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The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
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Almost everyone sells; most of it is non-sales selling.
One step to try: before your next important conversation, ask yourself 'Can I move this person?' and write down three honest reasons why.
Almost everyone sells; most of it is non-sales selling.
Buyers now know as much as sellers; honesty wins.
Attune: take the other person's perspective.
Stay buoyant: question yourself before, explain setbacks kindly after.
Find the problem, frame it clearly, give a next step.
Pitch, improvise with 'Yes, and', and serve.
Pink opens by reviewing two weeks of his own calendar, emails and conversations, and finds a surprise: he spends much of his time selling. Rarely for money, though. He is trying to convince an editor, a partner or his son to take a shower. Many people see sales as slick or shady, but he argues that selling has changed more in the last decade than in the century before, and that most of what we believe about it rests on assumptions that no longer hold.
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Predictions that the internet would make salespeople obsolete were wrong: about 1 in 9 American workers still sells for a living. But Pink argues the other 8 sell too. He calls it non-sales selling: persuading, influencing and convincing others in ways that do not involve anyone making a purchase. In a survey of workers he commissioned, people reported spending around 40 percent of their time at work moving others, and saw it as critical to their success.
Three forces pulled so many of us into selling. Entrepreneurship: technology lowered the barriers to starting something small, and a solo founder has to sell as well as make. Elasticity: in flatter, fast-changing organizations, jobs stretch across boundaries, and that stretch almost always includes moving others. Ed-Med: education and health care, which Pink calls the fastest-growing sectors, are all about persuading people to give time and effort today for a better tomorrow.
Why does selling feel distasteful? Pink traces the feeling to information asymmetry: for a long time the seller knew far more than the buyer, which made deception easy and gave rise to the rule caveat emptor, buyer beware. Today buyers can research, compare and talk back, so the balance has shifted toward information parity and caveat venditor, seller beware. In that world honesty, fairness and transparency become the practical path, and sellers become curators and clarifiers of information.
The old motto was Always Be Closing; Pink offers new ABCs: Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity. Attunement is bringing your actions and outlook into harmony with other people and the context. His three rules: increase your power by reducing it, since feeling powerful narrows your view; use your head as well as your heart, because perspective-taking matters as much as empathy; and mimic strategically and subtly. He also cites research suggesting that ambiverts, not extraverts, tend to be the most effective sellers.
Anyone who tries to move others faces what a veteran salesman calls an ocean of rejection. Buoyancy is how you stay afloat, before, during and after. Before: use interrogative self-talk, asking yourself 'Can I do this?' and answering with real reasons, rather than simply pumping yourself up. During: keep a healthy balance of positive to negative emotions, and genuinely believe in what you offer. After: explain setbacks as temporary, specific and external rather than permanent, pervasive and personal.
When information is everywhere, solving problems people already know about matters less. What moves them is problem finding: helping them see their situation in a fresh way and uncover problems they did not know they had. That means curating information rather than just supplying it, and asking good questions. Pink describes five frames that sharpen a message: less, experience, label, blemished and potential. And clarity on how to think needs clarity on how to act, an off-ramp: a clear, simple next step.
With attention spans shrinking, the classic elevator pitch is wearing thin. The aim of a pitch, Pink says, is not to win instant agreement but to start a conversation that brings the other person in. He offers six successors: the one-word pitch, the question pitch, the rhyming pitch, the subject-line pitch, the Twitter pitch and the Pixar pitch, a six-sentence story structure. Before you pitch, decide what you want people to know, to feel and to do.
Scripts worked when conditions were stable and sellers held most of the information; today's encounters are less predictable. When a well-prepared pitch goes off course, Pink borrows three rules from improvisational theater. Hear offers: listen fully, without waiting for your turn, and treat what the other person says as something to build on. Say 'Yes, and' instead of 'Yes, but', which keeps the exchange moving. And make your partner look good, looking for outcomes where both sides gain.
The final principle gives selling its meaning: serve, by making it personal and making it purposeful. Pink describes research in which radiologists wrote more thorough reports when a photo of the patient was attached to the scan; seeing the person changes the work. Purpose matters too, since people are moved by more than self-interest. Borrowing from servant leadership, he proposes servant selling and two tests: if they agree, will their life improve, and will the world be better when the interaction ends?
To Sell Is Human was written by Daniel H. Pink.
Key lessons include: Almost everyone sells; most of it is non-sales selling.; Buyers now know as much as sellers; honesty wins.; Attune: take the other person's perspective.
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BOOK NOTES · TO SELL IS HUMANPink opens by reviewing two weeks of his own calendar, emails and conversations, and finds a surprise: he spends much of his time selling. Rarely for money, though. He is trying to convince an editor, a partner or his son to take a shower. Many people see sales as slick or shady, but he argues that selling has changed more in the last decade than in the century before, and that most of what we believe about it rests on assumptions that no longer hold.
