To Sell is Human

Daniel Pink: It's an interesting question, I think that there are some slight differences among all those, but I don't see any deep theological divide among all those. To some extent I look at persuasion as changing your mind. I can persuade you that blue is a nice color, but you're not actually doing anything, you're not actually giving anything up, so I think that is the difference between sales and persuasion. Influence, I think, is maybe a little bit closer in that it suggests that you're actually moving people's behavior a little bit. But I actually explicitly chose to talk about sales, partly because it's somewhat controversial, that is we tend to have a greater resistance to the concept of sales than we do to persuasion and influence. And I do think a lot of what people are doing on the job, even if they're not selling products or services, is a form of sales and so I wanted to call it that rather than calling it something that sounded a little bit better, had a slightly more sugary connotation.

Rachel Salaman: In fact in the book you coin a term: "non sales selling," and you say that that's become much more prevalent these days. Could you talk a bit more about what you think that is?

Daniel Pink: Sure, so in order to do some of this research, I did a pretty large survey of an American audience, of a sample of the American workforce, and one of the questions we asked is, "What percentage of your time do you spend trying to convince other people to part with what they have in exchange for what you have?" And we found that people are spending about 40 percent of their time in this thing called "non sales selling." What I mean by this is it's sales, it's a transaction, you're giving something to me, I'm giving something to you, but it's sales with a twist, money is not changing hands, the cash register is not ringing, the denomination is not dollars or euros or pounds, but it's time, it's effort, it's attention, it's energy, it's commitment, it's zeal. It's often more intangible things like that, and that's a lot of time that people are spending because when people reflect on what they do they realize, "Hey I'm pitching ideas in my job, I'm trying to get my teammates to come and work on this project rather than on another project." I'm trying to get my boss to say, "Listen boss, give me more resources, I can't do it just with what you give me." Bosses are saying to their employees, "Don't do it this way, do it that way," or "Can I get you to do X rather than Y?" And it's a big part of how we spend our time at work. What's interesting about it is that it's a revelation that's not too difficult to surface, that all it requires is some amount of reflection, and that's what I've tried to do. When people just reflect on your work a little bit, just think about it through maybe a longer lens and I think once people do that they understand it very deeply, they spend very little, almost no pushback on that claim. Most people, when you say, "You're spending a lot of your time selling," they say, "Yes, what do I do, what do I do about it, how do I get better at it?"

Rachel Salaman: Now whether someone is in traditional sales or the kind of non-sales selling we were just talking about, you say that the prevailing motto, if you like, has changed from "caveat emptor, buyer beware," to "caveat venditor, seller beware." What exactly do you mean by that?

Daniel Pink: Well, "caveat emptor, buyer beware," comes from a certain set of conditions, the conditions of information asymmetry where the seller always had a lot more information than the buyer. When the seller has a lot more information than the buyer, and that's basically selling until very recently, whether you're selling cars, whether you're selling property, whether you're selling computer systems, whether you're selling machine tools or whatever, the seller always knew a lot more than the buyer. When the seller has a huge information advantage, the seller can rip you off. To me, this is the reason why people think of sales as manipulative, sleazy, lowbrow, dishonest, all these very negative connotations, and that's because of this information asymmetry. The negative connotations and the whole concept of "buyer beware" come from a world when sellers have a lot more information than buyers, buyers don't have many choices and don't have a way to talk back, that's the world of "buyer beware." But that's not our world. We live in a world where, in many kinds of markets, not all, buyers can have as much information as sellers. Buyers can sometimes have more information than sellers. It's true when people go buy an automobile they can research the heck out of it and go in there knowing arguably more about a Toyota Camry than the Toyota Camry dealer. Even in a non-sales setting they can go into a physician's office and actually have a lot of information about what they think is wrong with them. You can go into a classroom setting where a student who is eagerly reading stuff and learning stuff online might know more than her teacher about a particular topic. And so a world of information parody is a world of "seller beware," when buyers have lots of information, lots of choices, and lots of ways to talk back. Now it's the seller who is also on notice, and to me that's just a fundamentally different world, it's not just a little bit different from a world of "buyer beware," it's not the difference between blue and light blue, it's the difference between blue and a banana, it's a different thing altogether.

Rachel Salaman: You say in the book that everyone can sell, that it comes naturally to humans, but aren't some people better at it than others, or at least more comfortable doing it, which might equate to the same thing?

Daniel Pink: Perhaps, but I have a mixed and paradoxical view on this, and the first thing is that a lot of the salespeople I talk to really push back on the idea that there are natural salespeople. Today, especially in sales-sales, what matters more than almost anything else is expertise. And people just don't come out, "You're not a natural expert in ball bearings, you have to work at it," and I think it's true for other kinds of things. I don't think that people are natural violinists, I don't think that people are natural cricket players. People might be interested, have a certain proclivity, but the way they get good at it is through work and practice and practice and practice. On the other hand what the research does show is that the personality type that's most advantageous to sales is the personality type that most of us have. That is, we have this belief that extroverts are better salespeople than introverts, and that's actually true, extroverts are better than introverts, but neither are as good as the people in the middle, what are called "amboverts," and most of us are kind of in the middle. So, to some extent, and it's a little bit of a paradox, there are no natural salespeople because at some level we're all natural salespeople. So on introversion and extroversion, it's a really interesting issue because we have this belief, and it's a belief that actually you can see in practice, in that extroverts are more likely to go into sales jobs, extroverts are more likely to get hired at sales jobs, extroverts are more likely to get promoted at sales jobs, but when you look at the link between extroversion and sales performance it's basically non-existent. Adam Grant at the University of Pennsylvania did some great research, he measured the introversion/extroversion scores of a team of software sellers, and then they went out into the field for three months and he measured how much they sold, and what he found is that extroverts did a little bit better than introverts, but neither did as well as the third group, the amboverts. Amboverts are a group of people who are in the middle, they're not strongly introverted, they're not strongly extroverted and what he found (and which makes sense once we unpack it), is that very strong introverts are not very good at selling, they don't assert themselves, they're a little too quiet, they're not good at it, but that's no surprise. But the bigger surprise is that the people on the other end of the spectrum, the very strong extroverts, they weren't very good at it either, and the reasons were that they were often too pushy, they came on too strong, they didn't listen very well. And it's the people in the modulated middle who are ambidextrous in their personalities who flourish easily the best, they're a little bit extroverted, a little bit introverted, and they have a wider repertoire of skills. They know when to push, they know when to hold back, they know when to speak up, they know when to shut up. I think the good news here is that most of us are amboverts, very few of us are represented on the extremes of introversion or extroversion, most of us are in the middle and it's the people in the middle who end up selling the best.

Rachel Salaman: So in the book you take a classic sales acronym ABC, "Always Be Closing," from "Glengarry Glen Ross," and you turn it around and give it a new meaning. Could you explain your new acronym based on ABC?

Daniel Pink: The new acronym is A, "Attunement," B, "Buoyancy," C "Clarity." Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity, these are the three foundational qualities that are necessary in moving, persuading, influencing others in a world of "seller beware." Attunement is perspective taking: "Can I take your perspective and get out of the anchor on my own perspective, see the world from your point of view?" Buoyancy is: "How do you stay afloat in an ocean of rejection?" And that's what sales is, you're rejected all the time, and social science gives us some very interesting clues about what to do before an encounter, what to do during an encounter, what to do after an encounter to remain buoyant. And finally is "Clarity," the C, we do not live in a world of information asymmetry, we live in a world of information overload in some ways, and so being able simply to access information doesn't give you a comparative advantage, what gives you a comparative advantage is being able to curate information, distill information, separate out the signal from the noise, and also to move from solving existing problems to identifying new problems. There's a lot more action now in identifying problems people don't realize that they have than there is in solving existing problems, because if people know precisely what their problem is, they can probably find a solution on their own, you are more valuable to the other person if you are helping them to surface latent needs, helping them to see problems that exist down the road, helping them identify problems they don't realize that they actually confront.

Rachel Salaman: Can you talk a bit more about that idea which comes out quite strongly in your book, that the new selling paradigm is now more about problem finding rather than problem solving.

Daniel Pink: I think it's an important point, I think it goes even beyond selling, because here's the thing, people have so much information and so many tools to help themselves. Let's say that I have a light fixture in my house and the light bulb burns out and I know precisely what light bulb my light fixture needs. I don't need a light bulb salesman, why would I need that? I know precisely what my problem is, and I can find it on my own. Where I might need somebody's help is if a salesperson comes to my house and she says, "Well, the reason that the light bulb is burning out is that you have a problem in your electrical system, or you're trying to illuminate this room and you're keeping the light on all the time, and the reason is that you have the wrong kind of curtains that aren't letting in enough natural light." "Whoa, wait a second, I didn't realize that was my problem and that's valuable to me." But simply solving an existing problem doesn't matter so much, what you need is the skill of problem finding, and there's a whole literature on problem finding and it ends up being very much an artistic skill, it's an iterative creative kind of skill, it's "How do you give people something they didn't know that they were missing?" And it's very different from solving existing problems, it's very different from solving an algebra problem or balancing an equation in chemistry, it is the skill to some extent of inventors, of poets, of musicians.

Rachel Salaman: If we can talk a little bit about the A for "Attunement," one of the points you make in the book is about strategic mimicry, could you just tell us a bit more about that?

Daniel Pink: Yes, if you look at human beings, human beings are natural mimickers, we mirror other people's behaviors in some pretty interesting ways. In a weird way, your listeners can't see this, but you and I are sitting in a very similar way right now. I wasn't even conscious of it until you asked that question. Just look at the way we're sitting; our legs are crossed in a similar way, we have one hand in one place and one hand in another place. This is what human beings do, and you watch in action, people who are having a conversation, people who are engaged with each other, they tend to mirror each other's gestures, mannerisms, even their word choices, and it turns out that there's some fascinating research that says that it's actually being conscious of that, a little more conscious of that, is very effective. So there's some interesting studies that put people in negotiation settings, so they send one group into a negotiation, they send another group into a negotiation with the same set of facts, same kind of instructions, but five minutes beforehand they say, "Pay attention to mimicry." And the group that had these last minute, pretty shabby instructions about mimicry ended up coming up with a deal that was better for both sides than the group that went in with the same set of facts, same set of instructions, and wasn't focused on mimicry. What I don't like about it is that it sounds like it's duplicity and it isn't, and for those of your listeners who fear duplicity, I mean go out at lunch and watch people talk to each other and take a wide lens on their behavior as if you're shooting a wildlife film, and these are not human beings in Soho in London, but these are wildebeests on the savannah somewhere in Africa, and watch how they behave. You're going to see a lot of mimicry, and it's how people understand each other, and if we just become a little bit more conscious of it, it just gives you another channel of communication. It's also verbal, too. One of the things that you see, there's some interesting research that shows that waiters and waitresses who repeat back the customer's order word for word earn far higher gratuities than ones who say, "Got it, OK, great." It's not like the waiters who are not repeating the order are getting the order wrong, it's just that the people who are repeating the order back word for word are signaling, "I understand where you're coming from, I'm listening to you." If you look at something in sales-sales the huge mistake that people in any kind of technical sales make is they use their own language rather than the customer's language. They should be using the customer's language in order to explain and clarify what's going on, but they love resorting to their own somewhat mystifying technical language which ends up actually misattuning you to your customer.

Rachel Salaman: You offer a great tip that you borrowed from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, which is always to have an empty chair at meetings. Can you tell us about that and how it works?

Daniel Pink: Yes, this is a cool idea, Bezos does it and others do it as well, and it's basically this, so he'll have a meeting on something of significance to the company and he'll bring in his marketing people and his operations people and his software people, but at these important meetings he'll also include a chair around the table that remains empty, and that chair represents the most important person in the room who is not in the room, and that is the customer. And the idea here is that by having an empty chair it forces the people in this meeting to attune themselves to the customers' interests. "So, we're saying our new strategy is going to be this… oh, what do the customers think?" "Our new pricing is going to be this… what would the customer think?" "Our new advertising campaign is going to be this… what would the customer think?" And I think it's actually a really brilliant strategy for a number of reasons, first of all it brings attunement to the surface, and the other thing I like about it is that it's free and there's nothing more effective in organizations than simple no-cost things people can do to get a little bit better, those kinds of things actually have a big catalytic effect, they scale very easily, and so I really like this, it's one of the smartest attunement exercises I've seen.

You're listening to Expert Interview from Mind Tools.

Rachel Salaman: We can move onto "Buoyancy" now, you summed up earlier the basics of what you mean by this. Could you tell us a bit more about buoyancy in successful selling?

Daniel Pink: I got this concept from a salesman I interviewed who is a door to door salesman in the U.S., and he sells brushes, and he's been doing it for 40 years, and he said even now after four decades, the hardest part about being in sales is that every day you face an ocean of rejection, and that's true and as more of us are in sales, as more of us are in sales kinds of functions we're going to get rejected, and nobody likes rejection, it's difficult, but there are some things we can do to equip ourselves. For instance, before an encounter we can practice what's called "interrogative sales talk"; that is, a lot of us think that when we go into a sales call or asking somebody out on a date or going to a meeting, that we should pump ourselves up, very affirmative, "You can do it," and there's some interesting research showing that actually phrasing that self-talk as a question is more effective. Asking ourselves, "Can you do this?" rather than, "You can do it!" Because "can you do this?" basically catalyzes the question of "how do you do this?" and you begin preparing by saying, "Can I go into the sales call? Well, yes I can go into the sales call and do well. So, why? Because I'm very well prepared, I know this product inside and out, I know this company's business and therefore I need to mention these two things, I know there's going to be somebody in this meeting, Martin, and I know that Martin is going to be totally opposed to this so I've done a lot of due diligence on Martin and I have found the one nugget that I think can be persuasive to Martin." Asking yourself "can you do this?" ends up being more muscular than the nominally powerful pumping up "you can do it" kind of sales talk. In an encounter it turns out there are returns to positivity within certain kinds of limits, even though that's something that I rolled my eyes at, when I look at the research it's pretty persuasive that positive affect can have, make a big difference. There's some fascinating research showing that when in simulated sales settings that my delivering bad news to you and being a nice guy about it, versus my delivering you the same bad news and being a jerk about it makes a huge difference, that people aren't only evaluating the content of it, they're evaluating the affect too. Then there's also some very powerful research showing that how you explain failure has a huge effect on your ability to flourish, so if you explain what Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania calls, "People's explanatory style," there are certain explanatory styles that leave people more buoyant, and the explanatory styles are largely about explaining things in ways that don't make them totally personal, totally pervasive, and totally permanent.

Rachel Salaman: If we move onto the C of ABC now, "Clarity," and you make some interesting points about the use of contrast. Could you just share the story of the blind man in Central Park which vividly illustrates this?

Daniel Pink: Oh yes, this is a famous story, it might even be true from advertising, there is a famous American ad man named Rosser Reeves. He did a lot of different things, he did some presidential campaigns, he's the guy who came up with the slogan for President Eisenhower, "I Like Ike," as the story goes. It probably has a germ of truth to it, but probably more apocryphal than purely accurate. So, he was in Central Park and there was a blind man who had a sign that said, "I am blind," and he had a cup to collect coins that he was hoping passersby would give to him, and he wasn't doing very well, he wasn't getting many coins in his cup, and, as the story goes, Rosser Reeves was having lunch in Central Park and he says to his colleague, "I believe I can add four words to his sign that will increase his contributions." So they make a bet and he goes to the blind man, he talks to him briefly, he scribbles something on his sign, one beat, two beats, three beats, suddenly people start filling up his cup, and when his colleague looks and sees what he wrote, he'd written, "It is springtime and I am blind." And so that contrast is a really good example, the way people understand things is by asking the question, compared to what Robert Cialdini, one of the great American researchers in influence, has helped us understand that one of the most important questions in persuasion and influence isn't "what's in it for me?" although that's not unimportant, but compared to what, because people don't look at things in absolute isolation, it's always compared to what, it's really important for people to understand.

Rachel Salaman: So how might someone use that nugget of insight in their daily life, let's say an insurance broker?

Daniel Pink: The thing about insurance, if you're simply selling an insurance policy, let's say the kind of insurance that people might not need.

Rachel Salaman: Pet?

Daniel Pink: OK, let's take pet insurance, a modern 21st century first world product, so people might realize that they don't need pet insurance, so if they see the contrast, what does pet insurance cost, say they're going to pay £200 a year for pet insurance, so if they say, "Oh, is it worth my paying £200?" So if they just look at it in isolation, saying, "I'm going to be out £200," they don't really understand, it's not very persuasive, but if the insurance person can give them something compared to what then they can actually be more persuasive. So, compared to the feelings of dread and despair when your pet passes away, or compared to you're going to spend £200 a year on this, well, what do you spend on coffee at Starbuck's, what do you spend on cigarettes, what do you spend on these other kinds of things? And when people look at it in that respect they can actually be more persuaded. So, there's some really interesting research on how to frame things, too, that basically are rooted in this principle of compared to what.

Rachel Salaman: Could you talk a bit more about framing because it does come up in your book, and you link it to curation, which you mentioned earlier?

Daniel Pink: I think some of this makes perfect sense to us but it's amazing how much people violate it. One of the most important things is what I call the "less frame." We tend to think that giving people lots of choices is the best way to persuade them. "Do you want to buy a car? We've got all these models and all these makes and all these options," and they do the permutations and you can have a thousand different cars, and it turns out that there's a lot of research that that can overwhelm people, it's not that surprising because when we understand it from the consumer's side we often neglect it from the seller's side, so there's a lot of research that actually giving people fewer choices they are more likely to act than if you give them a lot of choices, because, again it's a comparison, you're evaluating something compared to, let's say you give somebody three choices, they're evaluating compared to two other choices, they're not evaluating compared to a hundred choices which ends up being debilitating. If you look at something like what I call the "blemish frame," there's some fascinating research out of Stanford that says that acknowledging an honest blemish in an offering can be very persuasive, even though our instinct might be to say, "Oh, I hope they don't talk about this." Because what will people do, if it's a minor blemish, they'll say, "Well, look at this minor blemish compared to the totality of the offering, which is good." And so it reminds them that, oh wow, the totality of the offering is very good, the idea that Cialdini talks about, about contrast and the idea of actually helping people, it's curation in the sense that there's so much out there that if you just focus in and give people a different way to look at it, you can actually help them find a solution that's right for them.

Rachel Salaman: Most of us are familiar with the idea of the elevator pitch, and in your book you point out that times have moved on since that idea came about, and you present some successors to the elevator pitch, what are some of those?

Daniel Pink: There are a lot of really cool ones, one of them is the question pitch, that we don't pitch enough with questions, and what the research shows very clearly is that when the facts are on your side, clearly on your side, pitching with questions is very effective. The reason for that is that when I ask you a question, even if you don't respond explicitly, you have to think about it a little bit, and so if I can get you to reason through something where the facts are totally on my side, you're probably going to reach your own conclusion, you're going to come up with your own reasons for agreeing with me. When people come up with their own autonomous reasons for agreeing with something, they believe it more deeply, adhere to them more strongly and this is really central in any kind of persuasion influence selling, I'm much better off helping you surface your own reasons for doing something rather than trying to convert you or coerce you into accepting my reasons and questions do that. The downside of that is that if the facts aren't on your side, if the facts aren't clearly on my side and I start asking you questions, you might actually reason your way through actively and come up with your own autonomous, intrinsically motivated reasons for disagreeing with me, so it's fairly perilous, but when facts are clearly on your side, pitching with questions is really effective. There is some fascinating research showing that rhymes are actually more persuasive than we would ever think. There's a really interesting study out of the U.S. that gave participants aphorisms and they asked these participants, the question before them was, "Are these aphorisms accurate depictions of the human nature, the human character?" And half the group got aphorisms that rhymed, so things like, "Woes unite foes," and half the group got the same basic aphorism but in a non-rhyming version, not "woes unite foes," but "woes unite enemies." The first group got, "Caution and measure will win you treasure," the second group got, "Caution and measure will win you riches." So, basically equivalent statements, one rhyming and one not, and when they looked at the data it was quite astonishing how much the people who had read the rhyming aphorisms rated those as much more accurate depictions of human character and human nature, and then when the researchers go back and ask them, "Did the fact that these things rhymed make any difference to you?" "Absolutely not," even though it clearly was more persuasive than these others. What this shows us is the importance of what cognitive scientists and linguists call process influencing, that is rhymes just go down a little easier, they're easier to process, when we process something more easily we take it in a little bit more, we take it more seriously, we reason our way through it, we feel our way through it and ultimately we end up remembering it more and actually believing it more, so pitching with rhymes is really effective. One of my favorites is the Pixar pitch; it's a pitch modeled on the narrative structure of Pixar movies. Pixar movies all have basically the same basic narrative structure, it's six sentences: "Once upon a time, blah-blah-blah, every day, blah-blah-blah, one day, blah-blah-blah, because of that, blah-blah-blah, because of that, blah-blah-blah, until finally…" and that ends up being if you just fill in the blanks of those you can actually end up, especially for startup companies, entrepreneurial companies. The Pixar pitch is a perfect kind of pitch, you're basically telling a story, once upon a time the world didn't need this product, every day they needed something one day, one day your product came along and you did something differently, because of that something great happened and because of that something greater happened, until finally everyone adopted your product and the world is a better place, I mean it works out perfectly for entrepreneurs.

Rachel Salaman: It's clear from the book and from this interview that your philosophy about selling is not at all about manipulating or conning people, but when all is said and done what exactly is the difference between using the techniques in your book to persuade someone to buy something or do something, and using conventional sales techniques to push buttons so that someone buys something?

Daniel Pink: It's a great question, I think there are a couple of distinct differences. Number one, this approach works better. That approach, the approach of manipulating people, pressing their buttons, trying to coerce them or trick them into doing something is much harder to do when people have lots of choices, lots of information and lots of ways to talk back. I think people are much more sophisticated about the grammar of sales techniques as well, and so they know, "Oh, you're trying this kind of close on me," "You're trying to do this kind of technique," "You're always asking me questions that I can only answer yes to," and so I think people are much more literate in that and so those old style techniques don't work very well. I think these other kinds of techniques which basically look at the seller buyer relationship as more of a partnership, look at it as a relationship among peers and then recognize that the way to sell better in a world of "seller beware" is to be more like a human being, so I think the big difference is this is more effective. The other thing, obviously, is that it has the added advantage of your being able to sleep at night. I'm not convinced that many people want to make their living deceiving, tricking other people, eventually that corrodes at people's souls, this is a way that you can actually do some good for the world and be effective without losing your sense of integrity. The other thing is that they begin with different goals, the goals of that old fashioned sales is basically for me to take pounds out of your pocket, the goal of the other one is to put both of us in a better situation and that's more sustainable and at some level that's how progress is made. And so again, if we summarize the differences, it's more ethical and it's more effective.

Rachel Salaman: Daniel Pink talking to me in London. The name of his book again is "To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth about Persuading, Convincing and Influencing Others." You can find out more about Dan and his work at www.danpink.com and you can find a review of his bestselling book "Drive" in the Book Insights section of the Mind Tools site.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.