To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

Ask people to describe your invisible pitch in three words.

We don’t always realize it, but what we do and how we do it are themselves pitches.

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?

Improvise

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 first principle of improvisation—hearing offers—hinges on attunement, leaving our own perspective to inhabit the perspective of another.

For many of us, the opposite of talking isn’t listening. It’s waiting. When others speak, we typically divide our attention between what they’re saying now and what we’re going to say next—and end up doing a mediocre job at both.

Genuine listening is a bit like driving on a rain-slicked highway. Speed kills. If you want to get to your destination, you’re better off decelerating and occasionally hitting the brake. The ultimate idea,

is to “listen without listening for anything.”

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.

2. Say “Yes and.”

Like a potter learning to center the clay on the wheel or a tennis player acquiring the proper grip, saying “Yes and” is a foundational skill for improv artists. This second principle of improvisation depends on buoyancy, in particular the quality of positivity.

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.

3. 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.

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.”

Take five.

Designate one day this week to be your slow day. Then when you have a conversation, take five seconds before responding.

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.

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.

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

The Second City Almanac of Improvisation by Anne Libera.

Serve

Sales and non-sales selling are ultimately about service.

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.

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.

the value of making it personal has two sides. One is recognizing the person you’re trying to serve,

The other is putting yourself personally behind whatever it is that you’re trying to sell.

Make it purposeful.

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.

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?

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.