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
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