Clancy Martin - How to Sell

I had strong opinions on this whole cheating business because of what our father did to our mother. I asked him once how he could have cheated on Mom. I could always ask him any question. He used to say, “Hey, son, want to take a drive?” Or, “Are you in the mood for a cold drink?” Then we would get in the car and drive around and talk.

“She told you I hit her?”

“Didn’t you?” Jim had told me, but I wasn’t going to let Dad know that.

“That was a difficult time, son. It was when I was drinking. I’m surprised she told you that. That is disappointing.”

“I still don’t see how you could cheat on her like that, Dad.”

“It’s complicated, son. Sometimes one person’s sex drive doesn’t match the other’s. Your mother is what is technically called frigid. That’s not an insult, it is a scientific term. It is not her fault. It’s your grandmother. That bitch. She never held her when she was growing up. That’s why you boys have had the problems you have had. She never held you. She couldn’t even hug you when you hurt yourself. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know how. In your case, Bobby, she weaned you too soon. It was on an airplane. Because she was embarrassed of her own body. Sad.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good excuse, Dad. I could never do that.”

“I hope that’s true, son. You might look at it differently later. Try not to be too hard on your old man.”

“I don’t think so, Dad,” I had said. “I don’t think there’s more than one way to look at it.”

Lisa said, “I understand.” She ate another bite of the nachos. I tried not to watch the way she placed the chip into her mouth. I could see her lips and her tongue and her white teeth. I was afraid that if she saw me watching she would understand what I was thinking.

“So let’s have a new conversation now. You start. What should our conversation be about? It’s your turn. You think of a subject.”

She was easy to talk to until I began to consider her sexually. Well, I had always considered her sexually, ever since I had met her, but she had seemed remote until the past few days. Now the sexualness of her kept happening every time I looked at her, like I would reach out and grab her at any second and start having sex with her, right here under the table, without having any control over it, and that drove everything else out of my head. Not one word that I might speak was in my brain.

I took a sip of my margarita.

“Now you’re just going to sit there and look at me?” She laughed. “Sometimes you really remind me of your brother. And then sometimes I swear you are complete opposites.”

I wanted her to explain that. So I could fix the opposite parts, I mean.

E very salesman had to write his own appraisals, so as part of my training Jim gave me his to do. We did them at closing before going home. Often Lisa and I would hang out at Jim’s desk and do them together. Though normally she let hers sit for a few days before she sent them out. Jim nagged her about that.

“It’s crucial they go out in the morning mail,” Jim said. “It’s called confirming the sale. When the customer gets this appraisal in the mail a day or two after he bought the piece and reads it and sees the appraised price, it reconfirms his decision. Then he tells himself he made a good decision when he spent that money. An investment.”

“What did we pay for these, Dennis?” I was appraising a pair of diamond studs, three carats total weight, set in fourteen-karat yellow gold with push-backs. As a rule when you did an appraisal the jewelry was already out the door with the customer, but Jim was having these studs converted to screw-backs.

“What would you call these for color and clarity?”

Dennis Panier, the manager of the back-of-the-house, was also in charge of diamonds. “Most diamonds we just use our own made-up grading system,” Dennis explained to me once. “We can’t use GIA. It would discombobulate the average Texan.”

I showed Dennis the ear studs. He looked up at them, in a hurry.

“I’d call ’em K SI3s if I were you. That’s close enough for lookin’, anyhow. I pay twelve hundred a carat for goods like those. Pull them and weigh them and you’ll know what we paid.”

I looked at the diamonds more closely myself. It seemed to me that Dennis was right. But Jim had told me “white, eye-clean,” which should translate to H or I, and SI1 to SI2.

“Are you sure? I mean, I’m sure you’re sure. I’m sorry to ask. But Jim said they were — well, something else.”

He laughed. Dennis’s startling, musical laugh was one of his best selling tools. Any person who heard his laugh started to laugh after him, a beat or two after he began. He may have deployed it as a tool or it may have been entirely natural, you could not tell. It was like the pied piper. He looked a bit like the pied piper, too. He was from the swamps of Louisiana and he had the rubber-band-like body and the milky coffee-colored skin of those old French Creoles. Popper had found him tending bar at the Dungeon in New Orleans. He was five feet two or three inches tall, and he had a long nose, slightly pinched at the sides, with a broad round tip. He had a lot of brown hair, and stray curls at his temples, like a girl.

•

When I gave Jim the appraisal he was confused.

“Look, Bobby, the appraisal is not a lab report. I know I told you it is important to get it exactly right. But there is more to being right than being good at arithmetic. We are not calculators, we are people, and so are our customers.” When he had first shown me how to write one I made the mistake of comparing it to writing up a lab in IB chemistry or physics. “This is not a scientific thing. It is a sales tool. Plus it protects the most important person in the transaction. Who is that? The customer. It protects our customer, Matthew, here. Matthew Randolph.” He tapped the appraisal and looked at me seriously. “Mr. Matthew Randolph is protected from the insurance industry if his wife’s new diamond studs are lost or stolen. You know what those insurance bastards are like. They’ll take your money all right but they don’t want to give it back to you. So we have to make sure that Matthew has plenty of money to work with if something does happen. Do you want to explain to Matt that his wife has to downgrade her diamond studs, now, even though they were appraised and insured, because the cost of diamonds has gone up and we failed to account for that in the appraisal? Or that god forbid we appraised the studs too low? Would that be fair to Matt? Would that make him a lifetime customer? This business is about building relationships, Bobby. Relationships of trust. What if some joker pulled every stone on his new tennis bracelet? Those things can weigh out half of what’s on the tag. For crying out loud. We have to trust them to treat our expertise with respect. They have to trust our expert opinions. This is how we do it. Stick to the store’s grading system. Take the information from the tag. That’s why we tape the tag to the original store copy of the receipt. So there can be no mistakes. Then, whatever he paid for them, whatever he actually paid, times it by three. Your retail replacement value. Some customers will ask you to lower this number because of the cost of the insurance. If they ask, fine, it’s their business, their decision. The point is we want his wife to see this appraisal and she’ll think that’s about what he paid for them. She’ll be thrilled. But always call the customer to ask where the appraisal should be mailed. Never forget that. Or you can have a real mess on your hands. It can even turn legal. You understand.” There was a blue pen on his desk. I picked it up and played with it between my fingers. “In case the studs aren’t for his wife, say. And you accidentally send them to the home address. You make that mistake once and you never make it again.