How do we decide who people really are -- and whether we should retain their services?
We look for clues. When a writer profiles a celebrity, for example, and wants to tell us who this celebrity really is, he observes and reports details. What shoes is she wearing? Is she wearing eye makeup? Does she serve water in simple Crate and Barrel glasses, or in Waterford crystal?
What's on her mantel: her Oscar, or pictures of her teenage children?
Does she bite her fingernails?
We try to hide ourselves behind large and obvious things: our house, cars and other outward gestures. Knowing this, when we want to discover the real person behind the veil we look for the tiny details.
Consider, as one vivid example, the heel.
What could be more obscure than a heel? The cartoon character Linus once hinted at the heel's obscurity -- and his own attempts at cultivating his image -- when Lucy one day asked him why he shined only the front of his shoes.
"I care what people think of me when I enter a room," Linus answered. "Who cares what they think when I leave?" Linus was wrong. People noticed the back of Linus's shoes well before he left. In fact, for decades it was precisely to a man's heels that people looked to determine his station in life. People knew that a man might continue to wear an expensive gold pocket watch and rich-looking silk tie for years, but that he would skimp on replacing the heels of his shoes when cash was short, thinking no one would notice.
But people did more than notice. People learned to look for that very detail. Thus entered into English the expressions "well-heeled" and "down at the heel." People looked at people's heels -- a tiny detail -- to tell who they were.
The next time you visit a Nordstrom store, sit in one of the chairs and ask, What's different about this chair? The company ordered it custom-built, at great expense, with a firm seat slightly lower to the ground than a standard chair's. Nordstrom designed these chairs after noticing how much effort it took customers to lift themselves out of heavily stuffed chairs.
Why did Nordstrom spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to custom-make its chairs? Because they understand that tiny details attract and keep customers.
"God is in the details," Mies van der Rohe is famous for saying.
Business is, too.
Copy your prospects: Watch your visible details.
Excerpts from Harry and Christine Clifford Beckwith's new book, You: A Field Guide to Selling Yourself (Warner Books September 2006). For more information, visit BeckwithPartners.com. | 
