Brief Review: “To Sell is Human”
I just finished reading “To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others” by Dan Pink. For anyone in entrepreneurship, leadership, management, marketing — its a good and quick read that I’d recommend.
I enjoyed the last Dan Pink book I read “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us”. The key message in Drive was about “motivation 3.0”, and what it takes to motivate people today in the modern day clearly describing why the traditional carrot and stick (i.e. honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay) doesn’t work anymore. The summarized research explains that to get creativity and productive work form knowledge workers — bonuses and cash compensation are not sufficient. A certain base level compensation is of course necessary, but past a certain amount —additional compensation no longer produces better results — and in fact may produce worse. The new theory that was proposed was that of AMP — autonomy, mastery and purpose — the three ingredients that today’s modern worker needs to provide sufficient drive and motivation to produce their best work. The concept is quite clear — workers need to be able to work autonomously largely at their own time and schedule, they should have a broader purpose in what they feel they are working for (ala Simon Sinek’s “why”), and they should be in an environment where they are growing and improving in their skill, craft, role. If you haven’t read the book — you can see a nice 17 minute summary in Pink’s ted talk on motivation.
“To Sell is Human” is written in the same style —fun and conversational, full of summarized research and anecdotes, and a nice simple memorable theory about selling.
The big premise is that “sales” is not a bad used-car-salesman type thing anymore and in fact all of us are in “sales” — meaning that all of us are in the business of moving others. One in 9 people are officially in “sales” and the rest of us spend upwards of 40% of our times in “sales” type activities i.e. moving others.
Another key concept about the rise and change of sales is information parity. Customers have as much (and sometimes) more information than their sales person, lawyer, or doctor (search engines, social media product reviews, etc.) — and that person on the other end needs to make a clear case for why the customer should “buy” their product, service, idea, or suggestion.
Three concepts that Pink shares about the new world of selling — the cleverly labeled A, B, C’s:
- Attunement — understanding your audience or the buyer. Interestingly the concept that extraverts are the best sales person is challenged by this — and ambiverts who have a high degree of emotional intelligence and attunement do the best.
- Buoyancy — here the concept is about being gritty, positive, and optimistic. Be open to taking your audience/potential customers to new places and new ideas. Enable yourself to improvise and be creative.
- Clarity — Be able to clarify the problem, what you are selling, why the customer needs what you are offering, why its a good fit.
A couple other key concepts introduced were about improvisation and service. The idea here is that instead of offering and “shoving” your product or idea down your audience/buyers throat — be open to learning about what problems they have and helping them solve those problem. Information is abundant — a strong salesperson (or leader) is able to understand problems that otherwise might not be addressed and learns how to offer meaningful solutions. Diagnosing and understanding problems is often more important that the product information per se. Improvisation and the ability to speak the language of your customer and audience is important in this regard. And last the idea of serving your customer. Helping solve their problem, make their world better is critical. Instead of upselling — look to upserve. Not about winning the one sale — but about a long term set of relationships and credibility.
Nice Summaries:
