Tipping Point week 3

This week I read pages 70-100 of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. In this reading, I learned what a maven is. A Maven is a person that is an expert on getting the best possible deal. When you get advice from your maven friend, you always take it because you trust that they are always right. He explains that these mavens give everyone all of their knowledge because they like sharing their information. I have one aunt that is a maven. She loves collecting coupons and telling me where and when there will be a sale. If I ever approach her with something that I am considering purchasing, she will tell me exactly why or why not to buy it and usually if she says I shouldn’t get something, its because she knows of some other place with the same thing for less.

I also learned about what it takes to be a good salesperson. According to Gladwell, a salesman is a person that could persuade you into buying anything because they understand how to manipulate someone's thoughts so that they want to buy it. He said that good salespeople understand three things: 1. Little things are important 2. Non-verbal cues are as important as verbal cues (which pretty much means that your physical presence matters just as much as what you are saying) 3. How convince someone that they need to buy whatever is being sold. This makes me think that salesmen need to know a lot about psychology because they need to know how to know what the other person is thinking about and then using that information to influence their thoughts. Before this reading I just assumed that a salesperson had to know what they were selling but now I feel that all good salespeople could sell anything.