At the recent Inside Sales Virtual Summit, Guy Kawasaki, an author and software evangelist currently working with Motorola, delivered a keynote address about enchantment, which he considers to be the purest form of sales.

Kawasaki characterized “enchantment” as being all about changing people’s minds, hearts, and actions, and providing them with the vision and motivation to buy what is truly best for their needs, rather than just what the salesperson is attempting to sell. This technique involves three pillars:

Pillar One: Likeability.

  • Kawasaki’s first step to achieving likeability is to use a Duchenne smile – that is, a real, eye-crinkling smile, not just one that ends at the lips. This also entails being genuine; faked niceness is rarely convincing.

fake smile 1

I see absolutely nothing unnatural about this smile. Or the fact that his eyes are purple.

  • The next step is to accept people as they are, rather than judging them or attempting to change them through your product. Don’t try to convince someone that their lifestyle and choices are substandard but luckily you can “fix” them – accept them as they are.
  • The third step to achieving likeability is to emulate Jim Carrey in “Yes Man” and make “yes” your default answer. When you meet someone, try to be thinking, “What can I do for them?” rather than “What can this person do for me?” Being helpful and willing almost always engenders a good relationship.

Yes Man 2

Pillar Two: Trustworthiness.

  • Being trustworthy is not the same as being liked. You can be liked without being trusted – for example, I like Amanda Bynes as an actress but I probably wouldn’t trust her with my money – and to be trusted involves trusting.
  • You have to trust others before they will trust you.
  • One example of this is Amazon’s Kindle eBook store, which allows users to return an eBook within a week of purchasing it. Customers could easily read and return the eBook with Amazon being none the wiser, but many, because Amazon trusts them, are prompted to do the right thing, trusting Amazon with their business in return.
  • Try to be more of a baker than an eater – people place more trust in those who create than those who merely consume.
  • Always try to agree with your prospect on something, no matter how small.

Pillar Three: Perfection.

There are five qualities that determine what makes something enchanting:

  • Deep – the product has many features and a depth of functionality.
  • Intelligent – the company has insights into what the customer needs. For example, a small universal TV remote that also contains a tracking feature for when it gets misplaced.
  • Complete – a totality of experience that takes the product beyond just bells and whistles.
  • Empowering—the product makes the customer feel creative and productive, not like they’re fighting the product.
  • Elegant—the design, which should show that the manufacturer really cares about aesthetics. Setting aside function and looking solely at visual appeal, it’s much easier to enchant someone with an iPhone than with a Nokia.

Kawasaki also shared several general tips:

  • During introduction of a product or service, tell a story about why you created said product or service. Don’t just rely on buzzwords like “curb-jumping,” “paradigm-shifting,” and “scalable,” give your brand a narrative.
  • Stop thinking of the type of top-down marketing where you court a high-profile journalist or celebrity and hope they’ll talk up your product to everyone below them on the totem pole.
    Nowadays, it’s much wiser to start from the bottom up, with people who have fewer but higher-quality social media followers.
  • Use the principle of social proof, wherein by showing that you and other people use product, customers know it’s okay for them to use it too. The best example of this is Apple’s white earbuds. The more people saw white earbuds, the more social proof they had that iPods were worth buying, which led to more people buying iPods, creating a positive feedback loop.
  • People have a social need to reciprocate. So when you default to yes and people thank you, your response should be “I know you’d do the same for me,” which enables them to reciprocate to you. This can be helpful when you least expect it.

Click here to listen to Kawasaki’s (and many other presentations) from the Inside Sales Virtual Summit. Let us know what you think of Kawasaki’s technique below.