To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

One of the most effective ways of moving others is to uncover challenges they may not know they have.

The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.

To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.

This principle of moving others relies on a different set of capabilities—in

“It’s about leading with my ears instead of my mouth,”

“It means trying to elicit from people what their goals are for themselves and having the flexibility to frame what we do in that context.”

Attunement

Always be closing. Its simplicity makes it understandable; its alphabeticality makes it memorable. And it can be constructive advice, keeping sellers focused on a deal’s end even during its beginning and middle. But the effectiveness of this advice is waning because

the new ABCs of moving others:

A—Attunement B—Buoyancy C—Clarity

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

the ability to move people now depends on

understanding another person’s perspective, getting inside his head, and seeing the world through his eyes.

Assume that you’re not the one with power.

Think of this first principle of attunement as persuasion jujitsu: using an apparent weakness as an actual strength. 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.

And 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. As the researchers say, ultimately it’s “more beneficial to get inside their heads than to have them inside one’s own heart.”

When social scientists have investigated the relationship between extraversion and sales success, they’ve found the link, at best, flimsy.

One of the most comprehensive investigations—a set of three meta-analyses of thirty-five separate studies involving 3,806 salespeople—found that the correlation between extraversion and sales was essentially nonexistent.

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.34 Extraverts, in other words, often stumble over themselves. They can talk too much and listen too little, which dulls their understanding of others’ perspectives.

SAMPLE CASE Attunement

Discover the best way to start a conversation.

Jim Collins, author of the classic Good to Great and other groundbreaking business books.

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

Buoyancy

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

Before: Interrogative Self-Talk

positive self-talk is generally more effective than negative self-talk. But the most effective self-talk of all doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions.

Three researchers—Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracín of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi—confirmed the efficacy of “interrogative self-talk” in a series of experiments they conducted in 2010.

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

During: Positivity Ratios

“Positivity” is one of those words that make many of us roll our eyes, gather our belongings, and look for the nearest exit. It has the saccharine scent of the pumped-up and dumbed-down, an empty concept pushed by emptier people. But a host of recent research testifies to its importance in many realms of life, including how we move others.

Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina is the leading researcher on positivity—her catchall term for a basket of emotions including amusement, appreciation, joy, interest, gratitude, and inspiration. Negative emotions, she says, evolved to narrow people’s vision and propel their behavior toward survival in the moment

By contrast, “Positive emotions do the opposite: They broaden people’s ideas about possible actions, opening our awareness to a wider range of thoughts and . . . making us more receptive and more creative,” she writes.9

Positivity has one other important dimension when it comes to moving others.

Nearly every salesperson I talked to disputed the idea that some people “could sell anything”—whether they believed in it or not. That may have been true in the past, when sellers held a distinct information advantage and buyers had limited choices. But today, these salespeople told me, believing leads to a deeper understanding of your offering, which allows sellers to better match what they have with what others need. And genuine conviction can also produce emotional contagion of its own.

In research she carried out with Marcial Losada, a Brazilian social scientist who uses mathematical models and complexity theory to analyze team behavior,12 Fredrickson had a group of participants record their positive and negative emotions each day for four weeks.* She and Losada calculated the ratio of positive to negative emotions of the participants—and then compared these ratios with the participants’ scores on a thirty-three-item measurement of their overall well-being.

What they found is that those with an equal—that is, 1 to 1—balance of positive and negative emotions had no higher well-being than those whose emotions were predominantly negative. Both groups generally were languishing. Even more surprising, people whose ratio was 2 to 1 positive-to-negative were also no happier than those whose negative emotions exceeded their positive ones. But once the balance between emotions hit a certain number, everything tipped.

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.

Once the ratio hit about 11 to 1, positive emotions began doing more harm than good.

After: Explanatory Style

One of the towering figures in contemporary psychological science is Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania scholar who helped originate “positive psychology,” which treats happiness, well-being, and satisfaction with the same intensity and analytic rigor with which the field has long treated dysfunction, debility, and despair.

Seligman arrived at the topic from the other end of the emotional tunnel. As a young scientist in the 1970s, he’d pioneered the concept of “learned helplessness.” First with studies on dogs, and later with research on humans, Seligman pushed back against the prevailing behavioralist view, which held that all creatures, whether they walked on two legs or four, responded systematically and predictably to external rewards and punishments. Seligman’s work demonstrated that after extended experiences in which they were stripped of any control over their environment, some individuals just gave up. Even when conditions returned to normal, and they once again possessed the ability to seek gain or avoid pain, they didn’t act. They had learned to be helpless.

In human beings, Seligman observed, learned helplessness was usually a function of people’s “explanatory style”—their habit of explaining negative events to themselves. Think of explanatory style as a form of self-talk that occurs after (rather than before) an experience. 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. They believe that negative conditions will endure a long time, that the causes are universal rather than specific to the circumstances,

Optimism, it turns out, isn’t a hollow sentiment. It’s a catalyst that can stir persistence, steady us during challenges, and stoke the confidence that we can influence our surroundings.

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

clarity—the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identify problems they didn’t realize they had.

Identifying problems as a way to move others takes two long-standing skills and turns them upside down. First, in the past, the best salespeople were adept at accessing information. Today, they must be skilled at curating it—sorting through the massive troves of data and presenting to others the most relevant and clarifying pieces. Second, in the past, the best salespeople were skilled at answering questions (in part because they had information their prospects lacked). Today, they must be good at asking questions—uncovering possibilities, surfacing latent issues, and finding unexpected problems.

Finding Your Frames

the most essential question you can ask is this: Compared to what?

the following five frames can be useful in providing clarity to those you hope to move.