In his book To Sell Is Human, author Daniel Pink shares with us the surprising truth about moving others.
In order to help me (and perhaps you) remember and apply the ideas from that book, let’s sketch out a visual summary of the key ideas.
We’ll use the visual metaphor of two folks riding a tandem bicycle as a starting point, because after all, selling is a two-person process. It’s about working together and often it’s about going someplace together. So let’s consider the person in front to be the seller, and the person in back the potential buyer.
Pink starts the book by sharing some interesting stats. Officially, only one in nine people work in sales. But when you look at what the other eight spend their time doing, it turns out they do a lot of sales work as well, but not what you might typically consider to be selling. That second group spends about 40% of their time engaged in activities such as persuading, influencing, convincing, and pitching.
So even if you’re not in the official role of a salesperson, you’re likely still spending a good portion of your day doing one of those four things. That’s true not just in a corporate work setting, but also in education, where teachers convince students to care about certain subjects and influence the way they study. It’s true in parenting – as the father of twin toddlers, I spend a lot of time persuading and convincing (or at least attempting to).
As the title of the book suggests, the idea here is that as a social species, we’re built for those types of non-sales selling activities. And the good new is that we don’t have to do it in a way that feels icky, what you might typically associate with a sleazy car salesman.
We used to live in a world of “buyer beware,” especially with that stereotypical car salesman example, where the potential buyer stepping onto the lot knows way less about those cars than the seller. That’s why buyers needed to be careful, because of what Pink calls that information asymmetry that used to exist in most marketplaces.
Now, though, with specs and product comparisons and countless reviews available to any potential buyer, we have moved to a situation of “seller beware.” Sellers can no longer take advantage of information asymmetry, because often the buyer has more information about the product than they do. Therefore it’s not as easy for a salesperson to take advantage of a buyer.
So as a seller, whether you’re selling ideas or products, or a particular type of behavior, it makes a lot more sense to make it more of a collaborative experience. Not one where you’re trying to hide information or pull one over on the other person, but instead you’ve got the intent to go somewhere interesting together.
To support this more humane type of selling, pink introduces some new A, B, C’s of selling that contrast Alec Baldwin’s Always Be Closing from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross and replaces it with Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity.
Attunement
Attunement involves the seller tuning in to the other person and to the context that you’re in, with the goal of coming into harmony and resonating at the same frequency as that other person. You’re tuned in to their situation, as opposed to trying only to push through your own agenda.
Here Pink points out some interesting stats on sales as it relates to the level of extraversion of the seller, where they saw an interesting trend where folks that were heavy on the introvert side or heavy on the extroversion side weren’t great salespeople, but folks in the middle were. That’s what Pink calls the ambivert advantage. So if you’re naturally more of an ambivert, that’s a good sign. But if you tend to be more introverted, this is an encouragement to lean into some more extroverted tendencies during these sales conversations. And vice versa – if you’re extroverted, pull back a little bit so that you can tune into the other person.
Buoyancy
Next we come to buoyancy, which is all about staying afloat in a sea of rejection. That rejection could take the form of people deciding not to buy your product or of your children not following your directions. Pink shares with us something that you can do before, during, and after those experiences to maintain buoyancy and stay afloat.
Prior to any type of sales experience, it’s helpful to engage in interrogative self-talk. Here you ask yourself questions, like when Bob the Builder says “Can we fix it?” Even something as simple as “Am I ready for this?” prompts the type of thinking that will actually prepare you better for whatever conversation you’re about to have. So ask questions instead of just saying “I’ve got this.” or “You can do it!”
Then during the conversation pay attention to your positivity ratios. Keep in mind that emotions are contagious, and where negativity will narrow your options, positive emotions will broaden them. It turns out there’s a golden ratio required for flourishing relationships, and that’s a minimum of three positive to one negative. Three positive experiences to every one negative experience keeps the relationship humming along. But it has to be genuine. You have to actually believe in what you’re selling for this to work. So it’s not about fake positivity, but instead actual excitement and enthusiasm for whatever it is that you’re selling.
Finally, after the sales experience it’s helpful to pay attention to your explanatory style, especially when you receive a no. It’s easy to view a single failure as an indicator of permanent failure, or failure in one small aspect of life as an indication of failure across your life, or of that failure being about you as a person. That’s the pessimistic way of explaining a rejection that you might receive.
The optimistic way is to recognize that failure is temporary, it’s specific to that one situation, and it’s likely about the external circumstances surrounding it, not just you. So moving from an explanatory style that’s permanent, pervasive, and personal over to one that is temporary, specific, and external is an important factor in staying afloat amongst the inevitable rejection that will come your way.
Clarity
Next we come to clarity, which involves helping people see their situation in fresh and more revealing ways. It’s about identifying problems that they didn’t realize they had. So it’s about problem-finding and not just problem-solving.
But once you find a problem, you do need to communicate your solution to it, which is where different frames can be helpful. How you frame the problem and your solution is an important aspect of getting someone to go on the particular journey with you.
Pink describes five different frames you might consider, such as the less frame, where you reduce the options that you present. Restrict the choices of the buyer to help them see those choices more clearly as opposed to overwhelming them with options. Don’t provide a dozen options when three would do.
Then there’s the experience frame. This encourages you to frame what you’re selling as an experience that a person has, instead of just a material purchase, because experiences provide greater satisfaction and gives them a story that they can tell others. So if you’re selling a tandem bicycle, it might be less helpful to focus on the specs of the bike, and more helpful to tell the story of the experience that you and your partner get to have riding around at sunset along the esplanade.
Another frame to consider is the label frame. How you name a product or experience influences how the potential buyer thinks about not only the problem but also your solution. A group experience that was called “The Wall Street Game” led to just 33% cooperation, whereas that same experience called “The Community Game” resulted in 66% cooperation. So pay attention to the labels that you give things.
Consider also the potential frame. Here you emphasize the potential to be good at something over actually being good at that thing. Potential is something that we all like to buy into as human beings. So what latent potential does the selling you’re doing bring out in someone else?
The fifth and final frame is the blemished frame. It sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but it can actually be helpful to acknowledge one negative thing about whatever it is that you’re selling. That makes the experience a little bit more real for the buyer, when you acknowledge that the thing that you’re selling isn’t going to solve every single problem this person has. There is some downside to it, but in comparison to all the positives (which do need to come first), the blemish isn’t all that significant. In that way, it’s similar to the positivity ratios that we talked about earlier.
After finding the problem and framing your solution, you then need to provide an off-ramp. You need to share a specific request so that the potential buyer knows what to do in that moment. Because even if they like how you describe the problem and they resonate with the frame in which you describe your solution, they might not know what to do next. So tell them. Tell them where to sign up or where to buy, and give them a map so that they know how to get there.
So these ABCs of attunement, buoyancy and clarity represent the How To Be portion of to sell as human. In the final part of the book, Pink focuses on specifically What To Do with three specific actions.
Pitch
The first action is to pitch. You’ve got to pitch your ideas in order for them to be heard. And when you do that pitching, when you’re sending your message over to another person that you hope will catch it, treat that person as a creative collaborator. Include them in the process. Let them feel like they are contributing to the journey that you’re going on together. Because they are. They are peddling just as much as you are. And if they feel like they’re part of the process in defining the problem, framing it, and even some of the specifics around the solution, that makes it more likely that they’ll get on board with whatever it is that you’re selling, be it a product or some form of non-sales selling.
Consider what your one-word pitch would be to someone else. If you had to boil it down to a single word, what would it be? If it were a question pitch, what would it be? What would your rhyming pitch be. These are all alternatives to the stereotypical elevator pitch that is no longer as relevant as maybe it once was. My rhyming pitch for selling the skill of visual thinking, a skill set that I teach is “When in doubt, sketch it out.”
What’s your subject-line pitch? If you were writing an email about the thing that you’re selling, what would the subject line of that email be? Here pink points to some research that the emails that have the largest open rate are ones that focus on utility (how to do something) or curiosity (something that’s mysterious and intriguing that you want to learn more about). For example, “I was shocked when I learned THIS about the visual processing power of the brain” or “How to sketch out a visual summary to remember what you read in books”
There’s the Twitter pitch, 140 characters or less. And finally there’s the Pixar pitch. Tell it like a story. Once upon a time, this is what was going on every day. This happened one day this new thing happened. Because of that, this other thing happened. Until finally, this happened.
So those are six different types of pitches that you might develop for the thing that you’re selling that you can use in a collaborative conversation with someone else.
Improvise
In addition to pitching, Pink also suggests that you improvise. Here it’s about bringing in some tips from improv theater, such as listening for offers. Since it’s a creative collaboration, actively listen to what you’re hearing, so that you can stay attuned to where the other person is coming from and respond accordingly.
One form that response will often take is “Yes, and…” It’s not going to be helpful to actively contradict what the other person might be saying. Instead, build on it. Take whatever they offer you and go in that direction.
In this collaborative process, as you improvise, make the other person look good. In improv theater, you can tell when one person tries to be the star of the show by trying to make themself look good. But it’s so much more impressive and entertaining when you build on what someone else has done and make them look good instead of trying to make yourself the star. So look for options where there can be mutual gain, where you both can benefit from whatever it is that you’re selling.
Serve
Finally, pink ends with an encouragement to serve, in two ways.
First, make it personal. A study found that radiologists who were processing CT scans were more meticulous and identified more important things in those scans when there was a photo of the patient up in the corner of the screen, right next to the scan that they were interpreting. Don’t forget that there’s a real person on the other side of whatever it is that you’re selling.
Second, make it purposeful. Consider how what you’re selling makes the world a better place, and if it doesn’t improve someone’s life in some way, maybe you should reconsider selling it in the first place. Building on the concept of servant leadership, Pink advocates for servant selling, asking yourself “If this person agrees to buy, will their life improve?” and “When our interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began?” Lofty goals, but very much worth considering, and very much in line with selling as a human experience.
I hope that you found this visual summary of Pink’s book to be useful, and that perhaps I have convinced you of the value in sketching out ideas instead of just reading about them or talking through them.
For more on using the skill of visual thinking as a personal learning tool, check out my program Sketch Instinct, which includes a quarterly book club where we dive into (and sketch out) good books together.
Cheers,
-Doug