#230: Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human (Pt1)
Dear friends
If you’re looking for some December reading, this is the pile I’ve built myself and these are some I have finished over the last two months.
/strategy
In my coaching work, I often hear the protest, ‘I don’t like selling’.
Daniel Pink tells us that in research about our spontaneous associations with sales only five of the twenty-five most commonly offered words are positive.
He observes, “This word cloud, a linguistic MRI of our brains contemplating sales, captures a common view. Selling makes many of us uncomfortable and even a bit disgusted.”
He ends To Sell is Human, asking two questions:
- “If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will their life improve?
- When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began?”
And if the answer to both is ‘yes’, then you might say we are obligated to sell.
With that framing, where selling is an act of service, surely we should do what we can to be better at it.
Pink identifies three qualities essential to successfully influencing others – attunement, buoyancy (read more here) and clarity.
Today, we tackle attunement. Next week, to end the year, we’ll dive into clarity.
Attunement is simply the ability to take someone else’s perspective, to understand their needs from their perspective.
Pink explains three principles enable effective attunement:
- Increase your power by reducing it.
- Use your heart as much as your head.
- Mimic strategically.
The first principle is important for all of us here. We occupy places of power, and he reminds us that having power always reduces our ability to have perspective.
The more power we have, the more deliberate we must be to connect with and understand others’ viewpoints.
If you’re a CEO, an executive or a subject matter expert, you’ll do well to assume that your position is necessarily clouding your perspective. If you start with that humility, you’ll find better answers (This quotation from Netflix founder Reed Hastings expresses it well).
Find points of connection and similarity with those you’re seeking to influence.
A powerful departure-point is, “What do we have in common, either with another person or with everyone?”
Finding shared connections builds trust (To go deeper, explore Arthur Aron’s Fast Friend Protocol).
Being genuinely curious is the precursor to any successful sale. The more you know, the more you care, the more you care, the more you’ll tailor your solution, the more your solution fits the needs you’ve heard, and the more you’ll sell and serve. Pink notes, “… questions often pack a surprising punch. Yet they’re underused when we try to move others, despite a raft of social science that suggests we should deploy them more often.”
As Pink puts it, “The key is to be strategic and human – to be strategic by being human.”
//self
How to Be Buoyant introduced us to the power of optimism. Research shows optimism builds our ability to bounce back, a critical ingredient for sales success.
Whether we’re introducing clients to a new product or persuading our organisation to adopt new ways of working, rejection and resistance are inevitable. We need buoyancy to keep going.
In April 2002, the newly listed South African bank, Capitec faced a cash crunch. In the search for capital co-founder Michiel le Roux approached every financial institution in the country. They all rejected him. He describes the experience as a ‘long, painful and humiliating process’
Eventually, in 2004, Futuregrowth loaned them a mere R50 million. It was enough to keep going.
Today, Capitec’s market capitalization is R385 billion and Forbes estimates that Le Roux is worth $1.9billion (R34 billion).
Imagine if Le Roux had stopped after his seventh rejection.
(This anecdote is from TJ Strydom’s Capitec: Stalking Giants. If you’re looking for a business thriller for the beach, Strydom has written a fascinating and engaging action).
///soul
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital won this year’s Booker Prize. Like At Night All Blood is Black, winner of the 2021 International Booker, it is a slender volume. The similarity ends there.
Ali Smith described Diop’s book as ‘incantatory and visceral’. Diop was prize-twinned with Damon Galgut, whose The Promise won the Booker in same year. They both remind us that the battlefield never contains the horror of war. Not in place. Not in time.
If Diop is incantation, then Harvey is symphony, a harmonious weaving of inspiration.
In Orbital, six astronauts circle the planet. Harvey’s language celebrates.
They experience their “first dumbfounding view of earth, a hunk of tourmaline, no a cantaloupe, an eye, lilac orange almond mauve white magenta bruised textured shellac-ed splendour”.
“It’s the humanless simplicity of land and sea. The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself. It’s the planet’s indifferent turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere that transcends all language. It’s the black of hole of the Pacific becoming a field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges; then the spindle of Central America which drops away beneath them now to bring to view the Bahamas and Florida and the arc of smoking volcanoes on the Caribbean Plate. It’s Uzbekistan in an expanse of ochre and brown, the snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan. The clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold. The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds”.
Harvey weaves notes of sadness through her celebration, “Every swirling neo or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly base by snow that never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill, the discolouration of a Mexican reservoir which signals the invasion of water hyacinths feeding on untreated sewage, a distorted flood-bulged river in Sudan or Pakistan or Bangladesh or North Dakota, or the prolonged pinking of evaporated lakes, or the Gran Chaco’s brown seepage of cattle ranch where once was rainforest, the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine… or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses whose plastic makes the entire southern tip of Spain white in the sun”.
Read it. You won’t be sorry. If you’re feeling brave, read all three.
All the best
Karl
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