This past Tuesday, I wrote a behind-the-curtain email about negotiation coach Jim Camp.
Camp is widely respected and cited as a negotiation authority. His ideas are quoted in books and on TV and by dudes like me.
But if you dig a bit, it seems most of Camp’s advice about negotiation was swiped, often verbatim, from sales trainer David Sandler.
Problem:
The claim that Camp swiped Sandler’s ideas is based on textual analysis, by looking at Camp’s book side by side with Sandler’s book. It could be just one hell of a coincidence, or maybe there’s some kind of other explanation than plagiarism.
Solution:
I got a reply to my email on Tuesday from a reader named Ron, with some first-hand experience. I’m reprinting it here in full because it’s juicy, and because there’s an interesting bit of human psychology hiding on the surface of it.
Take it away Ron:
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Thank you John, I’ve tried to tell the same stories to the IM crowd for years and no one seemed to notice.
For a backstory, I took his Camp Negotiation coaching program back in 2009 and it was pretty silly, just a guided text followed by a quiz website (basically rereading the book to you), and my “advisor” was Jim’s oldest son.
At the end of the course, ironically, the module was “no closing” and it was on how closing sales was so 1950’s and you should just ask what do we do next and the prospect should tell you they’re in.
Well after finishing the course, his son called me to show me their new software (which was just a clunky CRM and with little negotiating tips pop-ups to remind you of the techniques) and after the demo, he tried to get me to buy it and I said no thanks.
He goes all weird and tells how I’m going to miss out on all these profitable deals and blah blah blah, and he’s getting pretty aggressive. I chuckled and said “so, no closing right?” He got all butthurt and hung up.
Anyways, I later found out Jim Camp was a franchisee for Sandler (the sales training business was sold city to city as a franchise model) and when his contract was up, Jim just rewrote the book and made up his own terms and sold his programs that way.
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So there you go. That’s the gossip. I can’t confirm or deny the franchisee part of it. All I can say is it makes sense to me personally. And with that, I’ll leave off this Sandler/Camp drama.
But what about that interesting bit of psychology I promised you? It’s there in Ron’s first sentence:
“I’ve tried to tell the same stories to the IM crowd for years and no one seemed to notice.”
This is a curious human quirk that I’ve noticed a few times before.
For example, back in the 1970s, a man named Uri Geller seemed to be blessed with the supernatural powers of telekineses and telepathy. Geller was making the rounds of TV talk shows, bending spoons and reading the insides of sealed envelopes.
Audiences watched with their mouths agape, certain that Geller was living proof that there’s more to life than we see, and that there are enormous untapped powers latent in all of us.
Then Geller was exposed as a fraud by a magician named James Randi.
Randi replicated Geller’s act completely. He also worked with TV producers of the Tonight Show to devise a scenario where Geller couldn’t do of his supposed telekinesis or telepathy.
Geller came on the show, unaware of what was going on. And for 20 awkward minutes, while Johhny Carson patiently smoked his cigarette and waited, Geller tried and failed to do his usual routine.
And the result?
Nothing. Geller’s fame, and people’s belief in his supernatural powers, remained untarnished.
You can draw your own conclusions from this, in particular about how it relates to marketing and money-making and persuasion.
I’ve drawn my own conclusions. And the most important and valuable one is the one I wrote about in the inaugural issue of my Most Valuable Postcard, two years ago. If you’d like to find out what that is: