To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others

by Daniel H. Pink

Utility worked better when recipients had lots of e-mail, but “curiosity [drove] attention to email under conditions of low demand.”

People opened useful messages for extrinsic reasons; they had something to gain or lose. They opened the other messages for intrinsic reasons; they were just curious.

Tapping the principles of utility, curiosity, and specificity, if I were to send you an e-mail pitch about the preceding five paragraphs, I might use this subject line if I suspected your inbox was jammed: 3 simple but proven ways to get your e-mail opened. But if I thought you had a lighter e-mail load, and you already knew me well, I might use: Some weird things I just learned about e-mail.

The mark of an effective tweet, like the mark of any effective pitch, is that it engages recipients and encourages them to take the conversation further—by responding, clicking a link, or sharing the tweet with others.

This six-sentence format is both appealing and supple. It allows pitchers to take advantage of the well-documented persuasive force of stories25—but within a framework that forces conciseness and discipline.

After someone hears your pitch . . . 1. What do you want them to know? 2. What do you want them to feel? 3. What do you want them to do?

pecha-kucha has spread like a benevolent virus and metamorphosed into an international movement. Several organizations now use it for internal presentations. And Klein and Dytham have established a foundation that operates free PechaKucha Nights in 547 cities around the world. Visit one to see how it’s done. Then try it yourself. For more information, go to http://www.pecha-kucha.org.

these scripts grew more detailed—morphing from a short primer called “How I Sell National Cash Registers” into a sales manual that ran nearly two hundred pages.1 The ever more detailed instructions, Friedman says, focused “not only on what salesmen should say, but also on what they were to do while saying it,” complete with NCR’s version of stage directions. Sprinkled into the company-crafted monologues were asterisks “that indicated that the salesman was supposed to point to the item he was referring to”—as in Now, sir, this register* makes the entries. The indication* of the transaction shows through this glass.*

you’ll do better if you follow three essential rules of improvisational theater: (1) Hear offers. (2) Say “Yes and.” (3) Make your partner look good.

Overcoming objections is a stage in every formal sales process, one that usually follows “prospecting for leads,” “qualifying leads,” and “making the presentation”—and that stands just before “closing.”

That’s why Salit’s training emphasizes slowing down and shutting up as the route to listening well.

Read these books. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone. If improvisational theater has a Lenin—a well-spoken revolutionary who provides a movement its intellectual underpinnings—that person is Johnstone. His book isn’t always easy reading. It’s as much a philosophical tract as the guidebook it purports to be. But it’s an excellent primer for grasping the underlying principles of improvisation. Improvisation for the Theater by Viola Spolin. If improvisational theater has an Eve—someone who was present at the creation, though in this case didn’t need an Adam and didn’t fall to temptation—it’s Viola Spolin. This book, which came out fifty years ago, but whose updated edition remains a brisk seller, collects more than two hundred of Spolin’s improv exercises. Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse by R. Keith Sawyer. Sawyer is a leading scholar of creativity. In this 2001 book, he zeroes in on our everyday conversations and shows how much these quotidian exchanges have in common with jazz, children’s play, and improvisational theater. Also worth looking at is Sawyer’s Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson. Madson, who taught drama at Stanford University until 2005, serves up thirteen maxims drawn from improv that readers can apply to their work and life. The Second City Almanac of Improvisation by Anne Libera. One part entertainment history, another part impr...

adding a few stickers to the minibuses saved more money and spared more lives than just about any other effort the Kenyan government had tried. And the mechanism at work here—the stickers moved the passengers and the passengers moved the driver—offers a useful way to understand our third and final skill: to serve.

“emotionally intelligent signage.” Most signs typically have two functions: They provide information to help people find their way or they announce rules. But emotionally intelligent signage goes deeper. It achieves those same ends by enlisting the principles of “make it personal” and “make it purposeful.” It tries to move others by expressing empathy with the person viewing the sign (that’s the personal part) or by triggering empathy in that person so she’ll understand the rationale behind the posted rule (that’s the purposeful part).

at every opportunity you have to move someone—from traditional sales, like convincing a prospect to buy a new computer system, to non-sales selling, like persuading your daughter to do her homework—be sure you can answer the two questions at the core of genuine service. 1. If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? 2. When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began?