What Women Can Learn About Leadership From Hillary's Defeat
Four sales techniques we can learn from watching Donald Trump in the debates.
Hillary Clinton (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty)
A leader is a dealer in hope.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
Without doubt, 2016 has been a stellar year for political grandstanding around the globe. First we saw Brexit, and then came the brutally relentless but utterly fascinating slogging matches between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, concluding just a few weeks ago with Hillary’s defeat.
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Right-wing; left-wing; liberal; feminist; racist; sexist; or atheist – none of the labels apparently matter when you are trying to win an election – it just comes down to who sells the voters the most hope.
As a result, I want to focus on “Selling” and “Hope” and look at how women can better use these concepts in business to become leaders. According to CNBC reports, Trump spent less than half the amount Hillary during the campaign, but he succeeded in toppling someone with 31 years of political administration experience and a 40-page, detailed campaign plan. How?
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and, if I had a time machine, I’d hop back and put an accumulator bet on Brexit and Trump (and Leicester winning the Premier League), but since I can’t do that, I have settled for analysing what went wrong for one of the World’s most powerful women in politics.
As I watched the drama unfold between them, I wondered (in an apolitical sort of way) what type of candidate could possibly lose to a man accused of sexual assault, a man who appeared to be openly comfortable with incitement of racial hatred, and a man who labelled climate change “a hoax”.
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As it transpired, the answer was simple: Hillary Clinton.
The question for women is whether she lost because she was a woman standing against a man or did she lose for other reasons? I personally think she lost because he is a better salesperson than she is and he sold people more hope. Whether people agree with me or not, it’s hard to deny Trump’s effective deployment of sales skills.
Here are four sales techniques that I observed from watching Trump in the debates:
1. You don’t need to be the best, you just need to make the most noise.
Hillary was infinitely more qualified and better equipped in politics than “the Donald”, but he drowned her out with noise. On multiple occasions, the content of his noise was completely irrational, but what he had on his side was the tremendous publicity outflow that his noise making generated. Personally, I have never seen so much news on our side of the Atlantic about the US elections and, largely, I attribute that to Trump making outspoken gestures that attracted huge press. It’s probably fair to say that some of Trump’s hyperbole was targeted directly at headline grabbing. Trump mastered the golden rule of sales, which is profile raising on a mass scale. Everyone was talking about him, whether negatively or positively, and that put him at the forefront of people’s minds. In the third presidential debate, he interjected 24 times and made 11 sustained interruptions (35 objecting noises in 90 minutes). Compare this with Hillary’s behaviour where, in the same debate, she interjected 8 times and made 3 sustained interruptions. She followed the rules of the game whilst he broke them to make sure his voice was heard over hers.
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This shows us three things: (A) noise and publicity are critical to selling; (B) sometimes you have to break rules and expected etiquette to be heard; and (C) if people are talking about you negatively, that might not always be a bad thing.
These things are important for women in business to consider, because Trump won a position as a first world leader by implementing them. What more could women achieve in their fields if they were less concerned with only speaking when it is their turn, with avoiding publicity, and with feeling shame over negative publicity?
2. People have to trust you more than your opposition.
Hillary Clinton went into battle for presidency saddled with decades of mistrust surrounding her. She was shackled with scandals, such as Whitewater, Benghazi, and Travelgate. Trump picked up on her scandal-laden past and used it time and time again to discredit her. He shone a light on dark subjects from her history, such as her successful defence of a paedophile rapist. Trump himself though isn’t exactly a Saint, and he had a plethora of skeletons in the closet (not least the fact that he is the first president for 40 years not to have released his tax returns). Hillary only scratched the surface of Trump’s unsavoury behaviours and his lack of transparency, whilst he pummelled her on the furore of her private server emails. I lost count of the number of times I heard Trump label Clinton a criminal and every time he did so, he reinforced that nagging doubt in voters’ minds about whether she could be trusted.
3. People want to follow hope.
Trump was passionate in his contentions.
The “Make America Great Again” rhetoric reminded me of a scene from The Wolf of Wall Street, where Leonardo DiCaprio has the whole office beating their chests. Essentially, Trump tuned into an apathetic and disillusioned part of rural American society and drove them to the streets to wave their stars and stripes flag for him. He also had lots of followers from other parts of American society (clearly, otherwise he couldn’t have won), and it’s hard not to attribute that directly to the fact that much of his campaign focussed on giving ordinary citizens hope. He gave them the hope of more jobs, of greater security, of freedom from terror, and these are things that society cares about. Hillary’s policies were so far apart from those of Trump that often she didn’t even outline how she would tackle the issues that he was raising.
Hillary appeared composed but, at times, cold. It’s a recognisable trait of a trained lawyer, and it’s the default stance for any negotiation. Reacting to anything with passion can alert your counterpart to chisel away at things that mean the most to you. However, Trump wasn’t a traditional counterpart for Hillary. He wasn’t a trained lawyer or a longstanding politician; he hadn’t spent his career being neutral and measured in all situations. For every composed, rational and well-reasoned rebuttal Hillary made, he countered her with shouting, baying, mocking, arm gestures, eye rolling and outraged facial expressions. As a result, he grabbed even more attention and inspired people unused to seeing such showmanship in politics.
4. You have to simplify and REPEAT your messages.
One of the key skills in selling anything to anyone is to message what you’re selling simplistically and repeat that message over and over again. Trump made simple propositions on what he would do if he became president (like building a wall to tackle immigration). He also said he could create more jobs, increase security, decrease regulations on businesses, and reduce business tax. The key for Trump was to just pelt out these simple messages as if they were being fired from a Gatling gun. The messages had determined frequency and were crystal clear so that people fully understood what he wanted to achieve.
Women in business can learn from the Clinton defeat, and the main lesson is that sharpening your sales techniques is fundamental to becoming a leader. Learning to communicate effectively and inspire people around you are the most crucial skills you can possess.
Incidentally, Napoleon, who describes leaders as being “dealers in hope”, is also quoted as saying: “Women are nothing but machines for producing children”. No doubt, if asked, he would have described this as “locker room banter”. Regardless of gender or race or religion or political inclination, what Napoleon and Trump teach us is that to be any kind of leader you must first learn to sell, and the commodity you should be selling is hope.
Jayne Backett is a partner at Fieldfisher LLP in London specializing in banking transactions, with a particular focus on real estate financing. Fieldfisher is a 600-lawyer European law firm, with a first-class reputation in a vast number of sectors, specifically, financial institutions, funds, technology and fintech, retail, hotels and leisure, and health care. Jayne has a depth of experience in mentoring and training junior lawyers and has a passion for bringing discussions on diversity in law to the forefront. She can be reached by email at jbackett@hotmail.com, and you can follow her on Twitter: @JayneBackett.
