of death. You have to give everyone your best shot. A green
salesperson looks at a customer and says, ‘This person looks like
he can’t afford a car,’ which is the worst thing you can do,
because sometimes the most unlikely person is flush,” Golomb
says. “I have a farmer I deal with, who I’ve sold all kinds of
cars over the years. We seal our deal with a handshake, and he
hands me a hundred-dollar bill and says, ‘Bring it out to my
farm.’ We don’t even have to write the order up. Now, if you
saw this man, with his coveralls and his cow dung, you’d figure
he was not a worthy customer. But in fact, as we say in the
trade, he’s all cashed up. Or sometimes people see a teenager
and they blow him off. Well, then later that night, the teenager
comes back with Mom and Dad, and they pick up a car, and it’s
the other salesperson that writes them up.”
What Golomb is saying is that most salespeople are prone to
a classic Warren Harding error. They see someone, and
somehow they let the first impression they have about that
person’s appearance drown out every other piece of information
they manage to gather in that first instant. Golumb, by contrast,
tries to be more selective. He has his antennae out to pick up on
whether someone is confident or insecure, knowledgeable or
naive, trusting or suspicious — but from that thin-slicing flurry