscule, but mighty troop of five people. I always sell the most boxes of anyone in my troop. My goal is 300 boxes because that is the number of delectable Girl Scout Cookie boxes I sold last year. I hope you purchase a few boxes from my website. The link is below.
Lastly, I would like to tell you about the cookies, for some of the descriptions use false advertising (note: I am rating all the boxes on a scale from 1 to 10. Ten being best, 1 being worst). Savannah Smiles are like sweet lemon wedges with just the right balance of sweet and sour. This cookie gets a 7 for it’s Devine taste. Next is the trefoil. It is a plain butter cookie with pairs well with any hot drink. I would give it a 6 because alone, it is sort of bland. The Do Si Do is peanut butter sandwich. I give it a 5 for unoriginal bland flavor. The Next cookie is the Samoa. I give it a 9 for its AMAZING flavor!
The next cookie is a Tagalog. If you don’t like peanut butter, than don’t buy it! I give it an 8 for the chocolate/peanut combo. Next is the thin mint. I give it a 9 for the delectable chocolate/mint combination. Then come the s’more cookie. If you have a wild sense of adventure, try this. No one has tried it, so I cannot rate it. Last and yes, least is toffeetastic. It is a bleak, flavorless gluten-free wasteland. It is as flavorless as dirt. I give it a 1.
Notice how none of the cookie boxes are a 10? There is a reason for it. The real 10 is donating a box. It helps strike a spark in the treacherous live of those making America safe. Please honor them by donating a box.
Let’s recap-
I love being honest with my clients
The Girl Scout Organization can sometimes use false advertisement
These are all only my opinion
Savannah Smile:7
Trefoil:6
Do Si Do:5
Samoa:9
Tagalog:8
Thin Mint:9
S’more:??
Toffeetastic:1
Donating a box overseas:10
Please buy soon.
Before we can dive deeply into the psychology of truth, let’s get one thing clear: Charlotte didn’t and still doesn’t think any of this is funny. But her potential “client,” Jason Mendelson, sure found it amusing—as well as inspiring.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HONEST SALESMANSHIP
As a venture capitalist and cofounder at the Foundry Group, Jason Mendelson has developed an effective way to find new business success stories before they go viral. Before that, he worked as a senior consultant at Accenture, as a corporate and securities lawyer at a worldwide law firm, and he authored a few books on business and venture capital. He gets hit up every day by cold calls and emails asking for his time and money. As Mendelson tells it, that’s why Charlotte’s outreach was so showstopping.
“My first reaction was that, as a venture capitalist, my entire life is built on (people) asking me for money or for time,” Mendelson told me. “In the most charitable situation they’re giving me the best look of themselves, and in the worst case they’re out-and-out lying to me. As a VC, cutting through the BS is the most important part of my job description. And here was Charlotte, laying it completely out. It was one of those emails where you could read the tone. There was a sincere honesty and she didn’t even get the humor in it. Her parents had to teach her what was so funny and so amazing about this. She only knew one way: ‘Be honest with my clients.’”
In truth, we’ll never know exactly what her cookie-sales strategy was in terms of consumer behavior, buying psychology, or customer relationship management. But none of that matters. What matters is what we can learn from her approach—the approach that eventually led to her selling a record-breaking 26,806 boxes of Girl Scout cookies.4 That bears repeating: in less than two months, Charlotte sold almost thirty thousand boxes of cookies. Even the “gluten-free wasteland” variety.
But those thousands of boxes started with a single customer relationship between Charlotte and Jason Mendelson. It was not only honesty that struck the venture capitalist but also the idea of one-to-one selling. He was floored by the fact that she was “creating a mutually beneficial relationship immediately, instead of saying, ‘I want something from you.’ She was treating me as a client before I even bought anything yet,” he marveled. “It’s a master class in sales. If all the companies I deal with were that good, we’d have much more successful companies,” he quipped.
In less than two months, Charlotte sold almost thirty thousand boxes of cookies. Even the “gluten-free wasteland” variety.
Unfortunately, we seem to exist in a time when getting our to-do list done outweighs thoughtfulness, which is perhaps how Pepsi and Dove went astray. “We get so overloaded with what we have to get done . . . with email, phone . . . texting and everything,” Mendelson noted, “[that] we’ve become a nation of executors and not necessarily thinkers.” But thoughtfulness, especially in today’s hyper–politically correct environment, is vital to business survival. Even regardless of society’s norms, people want to receive empathy, caring, and some level of thoughtful, personalized attention from those who communicate with them. Instead, we routinely get spammed by bots and cold-called by people halfway around the world with a fake phone number. Charlotte took the opposite tack. “There are multiple parts in that letter where she empathizes with me by providing an honest review,” Mendelson pointed out, “by treating me as a client, by trying to do something for me.”
As a venture capitalist, Mendelson is awash in ineffective entrepreneurs who reach out to him and misspell his name, give him form letters, spam his email, and otherwise act in thoughtless, discourteous, and impersonal ways. On the flip side, one smart entrepreneur once sent Mendelson a set of new drumsticks as a door opener when the entrepreneur saw that Mendelson had broken his at a local gig the night before. Like that drumstick-giving founder, Charlotte approached Mendelson in a one-to-one way, and that’s part of what made her pitch so effective despite today’s pressure to make everything scalable. He noted, “Entrepreneurs are extremely thoughtful with the strategy of business, and thoughtless with the strategy of fundraising, getting to the people behind the funds.”
Remarkably, Mendelson admitted that although he and Sean were lifelong friends, he and Charlotte had met only once. But here was Charlotte, happy to go directly to the source and establish a direct relationship with a man she only knew as “Dad’s rich friend.” Mendelson donated fifty boxes. He later went back to donate more, though, as he saw what happened when another one of McCourt’s contacts, Mike Rowe, saw Charlotte’s letter.
“Truth in Advertising” is the title of the video blog post in which Rowe held up Charlotte’s letter to Mendelson and read it aloud to his audience, producing ten million views and kicking off a media firestorm that resulted in several news articles and television appearances. Apparently, truth is so rare in business that all Charlotte had to do was provide a bit of it in her cookie review, and she was consequently able to successfully crash her Girl Scout cookie website with all the traffic she received. If you’re a salesperson looking to grow your revenues, you’ve got to at least pause and ask why this worked, and if it could work for you, too. It certainly helps to understand why Charlotte felt compelled to bash her own products in order to sell more of them in the first place. When I asked her, I was surprised to learn that her reasoning was as old as commerce itself.
First, Charlotte was an eleven-year-old disillusioned by big business. When I asked her why she thought honesty was the best policy in selling cookies, she told me that she hates when she buys products that are advertised to work well, only to have them unexpectedly break or fail to live up to their promises. It happened frequently, she said, opining that even the Girl Scouts organization didn’t explain their products to Charlotte’s own satisfaction and standard for honesty. So she reasoned that she might as well be the one to correctly advertise her cookies.
Second, Charlotte always had her end goal in mind: sell as many cookies as possible so she could get some to the troops. And, she reasoned, wouldn’t the troops want the best cookies, instead of the mediocre or even “flavorless” ones? Indeed, Charlotte wanted her end customers—those risking their lives for their country—to have the best product she could possibly deliver.
As logical as her arguments seem, I’m admittedly frightened to think about what her analysis means for our society. How have we gotten to a place where business is so dishonest that it prompts an eleven-yearold girl to adopt such a bold strategy to sell some cookies? As a champion of strategic honesty myself, I had to ask Charlotte a burning question: Why do you think more businesses are not honest with their customers?
Charlotte’s business advice seems simple enough: be honest and focus on creating exceptional products and services, and they’ll essentially sell themselves.
“Because they think it’ll sell them more,” she said simply. “They think ‘if we get [the product] out sooner before other companies can . . . it will be better for consumers.’ What they should be doing is focusing more on the product than the sales, instead of focusing on the sales and leaving consumers ‘stuck’ with the products.” Her startling mastery of business language aside, Charlotte’s business advice seems simple enough: be honest and focus on creating exceptional products and services, and they’ll essentially sell themselves.
Reflecting on Charlotte’s brave sales technique, Mendelson said, “I hope that something sustainable comes out of this”—that people everywhere take note of some basics of interpersonal communication that we seem to have forgotten. When I asked him to sum up his experience, he said simply, “Give before you get. She gave me information, [and even] humor, even though she didn’t even know it. Giving before you get is a really powerful way to live. If more people were like that, the world would be a better place.”
HOW TO USE HONESTY TO WIN MORE SALES
As someone involved in sales, you may or may not have control over the product you’re selling, but you can certainly control the benefits you’re touting. The thing is, even without Charlotte’s story, we know that honesty works. Think about the last time you were being sold something and the representative said something like, “You know, I’d go with this cheaper option over the more expensive one. It’s half the price, you get almost the same benefits, and if you add the warranty for another couple of dollars, it’ll be the best of both worlds.” Chances are you appreciated their candor and thoughtfulness as you said to yourself, Well, at least they’re honest!
Being honest—about what you’re selling, how you’re selling it, and what buyers want out of the buying experience—will lay the foundation for an exceptional outcome every single time.
We appreciate honesty; we recognize it and praise its use. In fact, honesty is the very first sales tool you should reach for as you attempt to engender trust between you and your customers. So when applying this principle, ask yourself, How can I use honesty to create a trustful relationship, faster? Whether you’re selling a home, a car, public relations services, a welding machine, or insurance, the premise is the same in the mind of your buyer, who’s only searching for the best option (for them, not for you). Being honest—about what you’re selling, how you’re selling it, and what buyers want out of the buying experience—will lay the foundation for an exceptional outcome every single time.
When we do anything outside of being honest, we sacrifice trust. Maybe it won’t hurt your sales today, but it will tomorrow. Look at what the automotive industry did to itself by using tricks instead of truth for decades. Charlotte could have told Jason Mendelson that every box of cookies was delicious and that trying them all was the only sound choice to make. She would have sold a few boxes of cookies, but she would have given up an opportunity to change the selling game, deepen a key relationship, earn the adoration of the media, and sell cargo planes full of treats. Charlotte learned what we must all deeply understand: honesty opens the door to innovative outcomes.
Charlotte learned what we all must deeply understand: honesty opens the door to innovative outcomes.
IT ALL COMES BACK TO THE HOURGLASS OF HONESTY
Throughout this book, we’ll occasionally come back to the framework I discussed in chapter four, The Hourglass of Honesty, to see how it applies universally. My hope is that if you take only one key strategy from our time together, it will be that applying the three levels of honesty (community, others, self) will get you most of the way toward your goal—in sales and more.
Charlotte and the Level of Community
Because of her brilliance—or perhaps completely by accident—Charlotte struck an honest chord with the community at large. A few days after the 2017 inauguration, our society was in disarray, struggling to cope with a new reality filled with both real facts and alternative ones. As Charlotte’s father tells it, “Charlotte’s letter was objectively honest, and it didn’t matter what side of the political divide you were on. I think that’s why people embraced it so immediately and so powerfully.” Fake news was gripping society, and into that storm of events walked an eleven-year-old girl with both an undeniable this-is-how-I-see-it attitude and impeccable timing, because the community was in exactly the right frame of mind for Charlotte’s honest message.
Charlotte and the Level of Others
Amazingly—or perhaps ironically—Charlotte also honestly addressed the others around her. In this case, her “other” was her prospective client, Jason Mendelson. She was honest and transparent about why she was pursuing him (his financial ability to buy cookies, of course), and she was honest with him about what he should and shouldn’t buy.
Charlotte and the Level of Self
Finally, Charlotte was honest with herself, choosing to stay true to her own personal beliefs about the quality of her products, regardless of what anyone else might think or how many boxes of cookies she might actively deny her clients by persuading them against certain options in her product suite.
The Bottom Half of the Hourglass
From the Hourglass of Honesty framework, we know that’s not where the story ends. Once Charlotte aligned the first three levels of honesty, that’s when the fun really started. The honest letter she wrote influenced others around her—including Jason Mendelson, her parents, Mike Rowe, millions of fans, and a record-breaking number of buyers. And when that happened, she influenced the community around her. She bent the world toward her mission of helping people, consequently sold a Herculean number of cookies, and helped those troops overseas get a little taste of home.
Wild success notwithstanding, the honest journey of a truth-telling preteen isn’t as smooth as one might hope. When her customers saw her honest sales letter, people laughed a lot, smiled, and bought cookies, and heartfelt thank-you letters poured in from active military members, veterans, and military families. But she also received a lesson about the cynical nature of human beings, with some individuals accusing her of plagiarizing a letter that must have been written by her parents. The disapproval didn’t just come from strangers. Charlotte sensed a hint of jealousy and cool indifference from her peer group of Girl Scouts, despite Charlotte’s success benefitting the group as a whole. As I probed into how she felt about her fellow Scouts’ lack of excitement, she looked down sheepishly. A few moments later, perhaps not entirely honestly, she reassured me, “I don’t care.”
Caveat emptor: honesty does work. But leadership, just like innovation, can trace a lonely path. It reminds me of some of our corporate clients over the years. Many knew something had to be done, and some knew what to do, but few were willing to put their necks out and do, because, to be blunt, finding clarity among the bullshit means helping everyone else recognize they’re stuck in a pile of shit. And people don’t like that. But I’m sure that’s not you; you’re a doer. Brave enough to tell your prospects how it is and earn their respect for it. And if that’s true, remember Charlotte McCourt’s ability to break sales records while helping troops overseas—a girl who figured out how to have her cookie and eat it, too.
QUESTIONS FOR HONEST REFLECTION
1.What’s going on in the world or in your industry right now that can help point you toward a more effective sales approach?
2.What do you think made Charlotte’s approach so successful, apart from her simple honesty?
3.How might you immediately apply her approach to something that you’re selling?