The Art of Sales: Activating the Audience

In recent weeks, we’ve used case studies from the arts to describe foundational tenets of good sales relationships: embracing the hustle, sharpening your visual awareness, and recognizing the power of silence. By thinking about these tenets in relationship to your own practice, I’ve challenged you to lay the foundation for flow state, a heightened productivity and intense focus familiar to artists and writers. In a flow state, you’ll find yourself creating, recognizing, and acting on a high volume of opportunity.  

Yet sales is different from canvasses stacked in the artist’s studio or pages piled in the writer’s desk drawer. Sales is about transactions driven by human connection, either on the level of interacting directly with consumers, or with businesses represented by individuals. So this week, let’s turn to artists whose dynamic engagements ask others to not only witness the work, but to complete it. In thinking about how these artists activate their audience into participants, we can refine our ways of engaging partners, clients, and prospects.

ALL HANDS ON DECK

When walking up to Laurie Anderson’s “Handphone Table,” first exhibited in 1978, you see what appears to be a typical five-foot-long table of lightly colored wood. Inert. Silent.

Except that the table conceals a sound system. Upon sitting down, subtle curvatures carved into the tabletop invite participants’ elbows to be placed on the wood. By placing their hands over their ears, a person can hear songs, words, tones—conducted by the bones in their own body. The table rewards a confluence of organic need (there’s a chair, maybe I’ll sit) and investigative instincts (what are these curvatures for?). Though Anderson has designed the sonic experience, the participants are charged with making her experience audible.

In an interview, the artist traced her piece to a literal moment of sitting down to a table and cradling her head in her palms. We often associate this posture with exhaustion, distress, helplessness. But when seated at Anderson’s Handphone Table, the pose is radicalized to become a means of delight. In this piece, as in any sales transaction, it is not enough to get a prospect to sit at the table; you have ensure they listen. Soon, your partner or client may find that a position of distress turns into one of discovery.

THE ARTIST IS HUMAN

Marina Abramović refers to herself as a “grandmother of performance art,” having staged pieces for over four decades. From 1976–1988, her partner was Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen). In one of their signature pieces, “Rest Energy,” Abramović held a bow loaded with an arrow that Ulay pulled back, aiming at her heart: a slip of his grip could be fatal. Their relationship culminated in the 1988 act of walking the Great Wall of China, each from opposite ends. Meeting in the middle, originally intended as a marriage ceremony, instead marked their spiritual divorce.

In 2010, Abramović incorporated an in-person performance as part of a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art. The Artist Is Present offered neutral silence with any stranger who wished to sit opposite her, for a period determined by the visitor. Her boundaries were clear: no conversation, no touching. “Nobody could imagine…that anybody would take time to sit and just engage in mutual gaze with me,” Abramović commented. The reality proved contrary. Over about three months, eight hours a day, she connected with 1,000 visitors.

On opening night, Ulay patiently waited his place in line. He sat opposite Abramović. Her face softened. They blinked at one another, not speaking, per her protocol. But then she leaned forward and extended her hands; he touched her hands in return. The crowd burst into applause.

What’s the takeaway? In sales, we often emphasize preparation in the form of question trees, email templates, and elevator pitches. These are essential tools, just as Abramović’s plan for her performance piece was essential—setting, duration, prohibitions. But when presented with a moment she could not have anticipated, she understood that seizing an opportunity was more important than following the script. Get to a point in life (and in sales practice) of being able to firmly articulate your rules. Then you can firmly articulate when and why you break them.

OF CURRY AND COMMUNITY

I’m allergic to many foods. Dairy, egg, beef, shrimp, mango, cucumber, pistachios, cashews, you name it. Hives, shortness of breath, disaster, etc. I’m telling you this so that you understand how amazed I was to find a slow cooker of vegetarian green curry, prepared by Rirkrit Tiravanija for MOMA in 2011, and realize: 1) that I was supposed to eat from it, and 2) that I could eat from it. After scrutinizing the ingredients, I ladled out my bowl of curry and rice. Then I hunkered down in the plywood structure to eat, looking around to see if any passersby would join me.

In addition to being an artist, Tiravanija is the son of a diplomat; he identifies as Thai but was born in Argentina before living in Thailand, Ethiopia, Canada, and now America. His MOMA project, “Untitled / 1992 / 1995 / 2007 / 2011 (Free/Still),” is an incarnation of a recurring installation that critiques the American tendency to compartmentalize. He mixes up culinary cultures using technologies that range across country and era—from mortar and pestle to electric wok—and he treats ketchup and tamarind paste as interchangeable elements in his Pad Thai.

In addition to asking that we commingle the banal and divine on our tongues, Tiravanija wants us to de-compartmentalize our spaces. The original 1992 installation took place in 303 Gallery—the layout of which is evoked with the scaffolding at MOMA—and turned a stage for high art into a setting for relaxation and camaraderie. The key to appreciating Tiravanija’s situational aesthetic is to realize that his work is not centered in the bowl; his work is centered in the participant’s act of accepting a gift, and the commitment to eating in a shared environment.

We emphasize the importance of authenticity to the art of sales. That means a message that is consistent, creative, and sincere. But authenticity is merely a display of ego until paired with genuine engagement. Otherwise, you’ve got a muted table; an unacknowledged love; a meal of curry gone cold. Just as these artists activate their audiences, you rely on the participatory energy of partners, prospects, and clients in your sales transactions. Although it may feel strange to entrust so much power to others, within that dynamic is your greatest potential for impact.

We can help your team with both the science and the art of sales. Reach us at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, coaching, and consulting.