Pink - To sell is human: the surprising truth about persuading, convincing, and influencing others

Also by Daniel H. Pink

Free Agent Nation

A Whole New Mind

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko

Drive

Published by Canongate Books in 2013

This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

Copyright 2012 by Daniel H. Pink

The moral right of the author has been asserted

First published in the United States of America in 2012 by
Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

www.canongate.tv

A portion of Chapter 5 appeared in somewhat different form in The Sunday Telegraph
A portion of Chapter 9 appeared in somewhat different form in the Harvard Business Review

Photographs by Jessica Lerner
Illustrations by Rob Ten Pas

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85786 717 9
Export ISBN 978 0 85786 718 6
eISBN 978 0 85786 719 3

Book design by Amanda Dewey

To booksellers, with gratitude

The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, youre a salesman, and you dont know that.

A RTHUR M ILLER ,

Death of a Salesman (1949)

A bout a year ago, in a moment of procrastination masquerading as an act of reflection, I decided to examine how I spend my time. I opened my laptop, clicked on the carefully synched, color-coded calendar, and attempted to reconstruct what Id actually done over the previous two weeks. I cataloged the meetings attended, trips made, meals eaten, and conference calls endured. I tried to list everything Id read and watched as well as all the face-to-face conversations Id had with family, friends, and colleagues. Then I inspected two weeks of digital entrails772 sent e-mails, four blog posts, eighty-six tweets, about a dozen text messages.

When I stepped back to assess this welter of informationa pointillist portrait of what I do and therefore, in some sense, who I amthe picture that stared back was a surprise: I am a salesman.

I dont sell minivans in a car dealership or bound from office to office pressing cholesterol drugs on physicians. But leave aside sleep, exercise, and hygiene, and it turns out that I spend a significant portion of my days trying to coax others to part with resources. Sure, sometimes Im trying to tempt people to purchase books Ive written. But most of what I do doesnt directly make a cash register ring. In that two-week period, I worked to convince a magazine editor to abandon a silly story idea, a prospective business partner to join forces, an organization where I volunteer to shift strategies, even an airline gate agent to switch me from a window seat to an aisle. Indeed, the vast majority of time Im seeking resources other than money. Can I get strangers to read an article, an old friend to help me solve a problem, or my nine-year-old son to take a shower after baseball practice?

Youre probably not much different. Dig beneath the sprouts of your own calendar entries and examine their roots, and I suspect youll discover something similar. Some of you, no doubt, are selling in the literal senseconvincing existing customers and fresh prospects to buy casualty insurance or consulting services or home-made pies at a farmers market. But all of you are likely spending more time than you realize selling in a broader sensepitching colleagues, persuading funders, cajoling kids. Like it or not, were all in sales now.

And most people, upon hearing this, dont like it much at all.

Sales? Blecch. To the smart set, sales is an endeavor that requires little intellectual throw weighta task for slick glad-handers who skate through life on a shoeshine and a smile. To others its the province of dodgy characters doing slippery thingsa realm where trickery and deceit get the speaking parts while honesty and fairness watch mutely from the rafters. Still others view it as the white-collar equivalent of cleaning toiletsnecessary perhaps, but unpleasant and even a bit unclean.

Im convinced weve gotten it wrong.

This is a book about sales. But it is unlike any book about sales you have read (or ignored) before. Thats because selling in all its dimensionswhether pushing Buicks on a car lot or pitching ideas in a meetinghas changed more in the last ten years than it did over the previous hundred. Most of what we think we understand about selling is constructed atop a foundation of assumptions that has crumbled.

I n Part One of this book, I lay out the arguments for a broad rethinking of sales as we know it. In Chapter 1, I show that the obituaries declaring the death of the salesman in todays digital world are woefully mistaken. In the United States alone, some 1 in 9 workers still earns a living trying to get others to make a purchase. They may have traded sample cases for smartphones and are offering experiences instead of encyclopedias, but they still work in traditional sales.

More startling, though, is whats happened to the other 8 in 9. Theyre in sales, too. Theyre not stalking customers in a furniture showroom, but theymake that weare engaged in what I call non-sales selling. Were persuading, convincing, and influencing others to give up something theyve got in exchange for what weve got. As youll see in the findings of a first-of-its-kind analysis of peoples activities at work, were devoting upward of 40 percent of our time on the job to moving others. And we consider it critical to our professional success.

Chapter 2 explores how so many of us ended up in the moving business. 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 carea sector I call Ed-Med. Jobs in these areas are all about moving people.

If you buy these arguments, or if youre willing just to rent them for a few more pages, the conclusion might not sit well. Selling doesnt exactly have a stellar reputation. Think of all the movies, plays, and television programs that depict salespeople as one part greedy conniver, another part lunkheaded loser. In Chapter 3, I take on these beliefsin particular, the notion that sales is largely about deception and hoodwinkery. Ill show how the balance of power has shiftedand how weve moved from a world of caveat emptor, buyer beware, to one of caveat venditor, seller bewarewhere honesty, fairness, and transparency are often the only viable path.