To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (26 page)

By removing the cloak of anonymity and replacing it with this form of personal connection, you’re more likely to genuinely serve, which over the long haul will redound to everyone’s benefit.

And if you’re skeptical, try this variation. Treat everyone as you’d treat your grandmother, but assume that Grandma has eighty thousand Twitter followers.

Always ask—and answer—these two questions.

Finally, at every opportunity you have to move someone—from traditional sales, like convincing a prospect to buy a new computer system, to non-sales selling, like persuading your daughter to do her homework—be sure you can answer the two questions at the core of genuine service.

1. If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve?
   
2. When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began?
   

If the answer to either of these questions is no, you’re doing something wrong.

—

For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit www.penguin.com/pinkchecklist

Acknowledgments

To sell may be human. To write a book, not so much—at least not the lumbering and painful way I do it.

That’s why I’m grateful I had so many people in my corner.

Rafe Sagalyn, the world’s best literary agent, recognized the possibilities of this book well before its author did. His counsel and his friendship mean the world to me. Thanks also to Lauren Clark for taking care of business on the international front.

At Riverhead Books, Jake Morrissey was, as always, smart and unflappable—particularly when people like me were being not so smart and flapping wildly. Geoff Kloske put his considerable editorial acumen and publishing muscle behind this project, for which I’m grateful. And a ginormous thanks to Riverhead’s production department for its heroic efforts when I sent the game into overtime.

Elizabeth McCullough assisted in ways large and small—from excavating obscure studies in the University of Virginia Library to discovering typos everybody else missed to schooling me on endnote formatting. Cindy Huggett, one of America’s best training and development minds, was masterful in helping me make the Sample Cases useful and coherent. Rob Ten Pas once again contributed several fine illustrations.

The fabulous Pink kids—Sophia, Eliza, and Saul—calmly endured their dad’s writing another book. (Alas, convincing them of the awesomeness of the resulting denied vacations, hurried meals, and missed baseball games proved to be a hard sell.)

But the most important person, in this and in all things, was Jessica Lerner. Jessica read every word of this book. Several times. Out loud. If that wasn’t enough, she also listened to me read each page. Several times. Out loud. She proofed, prodded, and pushed back—and did it all with the same astonishing combination of brainpower and tenderness she brings to everything she does. I didn’t know it at the time, but the smartest pitch I ever made occurred twenty-two years ago when I persuaded her to go out on a date with me. I’ve been sold ever since.

Notes

CHAPTER 1. WE’RE ALL IN SALES NOW

1.
Alfred C. Fuller (as told to Hartzell Spence),
A Foot in the Door: The Life Appraisal of the Original Fuller Brush Man
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), 2.

2.
John Bainbridge, “May I Just Step Inside?”
The New Yorker
, November 13, 1948.

3.
“The Ups and Downs of the Fuller Brush Co.,”
Fortune,
1938, available at http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/02/26/the-fuller-brush-co-fortune-1938/; Gerald Carson, “The Fuller Brush Man,”
American Heritage
, August–September 1986; Bainbridge, “May I Just Step Inside?”

4.
Carson, “The Fuller Brush Man.”

5.
Fuller,
A Foot in the Door
, 197–98.

6.
See, for instance, James Ledbetter, “Death of a Salesman. Of Lots of Them, Actually,”
Slate
, September 21, 2010. Available at http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2010/09/death_of_a_salesman_of_lots_of_them_actually.html.

7.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wages Summary (2011),” released March 27, 2012. See Table 1, which is available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm. The OES data show 13.65 million people in “Sales and Related Occupations” and another 328,000 “Sales Managers.” However, the OES survey does not include “the self-employed, or owners in partners in unincorporated firms.” If we make the conservative assumption that just 1 in 10 of these roughly fourteen million workers are in sales, too, that puts the total figure over fifteen million, which represents about 11 percent of the entire workforce. See “Occupational Employment and Wages Technical Note,” available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.tn.htm. See also U.S. Census Bureau,
The Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012,
131st ed., Table 606, which suggests that more than 16 percent of the self-employed are in “sales and office occupations.” The labor economics consulting firm Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. likewise argues that one reason for the seeming drop in the number of salespeople is that huge numbers have gone from traditional employment to independent contractor status: “Sales jobs (like other jobs) are not disappearing from the economy nearly as much as they are disappearing as traditional, ‘covered’ employment—all the while, growing in numbers and size outside the spotlight of the usual employment datasets.” EMSI’s analysis is available at http://www.economicmodeling.com/2010/09/30/the-premature-death-of-the-salesman/.

8.
U.S. Census Bureau,
The Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012,
131st ed. See page 300, Tables 461 and 462 and page 18, Table 13. One technical note: Government jobs and manufacturing jobs—that is, jobs grouped by sector—are tabulated monthly in the
Employment Situation
report. Sales jobs, as noted above, are tabulated twice a year in the Occupational Employment and Wages Summary, which groups jobs by occupation.

9.
C. Brett Lockard and Michael Wolf, “Occupational Employment Projections to 2020,”
Monthly Labor Review
135, no. 1
(
January 2012): 84–108. See page 88 and Table 1.

10.
Statistics Canada,
Monthly Labour Force Survey
, “Average Hourly Wages of Employees by Selected Characteristic and Profession,” April 2012, available at http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/labr69a-eng.htm; Australian Bureau of Statistics,
2006 Census Tables
, Table 20680, available at http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/; Office for (UK) National Statistics, “Labour Force Survey Employment Status by Occupation, April–June 2011,” available at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm:77-215723.

11.
The total number of employed persons in the EU is roughly 216 million. The total number of people employed in sales functions is roughly 29 million. Monika Wozowczyk and Nicola Massarelli, “European Union Labour Force Survey—Annual Results 2010,”
Eurostat Statistics in Focus
, June 23, 2011; Vincent Bourgeais, Eurostat Media and Institutional Support, correspondence with author, May 17–22, 2012.

12.
Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Statistics Bureau,
The Statistical Handbook of Japan 2011
, Table 12.3, “Employment by Occupation,” available in English at http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/c12cont.htm#cha12_1.

13.
China has 36.7 percent of its workforce in agriculture, and India 18.1 percent, according to
The CIA World Factbook (2012)
, available at http://1.usa.gov/2J7bUe and http://1.usa.gov/9doDpD.

14.
Adi Narayan, “Welcome to India, the Land of the Drug Reps,”
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
, September 8, 2011.

15.
See “How Does Gallup Polling Work?” available at http://www.gallup.com/poll/101872/how-does-gallup-polling-work.aspx.

CHAPTER 2. ENTREPRENEURSHIP, ELASTICITY, AND ED-MED

1.
U.S. Census Bureau, 2009, “Nonemployer Statistics,” available at http://www.census.gov/econ/nonemployer.

2.
Kaomi Goetz, “For Freelancers, Landing a Workspace Gets Harder,” NPR, April 10, 2012, available at http://www.npr.org/2012/04/10/150286116/for-freelancers-landing-a-workspace-gets-harder.

3.
Ryan Kim, “By 2020, Independent Workers Will Be a Majority,”
GigaOm
, December 8, 2011, available at http://gigaom.com/2011/12/08/mbo-partners-network-2011/; Kauffman Foundation, “Young Invincibles Policy Brief: New Poll Finds More Than Half of Millennials Want to Start Businesses,” November 10, 2011, available at http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedfiles/millennials_study.pdf.

4.
OECD (2011),
Entrepreneurship at a Glance 2011,
OECD Publishing. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264097711-en; Donna J. Kelley, Slavica Singer, and Mike Herrington,
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2011 Global Report
(2012), 12. Available at http://gemconsortium.org/docs/2409/gem-2011-global-report.

5.
Adam Davidson, “Don’t Mock the Artisanal-Pickle Makers,”
New York Times Magazine
, February 15, 2012.

6.
“The Return of Artisanal Employment,”
Economist
, October 31, 2011. A handful of you might remember that I made a similar argument a decade ago in Daniel H. Pink,
Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself
(New York: Business Plus, 2002).

7.
The latest Etsy data are available at http://www.etsy.com/press.

8.
Robert Atkinson, “It’s the Digital Economy, Stupid,”
Fast Company,
January 8, 2009.

9.
Carl Franzen, “Kickstarter Expects to Provide More Funding to the Arts Than NEA,”
Talking Points Memo
, February 24, 2012, available at http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/kickstarter-expects-to-provide-more-funding-to-the-arts-than-nea.php; Carl Franzen, “NEA Weighs In on Kickstarter Funding Debate,”
Talking Points Memo
, February 27, 2012, available at http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/the-nea-responds-to-kickstarter-funding-debate.php. That said, Kickstarter has a high failure rate. Roughly half the projects that seek funding don’t succeed in reaching their target. See Samantha Murphy, “About 41% of Kickstarter Projects Fail,”
Mashable Tech
, June 12, 2012, available at http://mashable.com/2012/06/12/kickstarter-failures/.

10.
Comments at Wired Business Conference, New York City, May 1, 2012.

11.
Michael Mandel, “Where the Jobs Are: The App Economy,” TechNet white paper, February 7, 2012, available at http://www.technet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/TechNet-App-Economy-Jobs-Study.pdf.

12.
Michael DeGusta, “Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster Than Any Technology in Human History?”
Technology Review
, May 9, 2012.

13.
“Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011–2016,” February 14, 2012, available at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.pdf.

14.
Dominic Basulto, “10 Billion Tiny Screens Can Change the World,”
Big Think
, February 22, 2012, available at http://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/10-billion-tiny-screens-can-change-the-world.

15.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Occupational Outlook Handbook
, March 29, 2012, available at http://www.bls.gov/ooh/home.htm. See also Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, Artem Gulish, and Bennett H. Beach, “Healthcare,” a report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (June 21, 2012), which projects between a 25 and 31 percent increase in health care jobs in the United States by 2020; available at http://www.healthreformgps.org/wp-content/uploads/Healthcare.FullReport.071812.pdf.

16.
“Friday Thoughts,”
White Coat Underground
, June 24, 2011, available at http://whitecoatunderground.com/2011/06/24/friday-thoughts/.

17.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “The ‘White Coat’ Economy of Massachusetts,”
Boston Globe
, May 9, 2006; Derek Thompson, “America 2020: Health Care Nation,”
Atlantic
, August 17, 2010, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/08/america-2020-health-care-nation/61647/.