Reading This May Be Your Only Non-Sales Activity Today
Daniel H. Pink talks with Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan about his latest book, To Sell Is Human, and the ubiquity of sales today.
Rebecca Drobis
Even if you've never operated a cash register or made a cold call, you probably spend much of your time persuading or influencing others to take an action or make an exchange--what journalist Daniel H. Pink calls "non-sales selling." In his latest book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, Pink explains the new art of persuasion, in which buyers have the advantage, solving problems is less important than finding problems, and the aggressive pitch yields to harmony and attunement.
Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan spoke with Pink about sales-saturated lives.
You write that the 90% of Americans not directly involved in sales spend much of their time selling. How did you arrive at that insight?
It started with a personal insight. I was procrastinating from writing one afternoon, and I started looking at how I had spent my time over a two-week period. I was amazed what a huge portion I spent selling. There are these commonalities between flogging books and trying to get my 14-year-old daughter to clean her room or trying to get Delta Airlines to change a flight. It's all selling in a broad sense. Convincing, influencing, cajoling. And I had a hunch other people were doing the same thing. So to put meat on those bones I did a survey of 7,000 full-time workers. One question I asked was, "What percentage of your time do you spend trying to persuade someone to give you something in exchange for something, such as time, effort, or attention?" I found a lot of white-collar workers spend a huge proportion of their time doing this kind of non-sales selling.
How can the knowledge that so much of what you do is selling influence how you conduct yourself?
I think it encourages you to do things a little more strategically, a little smarter. You realize the goal is to move this person in your direction, so that you will both be better off. And so you bring to those activities a greater openness, an understanding of the other person's needs, and the clarity to make a murky situation clearer. That makes such conversations far more effective than if you just looked at them as random events in your day.
For this book, you spent a lot of time with Norman Hall, the last of the Fuller Brush salesman. What did he tell you about what is and is no longer true about selling?
Norman's kind of selling--going door-to-door--obviously has faded away. But a lot of his principles are back in this new world of selling. For example, he had the best description of what salespeople face. He says every day he wakes up and looks out into an "ocean of rejection." That's a very difficult thing. And it's something more of us have to get used to because we are more out there, more exposed. So we will get rejected a lot more. We tweet something and people don't click on it. We write a blog post and people don't retweet it. We do a Facebook post and people don't "like" it. An entrepreneur goes to a potential customer and they say "no," or he tries to raise money and they say "no." Norman gave me a good sense of how to remain buoyant under those circumstances.
Another thing: Norman kept referring to himself as "soft-spoken." And what I learned--and it sounds a little hackneyed--is how important listening is in every kind of endeavor. No one teaches us how to listen. Norman did a great job of it. You can also connect that to some of the research that shows extroverts don't make the best salespeople.
So what types of people are the best at sales?
Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton, has done research that shows very, very clearly that "ambiverts"--people who are not too introverted and not too extroverted--are the most effective salespeople. Because they are the most attuned. They know when to shut up; they know when to speak up. They know when to push; they know when to hold back. I think most of us are ambiverts.
Some people originally interpreted the Internet and its self-service ethos as the end of traditional selling, which obviously was not the case. How has the Internet changed the way both buyers and sellers approach sales?
The obvious thing is it turned more of us into sellers. Now it's easy for someone to set up a storefront and reach the entire world in very modest ways. So these technologies that we thought would dis-intermediate traditional sellers gave more people the tools to be sellers. It also changed the balance of power between sellers and buyers. Most of what we know about sales comes from a world of information asymmetry, where for a very long time sellers had more information than buyers. That meant sellers could hoodwink buyers, especially if buyers did not have a lot of choices or a way to talk back. The new world is much closer to information parity. When buyers have as much information as sellers, and lots of choices and a way to talk back, then that changes the whole game. It's no longer "buyer beware,"but "seller beware." Because if you try to be duplicitous as a seller, then you are going to get found out.
If so many people spend so much time selling, what are they not doing instead? Are there opportunity costs?
That's an interesting question. It suggests, from an economic standpoint, a coordination problem. Maybe if people spent less time coordinating others, trying to persuade others, then it would free up time to make more stuff. So that is a possible opportunity cost. But to some extent the act of creation and the act of selling are hard to disentangle. If you create something, whether it's a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.
Does the fact that more people are selling also mean more people are buying--or, at least, being moved or persuaded?
That's probably right. They have so many more choices and so many more messages coming at them. And there's more time spent educating themselves to be a more sophisticated buyer.
I understand more people are out there selling because there are more very small companies and freelancers. But how is that true for larger organizations?
In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn't work in unstable conditions. In growth companies, especially, there is this kind of elasticity of function where they are stretching across traditional boundaries. So there are companies that do $100 million in sales or $300 million in sales--and they have no salespeople. What they say is no one is in sales because everyone is in sales.
