To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

But all of you are likely spending more time than you realize selling in a broader sense—pitching colleagues, persuading funders, cajoling kids. Like it or not, we’re all in sales now.

We’re persuading, convincing, and influencing others to give up something they’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got. As you’ll see in the findings of a first-of-its-kind analysis of people’s activities at work, we’re devoting upward of 40 percent of our time on the job to moving others. And we consider it critical to our professional success.

The keys to understanding this workplace transformation: Entrepreneurship, Elasticity, and Ed-Med. First, Entrepreneurship. The very technologies that were supposed to obliterate salespeople have lowered the barriers to entry for small entrepreneurs and turned more of us into sellers. Second, Elasticity. Whether we work for ourselves or for a large organization, instead of doing only one thing, most of us are finding that our skills on the job must now stretch across boundaries. And as they stretch, they almost always encompass some traditional sales and a lot of non-sales selling. Finally, Ed-Med. The fastest-growing industries around the world are educational services and health care—a sector I call “Ed-Med.”

I’ll show how the balance of power has shifted—and how we’ve moved from a world of caveat emptor, buyer beware, to one of caveat venditor, seller beware—where honesty, fairness, and transparency are often the only viable path.

It’s long been held that top salespeople—whether in traditional sales or non-sales selling—are deft at problem solving. Here I will show that what matters more today is problem finding. One of the most effective ways of moving others is to uncover challenges they may not know they have. Here you’ll also learn about the craft of curation—along with some shrewd ways to frame your curatorial choices.

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

Part One Rebirth of a Salesman

One out of every nine American workers works in sales.

Each day more than fifteen million people earn their keep by trying to convince someone else to make a purchase.7 They are real estate brokers, industrial sales representatives, and securities dealers. They sell planes to airlines, trains to city governments, and automobiles to prospective drivers at more than ten thousand dealerships across the country.

Between 2006 and 2010, some 1.1 million U.S. sales jobs disappeared. Yet even after the worst downturn in a half-century, sales remains the second-largest occupational category (behind office and administration workers) in the American workforce, just as it has been for decades.

Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the United States will add nearly two million new sales jobs

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I discovered that I spend a sizable portion of them selling in a broader sense—persuading, influencing, and convincing others.

Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students on the value of paying attention in class. Entrepreneurs woo funders, writers sweet-talk producers, coaches cajole players. Whatever our profession, we deliver presentations to fellow employees and make pitches to new clients. We try to convince the boss to loosen up a few dollars from the budget or the human resources department to add more vacation days.

Many of us now devote a portion of our spare time to selling—whether it’s handmade crafts on Etsy, heartfelt causes

on DonorsChoose, or harebrained schemes on Kickstarter. And in astonishing numbers and with ferocious energy, we now go online to sell ourselves—on Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Match.com profiles.

Two main findings emerged: 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. People consider this aspect of their work crucial to their professional success—even in excess of the considerable amount of time they devote to

At the same time, large operations discovered that segmenting job functions didn’t work very well during volatile business conditions—and because of that, they began demanding elastic skills that

stretched across boundaries and included a sales component. Meanwhile, the economy itself transformed so that in the blink of a decade, millions of additional people began working in education and health care—two sectors whose central purpose is moving others.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the American economy has more than twenty-one million “non-employer” businesses—operations without any paid employees.

these microenterprises account for only a modest portion of America’s gross domestic product, they now constitute the majority of businesses in the United States.

The research firm IDC estimates that 30 percent of American workers now work on their own and that by 2015, the number of nontraditional workers worldwide (freelancers, contractors, consultants, and the like) will reach 1.3 billion.2 The sharpest growth will be in North America, but Asia is expected to add more than six hundred million new soloists in that same period. Some analysts project that in the United States, the ranks of these independent entrepreneurs may grow by sixty-five million in the rest of the decade and could become a majority of the American workforce by 2020. One reason is the influence of the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old generation as it takes a more prominent economic role. According to research by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 54 percent of this age cohort either wants to start their own business or has already done so.

Whether we call them artisans, non-employer businesses, free agents, or micro-entrepreneurs, these women and men are selling all the time.

eBay. Some three-quarters of a million Americans now say that eBay serves as their primary or secondary source of income.

Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, 1.8 million people have funded twenty thousand projects with more than $200 million. In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States.9

As she explains, “People who don’t have the power or authority from their job title have to find other ways to exert power.”

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. That is also what, say, a good algebra teacher does. At the beginning of a term, students don’t know much about the subject. But the teacher works to convince his class to part with resources—time, attention, effort—and if they do, they will be better off when the term ends than they were when it began.

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

Health care and education both revolve around non-sales selling: the ability to influence, to persuade, and to change behavior while striking a balance between

what others want and what you can provide them.

In 1967, George Akerlof, a first-year economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a thirteen-page paper that used economic theory and a handful of equations to examine a corner of the commercial world where few economists had dared to tread: the used-car market. The first two academic journals where young Akerlof submitted his paper rejected it because they “did not publish papers on topics of such triviality.”1 The third journal also turned down Akerlof’s study, but on different grounds. Its reviewers didn’t say his analysis was trivial; they said it was mistaken. Finally, two years after he’d completed the paper, The Quarterly Journal of Economics accepted it and in 1970 published “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Akerlof’s article went on to become one of the most cited economics papers of the last fifty years. In 2001, it earned him a Nobel Prize.

Buyers today aren’t “fully informed” in the idealized way that many economic models assume. But neither are they the hapless victims of asymmetrical information they once were. That’s why that first word cloud isn’t wrong. It’s just out of date. The belief that sales is slimy, slick, and sleazy has less to do with the nature of the activity itself than with the long-reigning but fast-fading conditions in which selling has often taken place.

A—Attunement B—Buoyancy C—Clarity Attunement, buoyancy, and clarity: These three qualities, which emerge from a rich trove of social science research, are the new requirements for effectively moving people on the remade landscape of the twenty-first century. We begin in this chapter with A—Attunement. And to help you understand this quality, let me get you thinking about another letter.

The research shows that effective perspective-taking, attuning yourself with others, hinges on three principles.

1. Increase your power by reducing it.

Then researchers gave the people in each group the E Test. The results were unmistakable: “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.

To conclude that he inferred sarcasm in Maria’s e-mail depends on “privileged background knowledge” that Ken doesn’t have. As the researchers conclude, “power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspective.”

The results of these studies, part of a larger body of research, point to a single conclusion: an inverse relationship between power and perspective-taking. Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more subtle ones.

As a result, the ability to move people now depends on power’s inverse: understanding another person’s perspective, getting inside his head, and seeing the world through his eyes. And doing that well requires beginning from a position that would get you expelled from the Mitch and Murray always-be-closing school of sales: Assume that you’re not the one with power.

those with lower status are keener perspective-takers.

2. Use your head as much as your heart.

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.

The empathizers struck many more deals than the control group. But the perspective-takers did even better: 76 percent of them managed to fashion a deal that satisfied both sides.

“Taking the perspective of one’s opponent produced both greater joint gains and more profitable individual outcomes. . . . Perspective takers achieved the highest level of economic efficiency, without sacrificing their own material gains,” Galinsky and Maddux wrote. Empathy, meanwhile, was effective but less so “and was, at times, a detriment to both discovering creative solutions and self-interest.”5

3. Mimic strategically.

Synching our mannerisms and vocal patterns to someone else so that we both understand and can be understood is fundamental to attunement.