The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,25

they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word of mouth epidemics as the other two groups. Who are these Salesmen? And what makes them so good at what they do?

Tom Gau is a financial planner in Torrance, California, just south of Los Angeles. His firm—Kavesh and Gau—is the biggest in its field in southern California and one of the top financial planning firms in the country. He makes millions of dollars a year. Donald Moine, a behavioral psychologist who has written widely on the subject of persuasion, told me to look up Gau because Gau is “mesmerizing.” And so he is. Tom Gau happens to sell financial planning services. But he could, if he wanted to, sell absolutely anything. If we want to understand the persuasive personality type, Gau seems a good place to start.

Gau is in his forties. He is good looking, without being pretty at all. He is of medium height, lean, with slightly shaggy dark hair, a mustache, and a little bit of a hangdog expression. Give him a horse and a hat and he’d make an excellent cowboy. He looks like the actor Sam Elliot. When we met, Gau shook my hand. But as he told me later, usually when he meets someone he gives him a hug or—if it is a woman—a big kiss. As you would expect from a great salesman, he has a kind of natural exuberance.

“I love my clients, okay? I’ll bend over backwards for them,” Gau said. “I call my clients my family. I tell my clients, I’ve got two families. I’ve got my wife and my kids and I’ve got you.” Gau talks quickly, but in fits and starts. He’s always revving up and gearing down. Sometimes when he is making an aside he will rev up even further, as if to put in his own verbal parentheses. He asks lots of rhetorical questions. “I love my job. I love my job. I’m a workaholic. I get here at six and seven in the morning. I get out at nine at night. I manage a lot of money. I’m one of the top producers in the nation. But I don’t tell my clients that. I’m not here because of that. I’m here to help people. I love helping people. I don’t have to work anymore. I’m financially independent. So why am I here working these long hours? Because I love helping people. I love people. It’s called a relationship.”

Gau’s pitch is that his firm offers clients a level of service and expertise they’ll have difficulty getting anywhere else. Across the hall from his office is a law firm, affiliated with Kavesh and Gau, that handles wills and living trusts and all other legal matters related to financial planning. Gau has insurance specialists to handle insurance needs and stockbrokers to handle investments and retirement specialists for older clients. His arguments are rational and coherent. Moine has put together, in cooperation with Gau, what he calls a financial planner’s script book. Moine’s argument is that what separates a great salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers they have to the objections commonly raised by potential clients. He sat down with Gau, then, and tape recorded all of Gau’s answers and wrote them up in a book. Moine and Gau calculate that there are about twenty questions or statements that a planner needs to be prepared for. For example: “I can do it myself” is one, and for that the script book lists fifty potential answers. “Aren’t you concerned about making the wrong moves and having no one there to help you?” for instance. Or “I’m sure you do a good job at money management. However, did you know most wives outlive their husbands? If something should happen to you, would she be able to handle everything by herself?”

I can imagine someone buying this script book and memorizing each of these potential responses. I can also imagine that same person, over time, getting familiar enough with the material that he begins to judge, very well, what kinds of responses work best with what kinds of people. If you transcribed that person’s interactions with his clients, he would sound just like Tom Gau because he would be using all of Tom Gau’s words. According to the standard ways by which we