To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

non-sales selling—selling that doesn’t involve anyone making a purchase.

People are now spending about 40 percent of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling—persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase. Across a range of professions, we are devoting roughly twenty-four minutes of every hour to moving others.

In particular, large organizations tend to rely on specialization. A two-person company doesn’t need a human resources department.

It also requires discovering customers’ needs, understanding how the products are used, and building something so unique and exciting that someone will be moved to buy.

In the paper, Akerlof identified a weakness in traditional economic reasoning. Most analyses in economics began by assuming that the parties to any transaction were fully informed actors making rational decisions in their own self-interest.

Attunement is the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you’re in.

“High-power participants were almost three times as likely as low-power participants to draw a self-oriented ‘E.’”2 In other words, those who’d received even a small injection of power became less likely (and perhaps less able) to attune themselves to someone else’s point of view.

“power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspective.”

Start your encounters with the assumption that you’re in a position of lower power. That will help you see the other side’s perspective more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them.

Social scientists often view perspective-taking and empathy as fraternal twins—closely related, but not identical. Perspective-taking is a cognitive capacity; it’s mostly about thinking. Empathy is an emotional response; it’s mostly about feeling.

empathy is valuable and virtuous in its own right. But when it comes to moving others, perspective-taking is the more effective of these fraternal twins.

This second principle of attunement also means recognizing that individuals don’t exist as atomistic units, disconnected from groups, situations, and contexts. And that requires training one’s perspective-taking powers not only on people themselves but also on their relationships and connections to others.

In the world of waiters and waitresses, this sort of attunement is called “having eyes” or “reading a table.”

When salesmen (all the sellers were male) lightly touched prospective buyers, those buyers rated them far more positively than they rated salespeople who didn’t touch.21

Martin also said that top salespeople have strong emotional intelligence but don’t let their emotional connection sweep them away. They are curious and ask questions that drive to the core of what the other person is thinking.

According to a large study of European and American customers, the “most destructive” behavior of salespeople wasn’t being ill-informed. It was an excess of assertiveness and zeal that led to contacting customers too frequently.

He says his favorite opening question is: Where are you from?

begin to master the techniques of strategic mimicry? The three key steps are Watch, Wait, and Wane:

http://www .danpink.com/assessment—where I’ve replicated the assessment that social scientists use to measure introversion and extraversion.

If you test as an extravert, try practicing some of the skills of an introvert. For example, make fewer declarations and ask more questions.

If you turn out to be an introvert, work on some of the skills of an extravert. Practice your “ask” in advance, so you don’t flinch from it when the moment arrives.

Gather a few people and ask them to think of items that somebody from three hundred years ago would not recognize. A traffic light, maybe. A carry-out pizza. An airport screening machine. Then divide into groups of two. Each pair selects an item. One person plays the role of someone from the early 1700s. The other has to explain the item.

group’s social cartography. Draw a diagram of where each person in the meeting is sitting. When the session begins, note who speaks first by marking an X next to that person’s name. Then each time someone speaks, add an X next to that name. If someone directs her comments to a particular person rather than to the whole group, draw a line from the speaker to the recipient.

note the mood at the beginning of the session. On a scale of 1 (negative and resistant) to 10 (positive and open), what’s the temperature? Then, at what you think is the midpoint of the meeting, check the mood again. Has it improved? Deteriorated? Remained the same? Write down that number, too. Then do the same at the very end.

Assemble a group of three or four people and pose this question: What do we have in common, either with another person or with everyone? Go beyond the surface.

How to stay afloat amid that ocean of rejection is the second essential quality in moving others. I call this quality “buoyancy.”

“Just getting myself out of the house and facing people” is the stiffest challenge, he says. “It’s that big, unknown faceless person I have to face for the first time.”

Interrogative self-talk, the researchers say, “may inspire thoughts about autonomous or intrinsically motivated reasons to pursue a goal.”

Questioning self-talk elicits the reasons for doing something and reminds people that many of those reasons come from within.*

To help get us out of the door, then, the first component in buoyancy is interrogative self-talk.

For the seller, positive emotions can widen her view of her counterpart and his situation. Where negative emotions help us see trees, positive ones reveal forests. And that, in turn, can aid in devising unexpected solutions to the buyer’s problem.

Once positive emotions outnumbered negative emotions by 3 to 1—that is, for every three instances of feeling gratitude, interest, or contentment, they experienced only one instance of anger, guilt, or embarrassment—people generally flourished.

Hall seems to have found the proper mix. He says that he tries to begin his day with one or two sales calls that he knows will be friendly. He also seeks positive interactions throughout his day.

People who give up easily, who become helpless even in situations where they actually can do something, explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal.

In other words, the salespeople with an optimistic explanatory style—who saw rejections as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than universal, and external rather than personal—sold more insurance and survived in their jobs much longer.

Ask yourself: “Can I move these people?”

But don’t simply leave the question hanging in the air like a lost balloon. Answer it—directly and in writing. List five specific reasons why the answer to your question is yes.

visit Barbara Fredrickson’s website (http://positivityratio.com/). Take her “Positivity Self Test”—a twenty-question assessment you can complete in two or three minutes that will yield your current positivity ratio.

In fact, try listing Fredrickson’s ten positive emotions—joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love—on your phone, computer, or office wall. Select one or two. Then in the course of the day, look for ways to display those emotions.

ask yourself three questions—and come up with an intelligent way to answer each one “no”:

Is this permanent?

Is this pervasive?

Is this personal?

The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity.

For more information, visit Seligman’s website (http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx), and take his Optimism Test to get a sense of your current style.

Try actually counting the nos you get during a week.

Even in that weeklong ocean of rejection, you’ve still managed to stay afloat. That realization can give you the will to continue and the confidence to do even better the following week.

how you see rejection often depends on how you frame it.

We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation.

In other words, reducing consumers’ options from twenty-four choices to six resulted in a tenfold increase in sales.