to do “whatever it takes” to manipulate their prospects.
At a recent conference, for instance, I watched two hustlers maneuver three prospective clients into buying a program that they didn't need by pressuring them in front of a room full of people. I was so upset that I charged out of the room, checked out of my hotel, and caught an early flight home. What I saw was not only unconscionable, but also unnecessary. These men didn't have to rely on dirty tricks. They could have made the sales without forcing their clients (read: victims) to risk their egos and professional identities simply to decline an offer.
While the idea of being a One-Up salesperson is provocative, at its core it speaks to an ethical obligation to serve others. So, as you read this book, I hope you'll consider both tactics and ethics as you develop your own One-Up position. Use them to serve, to share, and to guide your clients—but most of all, to create value for them because you've been there before. The basic script goes like this: I know something you don't know. May I share it with you?
Introduction
People buy from people they trust to make a decision they don't trust themselves to make.
—Chris Beall
Three Miles High and One-Down
I was standing at Basecamp 1 on Mount Everest, where the thinness of the air at 17,000 feet made it hard to breathe. I had no interest in climbing 12,000 more feet to scale the tallest mountain on Earth, but I could not pass up the chance to take some pictures. Unfortunately, I'd suffered from altitude sickness during my entire visit to Tibet: my hands and arms often started tingling, like when your leg falls asleep during a long flight, and more than once I woke up gasping for air. A week's worth of prescription medicine had not done me much good—the tingling was getting worse, and that day it had not stopped for hours. Three miles above sea level, I was becoming concerned.
Soon, even the small hill we were climbing was too much for me to handle. My Sherpa, the guide who arranged and led our trip that day, asked me what was wrong. I breathlessly pushed out the words, “I have altitude sickness. I'm tingling and it's hard to breathe.” He replied, “Are you taking altitude medicine?” I pulled the small box of pills out of my pocket and explained that my doctor prescribed them. The Sherpa took one look at the medicine and diagnosed me: “The medicine is what's making you sick. Throw it away, then walk faster so you can get more air into your body.” Walk faster? I can barely inch up this hill! But I knew I had to make a choice: Did I trust my guide or my doctor?
Earlier in the day, I had visited my Sherpa's home. On the ground level, donkeys and chickens roamed around on a dirt floor, warmed by a smoke-belching potbelly stove. The outside of the house was covered in yak dung that had been shaped into patties and pressed against the outside walls, each one with an individual handprint of one of the Sherpa's family members. That detail struck me as I pondered my dilemma: I was being advised by a man whose house is covered in yak dung. I was positive that my physician, Dr. Zimmerman, an educated man, used a more, well, conventional insulation to keep his house warm. But I also knew that my doctor had never even been to the Himalayas, let alone Basecamp 1. And while my Sherpa had no formal degrees, he makes a living guiding people up to Everest.
After a long moment, I threw the medicine in a nearby trash can and started walking faster. My lungs burned, but the harder I worked to get up the hill, the better I started to feel. My Sherpa was right: I was getting more air into my lungs. Neither my education nor my doctor's years of medical school could match his knowledge and experience. That expertise put him in the One-Up position, a more valuable resource than a hundred degrees.
What Is the One-Up Position?
The concept of being One-Up, as you might guess, comes from the idea of one-upmanship. The Oxford English Dictionary will tell you that one-upmanship is the “technique of gaining a feeling of superiority over another person.”1 But that's not accurate for our purposes. My Sherpa was not advising me because he was trying to show off or feel superior to me. Instead, his knowledge and experience exceeded both mine and my doctor's, so he was confident in both his expertise and how he could help me. A better definition comes from Jay Haley, one of the founders of family therapy at Stanford University's Palo Alto Veteran's Hospital. He also created the strategic approach to psychotherapy. While at Stanford in the early 1950s, Haley was fortunate enough to meet a student (and patient) of psychoanalysis, who had written a book about what he called “the most basic principles of one-upmanship.” Haley read the unpublished book, which he recounted in an essay a few years later. In his summary, one-upmanship captures a dynamic present “in any human relationship”:
One person is constantly maneuvering to imply that he is in a “superior position” to the other person in the relationship. This “superior position” does not necessarily mean superior in social status or economic position; many servants are masters at putting their employers one-down. Nor does it imply intellectual superiority as any intellectual knows who has been put “one-down” by a muscular garbage collector in a bout of Indian wrestling. “Superior position” is a relative term which is continually being defined and re-defined by the ongoing relationship.2
In this book, we're going to apply the idea of being One-Up to selling more effectively, by using the modern sales approach necessary to help your contacts make effective decisions about how they should change to produce better results. At Basecamp 1, my Sherpa was One-Up and I was One-Down—not just because his knowledge and experience far exceeded mine, but because his advice created value for me. If my Sherpa needed help and guidance around a complex sale or sales leadership, I would be in the One-Up position. Generally, the person who needs help and is willing to pay for it is in the One-Down position. You are in the One-Up position when your superior knowledge and experience benefits your clients, which makes your expertise invaluable.
The Ethics of the One-Up Sale
Without a strong ethical underpinning, the powerful strategies and tactics you'll find in this book could easily harm your results. Let's review the interaction I had with my Sherpa. There is no evidence that he thought himself a superior human being, even if his physical abilities and adaptation to the mountain were far greater than mine. He was not competing with me (or with Dr. Zimmerman), nor was he just showing off. Instead, he was offering me help based on his situational knowledge, a type of pattern recognition that only comes from many experiences over time. In this case, he recognized the root of my (unnecessary) suffering: the poor decision I had made to trust my altitude sickness medicine. His One-Up advice forced me to adjust my beliefs and my behaviors, but with the significant benefit of better health outcomes and a far more pleasant visit.
In the world of sales, our prospective clients often struggle to produce results because they made a poor decision, possibly because they didn't fully recognize or understand their circumstances. No part of being One-Up requires you to judge your client for a past mistake or for waiting so long to fix it. Instead, you will use the One-Up approach to help them modify what they are doing and produce the better outcomes they need. The single reason you need to be One-Up is so you can help your contacts be One-Up in their business. This attitude is essential to being a trusted advisor, which as my friend Charlie Green points out, includes being credible, reliable, intimate, and other-oriented. Being One-Up also requires being consultative: providing professional advice that not only helps solve problems but enhances problem-solving in the first place.
In other words, your responsibility to your contacts is to help them be One-Up. Your One-Up advice helps decision-makers and decision-shapers explain their verdict to their
