Making a Connection with To Sell is Human: The Burning of a Gatekeeper
I hung up on Ken (name changed for privacy) for the last time. At 3 am I finally decided that we weren’t going to get paid for the show my band just played. Ken was a promoter for a good venue in Haleiwa on the North Shore of Oahu. He had caught our set a few weeks prior and made us a good offer to play a future show. He said he’d pay us prior to our performance and guaranteed us a decent amount – that’s uncommon. Before the night was over, Ken had disappeared from the venue where he was not only a promoter but a regular waiter. During my first phone call with Ken, when I started to wonder where he had gone, he said he had to go and get extra money from his house because he came up short with what he had promised. A few hours later he said he got into a car accident and was dealing with the cops and would be right there. All of which never happened we found out later. By that point, the venue manager got involved. The manager agreed to pay us half of what we were promised and told us Ken was a new employee and likely wouldn’t be working there anymore. After having everyone in the band and their girlfriends texting, calling, and leaving voice mails on Ken’s phone, we all decided it was time to call it quits, admit Ken was a fraud, and move on.
That night, once the equipment was unloaded and things were put away, I sat down to write an email. At that time my band’s career had a decent amount of connections in the music scene on O’ahu. I filled up the TO: line in an email with every venue, promoter, band, and anyone I could think of that could possibly be connected to the music scene on Oahu. I outlined what had happened that night and that everyone should beware of a promoter named Ken in the future and I pushed send. I don’t think that guy was ever heard of again at his original place of employment, he flat-out disappeared, and as far as I know he never worked in the music scene on Oahu ever again.
The secretary often is a gatekeeper to valuable opinions. Don’t piss off the secretary.
It’s like I was once told, don’t piss off the secretary. A secretary is the gatekeeper to something extremely important, like your grades, your paycheck, or the valuable opinions of people like your boss or other customers. That night in Haleiwa, we were the secretary, we were the gatekeepers to the opinions of other customers for Ken. He didn’t realize that his actions that night would burn any bridge he hoped to cross in the music scene in the future. He hadn’t learned yet that you don’t burn a gatekeeper.
To Sell Is Human Principle
Dan Pink writes about a customer in To Sell Is Human, “…if she encounters any dirty dealing, or ends up dissatisfied, she can do more than simply gripe to a neighbor. She can tell a few hundred Facebook friends, all her Twitter followers, and the readers of her blog – some of whom may pass her story on to their own networks, undermining the seller’s ability to deceive again.”
Don’t burn a gatekeeper = don’t burn a customer with an audience. Customers are now the gatekeepers to potentially huge audiences and you can never know how deep that well of potential clients can be. Maybe they have over a million hits on YouTube, maybe they have a huge blog following, or maybe they have a huge tribe of followers on Instagram or Twitter. Every customer has the potential to be a gatekeeper to a wider audience of customers that could be positively or negatively impacted by the actions of one salesman or one interaction. Take it back a bit more, everyone at a minimum has a few friends on Facebook these days. What’s the likelihood their audience will be impacted by your salesman ethics and you’ve ruined countless future opportunities to move someone?
Making Another Connection: A Call to Action
So obviously I’m trying to encourage you to pick up Dan Pink’s book, To Sell Is Human. You can buy it here. If you do before Dec 31 you can get all kinds of freebies. I know that those of you reading this likely have your own audiences and I believe enough in what I’m writing about that I’m asking you and others to take action. You, the readers, are gatekeepers to me and I recognize the damage that can come from disappointing you, by “pissing off the secretary.” So when it comes to a call to action, like to check out To Sell Is Human, recognize I get nothing if you pick up the book, other than the hope that it serves you and those of your audience. I’m trying to live by the rule…
Don’t burn the gatekeeper.
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