To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

3. The Rhyming Pitch Pro tip: Don’t rack your brain for rhymes. Go online and find a rhyming dictionary. I’m partial to RhymeZone (http://www.rhymezone.com). Your try: _____________________.

4. The Subject Line Pitch Pro tip: Review the subject lines of the last twenty e-mail messages you’ve sent. Note how many of them appeal to either utility or curiosity. If that number is less than ten, rewrite each one that fails the test. Your try: _____________________.

5. The Twitter Pitch Pro tip: Even though Twitter allows 140 characters, limit your pitch to 120 characters so that others can pass it on. Remember: The best pitches are short, sweet, an...

6. The Pixar Pitch Pro tip: Read all twenty-two of former Pixar story artist Emma Coats’s story rules: http://bit.ly/jlVWrG Your try: Once upon a time __________________. Every day, ______________. One day _______________. Because of that, ___________________...

After someone hears your pitch . . . What do you want them to know? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? If you’ve got strong answers to these three questions, the pitch will come together more easily.

A pecha-kucha presentation contains twenty slides, each of which appears on the screen for twenty seconds. That’s it. The rules are rigid, which is the point. It’s not nineteen slides or twenty-one seconds. It’s 20 x 20. Presenters make their pitch in six minutes and forty seconds of perfectly timed words and images. Then they shut up and sit down. The format promotes clarity through constraints. And because the slides advance automatically, presenters must convey their message with both elegance and speed.

For more information, go to http://www.pecha-kucha.org.

Pay attention to sequence and numbers.

Go first if you’re the incumbent, last if you’re the challenger. In competitive sales presentations, where a series of sellers make their pitches one after another, the market leader is most likely to get selected if it presents first, according to Virginia Tech University researchers. But for a challenger, the best spot, by far, is to present last (http://bit.ly/NRpdp6). How widely this applies to other settings isn’t clear from the research, but in general, the middle is the place you’re most likely to get run over.

Granular numbers are more credible than coarse numbers. A University of Michigan study asked participants to estimate the battery life of two GPS devices. One device claimed to have a battery life of “up to 2 hours”; the other had an identical, but more finely grained claim of “up to 120 minutes.” Participants estimated the first battery would last 89 minutes, but the second would last longer—106 minutes

Ask people to describe your invisible pitch in three words.

Take some time to find out what they think you’re saying. Recruit ten people—a combination of coworkers and friends and family. Then ask them which three words come to mind in response to one of these questions: What is my company about? What is my product or service about? What am I about?

Once you gather these words, look for patterns. Many people are surprised by the disconnect between what they think they’re conveying and what others are actually hearing. Knowing is the prelude to improving.

Beneath the apparent chaos of improvisation is a light structure that allows it to work. Understanding that structure can help you move others, especially when your astute perspective-taking, infectious positivity, and brilliant framing don’t deliver the results you seek. In those circumstances and many others, 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.

1. Hear offers.

“The bread and butter of improv,” says Salit, “is hearing offers.” The first principle of improvisation—hearing offers—hinges on attunement, leaving our own perspective to inhabit the perspective of another. And to master this aspect of improvisation, we must rethink our understanding of what it is to listen and what constitutes an offer. For all the listening we do each day—by some estimates, it occupies one-fourth of our waking hours6—it’s remarkable how profoundly we neglect this skill. As the American philosopher Mortimer Adler wrote thirty years ago: Is anyone anywhere taught how to listen? How utterly amazing is the general assumption that the ability to listen well is a natural gift for which no training is required. How extraordinary is the fact that no effort is made anywhere in the whole educational process to help individuals learn how to listen well.7

The ultimate idea, she says, uncorking a small bottle of Zen in the cramped conference room when the session is over, is to “listen without listening for anything.”

Once we listen in this new, more intimate way, we begin hearing things we might have missed. And if we listen this way during our efforts to move others, we quickly realize that what seem outwardly like objections are often offers in disguise. Take a simple example. Suppose you’re raising money for a charity and you ask your brother-in-law to contribute $200. He might say no. But he’s unlikely to say only that. He’s more likely to say, “Sorry, I can’t give two hundred dollars.” That’s an offer. Maybe he can donate a smaller amount. Or he might say, “No, I can’t give right now.” That’s an offer, too. The obvious move is to fasten onto the “right now” and ask when might be a better time. But the entire sentence is an offer—perhaps to contribute to your charity some other way, say, as a volunteer. “Offers come in all shapes and sizes,” says Salit. But the only way to hear them is to change the way you listen and then change the way you respond.

As Johnstone puts it, “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made.”9

2. Say “Yes and.” The “ocean of rejection” that we face every day in sales and non-sales selling delivers plenty of nos to our shores. But we also send many back out with the tide, saying “No” ourselves more often than we realize. Improvisational theater urges actors to check this behavior—and say “Yes and” instead.

This second principle of improvisation depends on buoyancy, in particular the quality of positivity.

But positivity in this regard is more than avoiding no. And it’s more than simply saying yes. “Yes and” carries a particular force, which becomes clearer when we contrast it with its evil twin, “Yes, but.”

Instead of swirling downward into frustration, “Yes and” spirals upward toward possibility. When you stop you’ve got a set of options, not a sense of futility. There are certainly plenty of times in life to say “No.” When it comes to moving others, however, the best default position is this second principle of improv. And its benefits stretch further than sales and non-sales selling. “‘Yes and’ isn’t a technique,” Salit says. “It’s a way of life.”

3. Make your partner look good.

Make your partner look good. Improv artists have long understood that helping your fellow performer shine helps you both create a better scene. Making your partner look good doesn’t make you look worse; it actually makes you look better. It shatters the binary, either-or, zero-sum frame of mind and replaces it with a culture of generosity, creativity, and possibility. This third principle of improv—make your partner look good—calls for, and enables, clarity, the capacity to develop solutions that nobody previously imagined.

“That’s so interesting!” The maneuver gives her time to conjure a question, but it also spins the weather vane in a friendlier direction. And when she poses a question, I have to stop a moment, think, and offer an intelligent answer. The idea here isn’t to win. It’s to learn. And when both parties view their encounters as opportunities to learn, the desire to defeat the other side struggles to find the oxygen it needs. Questions, whose potency we’ve seen in both interrogative self-talk and in pitching effectively, change the rules of engagement and therefore the nature of the interaction itself. The conversation becomes more of a dance and less of a wrestling match. That’s something that Fuller Brush founder Alfred Fuller intuited years before improv was ever invented. “Never argue,” he wrote. “To win an argument is to lose a sale.”11

Back then, unscrupulous sellers didn’t have to worry so much about making buyers look bad. Buyers often had nowhere else to go and nobody to tell. Today, if you make people look bad, they can tell the world. But if you make people look good, they can also tell the world. “In improv, you never try to get someone to do something. That’s coercion, not creativity,” Salit says. “You make offers, you accept offers—and a conversation, a relationship, a scene, and other possibilities emerge.” As goes improv, so go sales and non-sales selling. If you train your ears to hear offers, if you respond to others with “Yes and,” and if you always try to make your counterpart look good, possibilities will emerge.

One of the simplest ways to do that—to reduce your ratio of talking to listening—is simply to slow down. Designate one day this week to be your slow day. Then when you have a conversation, take five seconds before responding. Seriously. Every time. It will seem odd at first. And your conversation partner might wonder if you were recently bonked on the head. But pausing a few additional seconds to respond can hone your listening skills in much the same way that savoring a piece of chocolate, instead of wolfing it down, can improve your palate.

Lainie Heneghan, a British consultant who advocates what she calls “radical listening,” offers some ways to test whether you’ve slowed down enough. Are your conversation partners actually finishing their sentences? Are people getting their perspective fully on the table without your interrupting? Do they have time to take a breath before you start yapping? Taking it slower can take you further.

Say “Yes and.” One classic improv exercise is “The Ad Game.” Here’s how it works. Select four or five participants. Then ask them to invent a new product and devise an advertising campaign for it. As players contribute testimonials or demonstrations or slogans, they must begin each sentence with “Yes and,” which forces them to build on the previous idea. You can’t refute what your colleagues say. You can’t ignore it. And you shouldn’t plan ahead. Just say “Yes and,” accept what the person before you offers, and use it to construct an even better campaign. “There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes,’ and there are people who pref...

Enlist the power of questions. One of the Salit session exercises I enjoyed the most, “I’m Curious,” is worth replicating on your own. Find a partner. Then choose a controversial issue that has two distinct and opposed sides. Before you begin, have your partner decide her position on the issue. Then you take the opposite stance. She then makes her case, but you can reply only with questions—not with statements, counterarguments, or insults. These questions must also abide by three rules: (1) You cannot ask yes-no questions. (2) Your questions cannot be veiled opinions. (3) Your partner must answer each question. This is tougher than it sounds. But with practice, you’ll learn to use the interrogative to elevate and engage both your partner and yourself.

Read these books. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone.

Improvisation for the Theater by Viola Spolin.

Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse by R. Keith Sawyer.

Sawyer’s Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration.

Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson.

The Second City Almanac of Improvisation by Anne Libera.

Sales and non-sales selling are ultimately about service. But “service” isn’t just smiling at customers when they enter your boutique or delivering a pizza in thirty minutes or less, though both are important in the commercial realm. Instead, it’s a broader, deeper, and more transcendent definition of service—improving others’ lives and, in turn, improving the world. At its best, moving people can achieve something greater and more enduring than merely an exchange of resources. And that’s more likely to happen if we follow the two underlying lessons of the matatu sticker triumph: Make it personal and make it purposeful.

Make it personal.

And what’s true for doctors is true for the rest of us. Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant. Instead, we should recalibrate our approach so that it’s concrete and personal—and not for softhearted reasons but for hardheaded ones.

In both traditional sales and non-sales selling, we do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person. But the value of making it personal has two sides. One is recognizing the person you’re trying to serve, as in remembering the individual human being behind the CT scan. The other is putting yourself personally behind whatever it is that you’re trying to sell. I’ve seen this flip side in action not in the pages of a social science journal or the corridors of a radiology lab, but on the walls of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. One Saturday night last year, my wife and two of our three kids decided to try a new restaurant, Il Canale, an inexpensive Italian place that had been recommended by friends from Italy. We had to wait a few minutes before being seated. And since I suffer from inveterate pacing disorder, I did a few laps inside the small front lobby. But I halted when I saw this framed sign with a photograph of the restaurant’s owner, Giuseppe Farruggio:

Many of us like to say, “I’m accountable” or “I care.” Few of us are so deeply committed to serving others that we’re willing to say, “Call my cell.”

Make it purposeful.

But Grant and Hofmann reveal something equally crucial: “Our findings suggest that health and safety messages should focus not on the self, but rather on the target group that is perceived as most vulnerable.”16 Raising the salience of purpose is one of the most potent—and most overlooked—methods of moving others. While we often assume that human beings are motivated mainly by self-interest, a stack of research has shown that all of us also do things for what social scientists call “prosocial” or “self-transcending” reasons.17 That means that not only should we ourselves be serving, but we should also be tapping others’ innate desire to serve. Making it personal works better when we also make it purposeful.

This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world. That’s the lifeblood of service and the final secret to moving others.

In 1970, an obscure sixty-six-year-old former mid-level AT&T executive named Robert Greenleaf wrote an essay that launched a movement. He titled it “Servant as Leader”—and in a few dozen earnest pages, he turned the reigning philosophies of business and political leadership upside down. Greenleaf argued that the most effective leaders weren’t heroic, take-charge commanders but instead were quieter, humbler types whose animating purpose was to serve those nominally beneath them. Greenleaf called his notion “servant leadership” and explained that the order of those two words held the key to its meaning. “The servant-leader is servant first,” he wrote. “Becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.”20 The very idea of leaders subordinating themselves to followers, of inverting the traditional pyramid, made many people uncomfortable. But Greenleaf’s philosophy excited many more. Those who embraced it learned to “do no harm,” to respond “to any problem by listening first,” and to “accept and empathize” rather than reject.

What helped servant leadership take hold wasn’t merely that many of those who tried it found it effective. It was also that the approach gave voice to their latent beliefs about other people and their deeper aspirations for themselves. Greenleaf’s way of leading was more difficult, but it was also more transformative. As he wrote, “The best test, and the most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”21 The time is ripe for the sales version of Greenleaf’s philosophy. Call it servant selling. It begins with the idea that those who move others aren’t manipulators but servants. They serve first and sell later. And the test—which, like Greenleaf’s, is the best and the most difficult to administer—is this: If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began?

“But the successful seller must feel some commitment that his product offers mankind as much altruistic benefit as it yields the seller in money.” An effective seller isn’t a “huckster, who is just out for profit,” he said. The true “salesman is an idealist and an artist.”22 So, too, is the true person. Among the things that distinguish our species from others is our combination of idealism and artistry—our desire both to improve the world and to provide that world with something it didn’t know it was missing. Moving others doesn’t require that we neglect these nobler aspects of our nature. Today it demands that we embrace them. It begins and ends by remembering that to sell is human.

Move from “upselling” to “upserving.”

Upserving means doing more for the other person than he expects or you initially intended, taking the extra steps that transform a mundane interaction into a memorable experience. This simple move—from upselling to upserving—has the obvious advantage of being the right thing to do. But it also carries the hidden advantage of being extraordinarily effective. Anytime you’re tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you’re doing and upserve instead. Don’t try to increase what they can do for you. Elevate what you can do for them.