{"id":1836,"date":"2004-03-02T08:58:52","date_gmt":"2004-03-02T13:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/02\/1836.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:23","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:23","slug":"the-tipping-point-salesmen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/02\/the-tipping-point-salesmen\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tipping Point: Salesmen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ok, the Few are, according to Malcolm Gladwell<\/a>, the Mavens, the Connectors and the Salesmen, who have disproportionate influence on the rest of us. I’ve talked about Connectors, and I’ve talked about Mavens, so what’s left is the Salesmen.\n

Finally, Salesmen are, well, persuasive. Not everybody has a talent for selling, and not everybody learns to use what talents they have. There are people who can sell the proverbial refrigerator to the proverbial Esquimoux, though, and if you can get one of those on your side, it sure helps. They aren’t all in retail, of course. I was Sold on Bible Study by a brilliant teacher who was, of course, a Salesman (technically, I suppose, a Saleswoman). \n

The point is that most of us think that we make our own decisions about things, and to some extent we do. But we can be convinced. We can be converted. We can be charmed.\n

The Salesman is very, very good at selling. He’s much better than we think he is. I mean, we are all somewhat persuasive, on occasion, to various extents. I acknowledge that the spectrum goes much higher than we like to think; a good Salesman is so much better a Salesman than an average one that it’s easy to think he is a different type of person. Is he? I don’t really know.\n

I tend to think of selling as happening through advertising, but in fact, real selling happens face to face (or on occasion over the telephone). It’s hard to see exactly how that would work with voter turnout, except... Well, some of our politicians are great Salesmen (and Saleswomen). Mostly, we think of those as our National politicians, but I feel sure that there are some great Salesmen in your State House. They could, perhaps, be employed to Sell voter turnout. It would need appropriate venues, but whether those turn out to be schools or shopping malls or actual polling places, I don’t know. I’m not saying it would certainly work, but it seems likely. One problem is Selling the Salesmen on it.\n

Another option is to get people who already interested in Selling voter turnout to be better at Selling. Mr. Gladwell doesn’t think much of this idea, as he thinks Salesmen are types. I’m never sure about that sort of thing. There are tricks and techniques that can be learned and practiced. \n

I will never be a real Salesman, however, I could be a lot more persuasive than I am now. I am, by nature, more of a dilettante than a Maven, but if I want to, I could learn a lot about a topic. I am not a Connector, but I could keep in touch with a lot more people than I do.\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, the Few are, according to Malcolm Gladwell, the Mavens, the Connectors and the Salesmen, who have disproportionate influence on the rest of us. I\u2019ve talked about Connectors, and I\u2019ve talked about Mavens, so what\u2019s left is the Salesmen. Finally,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16937,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836\/revisions\/16937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}