Book Review: A Podcast On 'To Sell Is Human' By Dan Pink

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Overview of the book

The ABCs of selling: Attunement. Buoyancy. Clarity.

Freelancers are salespeople

‘Selling’ ideas inside your company

Improv theatre and sales techniques

Using mimicry when selling: is it manipulative selling?

To Sell is Human: Takeaways for sales teams

The era of hard selling is long gone

Don’t follow a script, have a conversation

Podcast transcript

Overview of the book:

Nick: Dan Pink says that the nature of sales has changed and we have this idea of the traditional door to door salesman, creating a high pressure situation to close the deal, sell those encyclopedias and sell brushes. That age is over.

The rise of the Internet means that that information asymmetry is done. And I don’t know if you remember that expression ‘buyer beware’? Dan Pink says that we’re now in a situation where it’s ‘seller beware’ because we can all get on the internet and look at who the buyer-look at who the salesperson is find out about their product, see other people’s reviews.

The buyer is in a situation of information parity and that the seller now has to beware because if they are not honest, not transparent, not clear on what they’re selling, it’s gonna get found out and that that business is not going to last long.

The nature of sales has changed, the rise of the Internet means that everyone has the same information the buyer, the seller, it’s not a situation anymore where: is a second-hand car dealer selling a lemon?

As a salesperson, you have to really now think about ‘how does the market know about this information of my products? What problems am I solving? What solutions am I offering?’

In that sense, whereas before this kind of high pressure situation where salespeople try and create situations, where the buyer has to buy because they’ve been put in this situation and they have to make that call, ‘do I want to buy or don’t I?’

That opens the book: making the case that the nature of sales has changed.

The ABCs of selling: Attunement. Buoyancy. Clarity.

Doug: Pink essentially talks about the ABCs.

He talks about attunement, buoyancy and clarity. The attunement being what are the people you’re selling to thinking and how can you listen, get on their level and learn to persuade them. It’s not necessarily being empathetic. It’s just learning what your subject or what your buyer wants you to be doing and mimicking that.

Buoyancy on the other hand is staying afloat after rejection, after you may have failed – we all do I’m sure. Making sure that it can be fixed. Bob the Builder approach of can I fix it and focusing on rather what you did wrong and the possible answers that you can solve next time and next time you try to make a sale.

Clarity, finally, being helping to see your customers see the problem that you’re going to solve for them being a fresh light, a new angle or something they didn’t really necessarily know they needed but actually they do in this world.

N: This is his alternative model to that ‘always be closing’ 1980s aggressive sales techniques.

One of the things that he’s really trying to push in this book is that we’re all salespeople now and it isn’t just if you work in sales, you have to move away from these aggressive sales tactics towards attunement, buoyancy and clarity. So the main structure of the book is around these chapters of attunement, buoyancy and clarity.

And then we do move into these tips of how to persuade, given that we’re all working in sales, given that we will have to persuade and influence people. How do you actually do that?

He talks a lot about pitching, the Twitter pitch, which is a short sentence to kind of show what your offer is. The pixar pitch, and then the one word pitch that we really need to distill information down for people to make it really obvious and simple, and how to have them understand what our solution is, and what our offer is.

He also talks about dealing with rejection, and that we need to move away from blaming ourselves when things go wrong and trying to make them more external and realise that these things don’t necessarily repeat themselves.

You know, sometimes you are just unlucky, it’s a bad day, and when you’re trying to make your pitch the person’s child kept them up all night or something. And then generally, and this is a nice way to finish off this summary, this is about having the right attitude to sales.

I think the book is more a corrective narrative to this idea of the traditional salesman, the ‘Death of the Salesman’, the Arthur Miller play, and that when you’re approaching sales now, it’s not about pressuring people into buying something. I’ve said that a lot in this intro. It’s about having the right attitude of helping people like being nice, listening. That’s what the book was about.

So given that, what, this is your first sales book, the first of many, apparently, what stood out to you? What were your favourite bits?

Freelancers are salespeople

D: I’m just going to say that was spoken like someone who has been in sales a lot longer than me, which is, kind of makes my point of what I enjoyed about the book!

It made me realise that there’s a way of thinking when you’re selling yourself that I hadn’t thought about before. So, I’ve got a history of being a freelancer, being a photographer and a videographer and you read this and of course I sell and I think I knew that I was selling but I didn’t realise that I was in sales, and I think that’s something that definitely came out. Especially in the first few chapters of Pink’s book of, we are selling we are using these persuasion techniques and there are definitely ways that we can, by realising that, begin to really work on market a lot more and really need out what we want from our clients.

N: So you buy his thesis?

D: Essentially I buy his thesis, I’ll give you that. It is approved by Doug!

N: So how has that evolved your thinking about freelancing and having to sell yourself – that’s never fun – but can it be when you think about how you might now approach selling yourself if you were to ever go back to freelancing? What does that actually mean? When you think about how to get out there and sell your wares?

D: No one ever leaves freelancing, you can never get away!

I think it’s really interesting to realise that you’re selling yourself. I think freelancers succeed when they do it well and it’s obvious when they are succeeding well.

We get into the creative industries, I think, assuming that it’s all going to be taking photos, getting clients, easy as that people are going to come your way.

I think you learn very, very early on that no one’s going to view your portfolio just because it’s on the internet, you have to go out and put yourself out there.

And I remember one of my favourite collaborators, after I asked him if he’d follow me on Instagram, pointed out that the most successful photographers aren’t necessarily the ones with five, 6 million followers on Instagram. Those are the most successful marketers and you got to decide which it is you’re going to be. Because not always can you be both unless you’re going to get a helping hand in there and that’s a decision you make as someone selling is to like do I have the required skills for doing this job, and also taking photos? Or do I need to focus on the photos and get someone else involved in helping me sell myself?

N: I think there’s a stat in the book, in the first couple of chapters, Dan Pink commissioned a study just to see how people are spending their days and I think he came up with the stat around like 40% of people’s time at work is selling, persuading.

I think this is office-based but obviously, this carries over to freelancing.

I think you’re right that some people think, ‘oh, I’m going to be a photographer’, or, in my case, I started off as a freelance writer, that you’re just going to spend your days doing that: ‘Someone’s going to drop out the sky, give me this work, and I spend my time doing that’.

But the reality is 40% as a freelancer sounds actually quite conservative. You actually have to be out there selling yourself the whole time so that’s interesting that you say that your perspective on this book is is slightly different from mine because you’re thinking about selling, literally, selling your skills.

One of the things I found interesting was how you actually go about doing that selling yourself.

It’s not just about throwing up a website and just making people visit your website and then buy from you.

You have to start conversations.

One of the threads through this book that I was nodding along to myself, as I was reading the book, obviously, was the idea that to collaborate over the projects that you want to engage with people, for you as a freelancer that’s quite clear what that might look like. But even internally, when you’re working in a company, how do you get people excited about something when you’re actually asking them for something?

How you do that is really interesting, because you need to sell the problem as much as the solution.

When you’re collaborating with someone you need to get them to see what problem they have, and that you understand that problem so that when you’re offering the solutions, you’ve put yourself in that position of an expert, so that it’s not just a “Doug is making a request” I want you to give me money, or whatever the case may be, I don’t know how you like to get paid.

So you need to have a variety of solutions.

‘Selling’ ideas inside your company

D: Yeah, having a whole arsenal of solutions for a client is really, really helpful, I think, or a client or even a manager or a boss.

That’s the core of what Daniel Pink gets to here is that we all do it in some way. And you know, now working in a company, I have to convince someone higher up to give me that time to do what I’m wanting to get done.

N: Yes! Because your time is a resource.

And so internally, you might not be asking for literally for money, but you are asking for a resource, which could be your own time.

I think, again, this is Dan Pink’s point is that we are all working in sales. Because even if you’re asking for the time and the budget, or just the time that is still trying to sell a vision, you still have to paint the possibilities.

That situation of talking to your team members, people who are higher up the food chain than you, that you need to paint the possibilities and bring people with you. You’re painting a future that you want them to get excited and become a part of.

And so you’ve brought them in and again, this is where I like this idea of sales is like a collaboration as opposed to like this kind of hard pitch because when you bring people along with you, you get them excited, they want to come along, and they want to be a part of that solution.

The trick then is – I say trick but I think the whole point of the book is that this is less about like hack-y type, sales techniques and more about yeah, being human, To Sell is Human! You bring people with you, and then help them understand what that solution looks like. So they can put themselves in that situation and you’re guiding them through the implementation of your solution. And that kind of collaboration, I think is if you’re working in sales it’s good news.

One of the other things – thinking about, what selling being human means – one of the things that jumped out at me that I kind of enjoyed was this, this idea of sales as improv. I’m not sure if you picked up on that?

Improv theatre and sales techniques

D: You get the idea that you have to read the room you have to respond to what’s going on.

This is the attunement principle of understanding what people are wanting and being able to frame what you’re selling in that way, and that’s, I think, true and everything.

He doesn’t talk too much about marketing teams but I got the image in my head of the heist films that you watch when you got one guy has this master plan and he’s robbing a casino, and he’s got to go and convince x, y and z.

That whole first section of a heist film is him convincing someone who doesn’t want to get back into the game and then that convincing, that whole process gets bigger and bigger to when you actually achieve what you’re trying to achieve.

N: I see what it says orchestration is interesting to talk about movies and acting though because I think sometimes salespeople do think of themselves as an actor. You learn the pitch and deliver it.

The improv principles, though, as a subset of acting, it’s much more about how to have that collaboration on stage. And you were saying, you have to read the room.

And you know, in a sales forum, that’s what that’s when you’re sitting across from your client could be over a cup of coffee doesn’t have to be like a pitching session.

You need to listen and pick up on the offers that they give you which is, apparently, I’m not a massive improv aficionado myself, but listening for offers, so that you can riff off the other person. They set you up and you pick up the baton and continue and then making your partner look good.

The whole stage looks good when everyone’s riffing off each other. And in a sales situation, you want to listen to the person that you’re having this discussion with, pick up on the things that they are giving to you. They’re obviously going to talk about the problems that they have. And that’s where you pick up on that, understand the way that you need to frame your solution and frame that solution in a way that will make the person that you’re sitting next to look good, whether they’re the owner or operator of a business or whether they’re one person in a multinational corporation.

They obviously have things that in their job, make them look good, whether it’s looking good to their boss, or helping their company grow. You can do that with these improv principles if you pick up on the signals, and guide the discussion in that way.

And I think, and I’m not saying that every salesperson now needs to sign up for an improv class, but understanding these principles is a good way to structure conversations because it’s less delivering a pitch and more inviting people in to co-create a pitch.

D: Have you found that you have been doing that anyway?

Is that something that you’ve always known about, is it something that Daniel Pink brought up that was new to you? And you kind of had that aha moment? Because that’s what I had that experience of “oh, yeah, I do that”.

I watch and see if a client or potential client is happy about one set of ideas I’m going to give them or not happy off the other and you totally disregard them and like push them towards that. Let them talk and then reattach that back to the argument. And that is the aha moment but that’s purely from the sense that no one’s ever told me to do that.

N: This is going to sound a bit hokey, but when I was out there freelancing and having to pitch a lot, I would talk a lot, pitch myself in different ways to different people. And it was seeing the whites of the eyes again, this is the hokey bit where you can you can only see someone’s eyes just like flicker a little bit, you’re like, oh, okay, that’s, that’s the thing that they’re, that they get.

And once you kind of talk enough to different people, and you work out, given the situation this person is in, if I say-if I present myself in the following way, are they gonna like pick up on that?

So I mean, that’s obviously not improv but it’s that kind of really trying to like pick up on the other person’s signals and the body language they’re giving you. Where did I learn that? I don’t know, because you read these books, and they kind of internalize some of that information. That’s one of the reasons why I think this is a good book because it does distil a lot of this information that you would you would expect a lot of people to know already but by giving these clear examples, I think you can understand improv and know what that means, like listening for offers seeing the flicker in the eye, that is the kind of ability to then keep that conversation going.

So you’re not just delivering a pitch at someone, you’re picking up on the things that people are responding to.

D: We don’t want to be framing salespeople as this sleazy salesman who’s manipulating the client the whole time, and I don’t know if what he’s saying is we all do that, therefore, it’s okay or he’s saying we can manipulate the things that we will do and we will respond to and we can convince people and surely that fall straight back into the stereotype of the salesman who comes down to a door and tries to sell you a brush for however much and he didn’t really need in the first place?

Using mimicry when selling: is it manipulative selling?

N: That is the interesting part because we’re giving these as examples in the book. And I think that what you are saying that just reminds me of a part of the book where we’re talking about mimicry, where apparently, if I look at your body posture and present that back to you and pick up on some of the words and language you use and give it back to you. Apparently, as humans, we love that! Without actually doing anything and literally copying another person, their mannerisms, their turns of phrases, they’re more likely to do business with you.

So does me now knowing that and taking that out and into the real world doing it, does that make me a sleazy salesperson? I think that he does have a line like ‘don’t overdo it’, so how much of this is about the collaborative approach to sales and that’s one of the things I liked about the book is that this is a co-production. You don’t pitch at people you include them in the pitches.

But now we move on to the part of the book where it’s here are some you know, social science studies that help us manipulate people? Create a situation whether more amenable to hearing our pitch, you know, there’s a fine line there, right?

Because, on the one hand you are manipulating. On the other, we’re just understanding how humans think and work and therefore just giving ourselves the best chance to help them. Which is which, depends where you sit.

D: Yeah, this reminds me of when my dad was a builder, and he had a building company and he had all of these books on ‘Neuro Linguistic Programming for Dummies.’

I’d flick through and, and it sounds like the sleaziest way of kind of manipulating, and I guess, possibly what Daniel Pink’s trying to do here is remove that from the equation.

This isn’t making people see something that’s not there. This isn’t like playing with their subconscious. This is just trying to get someone on to the right level at which you can provide for them. But I guess with all of these tools, it very easily shifted into a manipulative standpoint, but I do worry about anything that promises to tell you these little secret surprise things that no one else knows and no one will realise what you’re doing and and that way you can convince them to get on and buy what you’re selling.

N: Sure, I think when you talk about tools or ways of doing things, ultimately you have to be starting from a point of honesty and good faith.

You have to believe that you’re helping people solve the problems that presumably you have, which is why you’re having this conversation in the first place, whether you’re just kind of creating the circumstances that mean you are best able to deliver that solution to that problem.

If you believe that then I don’t think you’re being manipulative and sleazy. We’re not hypnotising people. There’s not a chapter on hypnosis and how we can get people to do what we want.

As long as you’re using some of these tools and techniques in good faith and not just literally to manipulate people to buy things they don’t want or need.

And I think that using the the first part of the book and almost to frame these techniques, I think Dan Pink is making the case that if you’re generally trying to help people, you’re setting up a collaborative project with them as part of the sales pitch.

You’re not manipulating them into a situation you are using techniques to better communicate to better put yourself in a position to be to be listened to. But obviously there is a balance. We don’t want to push people into things that they don’t want to do.

So what’s missing in this book for you? Because we’ve been quite full of praise to this point.

To Sell is Human: Takeaways for sales teams

D: I think it’s clearly for someone like me, the general audience, which is great.

It’s not really a “this is how you structure a sales team”. It’s for individuals. It’s for how to persuade, it’s for how to view what you’re doing and the process that you’re doing in this new kind of mindset, and therefore you can start to build on that. I think it’s definitely a really good basis.

I’m really happy to start with this. And then it makes me want to learn the exterior skills, the orbiting points that really bring it together.

N: Yeah, I agree it is an overview book, a state of the field type book.

And that’s also trying to be for a general audience: how to influence how to persuade.

But the first part of bringing the sales field up to date, correcting the narrative of the door to door salesman to this information age where we have the buyer and the seller, with an equal amount of information. And so ‘to sell’ now is not to hoard information and just selectively drop it on people so that they buy from you.

I would agree it does seem like he’s trying to keep that balance between it’s for general audience because ‘we’re all salespeople now’, as opposed to a kind of techie book for someone that was already working in sales and is presumably familiar with a lot of these concepts.

There are some bits where he talks about commission structures, he advocates ditching them, given that he wants companies – rightly so – to have more of a purpose and a mission and have their sales force more passionate about delivering that service so that they’re not just incentivized financially but he doesn’t really get into much detail on that.

So I’m not sure how actionable that kind of information is. In theory, everyone is so motivated in their business because the mission is so wonderful and inspiring. But that’s a hard thing to do. You can’t just do that; it’s not a sales specific advice. The whole company obviously has to be orientated that way. So I don’t know if it’s just a confirmation of existing trends, I wonder how much new did we learn?

D: It’s common sense. A lot of the stuff, like I say, there’s the aha moment: I was doing this, potentially view this kind of heading out of education heading into a career. where something like that it’s really good to learn to set yourself up.

But I think if you’ve been surviving and eating thus far in life, you’ve probably been doing a couple of these things anyway. I think that’s kind of his point, anyway, is that we’ve all been doing this, we just need to learn how to hardwire that into a system.

Like you say, he’s a great writer, the narrative helps. I think it’s very example driven, and not just hearsay. He has the Fuller Brush example at the beginning where he speaks to the last of what apparently was well known as a fuller brush salesman, I think it was before my time, but I do remember people coming and knocking and that is just one left selling.

And that’s it’s interesting to think of it like that, that there’s still this one piece of the old world existing and an entirely new world, but they still use the same techniques. So that’s really good. I think he does that. incredibly well.

The era of hard selling is long gone

N: It is really easy to read. He’s a good writer, I read some of his other books too, he keeps you turning the page. But I’m not certain that if you are a salesperson that’s been working in this space that you’re going to come away with a long list of actionable tips, you are going to get a state of your field, a couple of studies cited to probably explain why you’re doing the things that you’re doing.

I would hope if you’re still in that high pressure 1950s, door to door salesman approach, you’ve probably got problems that this book isn’t going to solve!

D: Yeah, it’s the new approach to sales, I think. It would be interesting to see if there’s someone who’s been in sales for a while and this was entirely new to them. I’d like to find that one!

N: I would be surprised!

That invites the question: what can sales people take away from the book?

We’ve just highlighted the approach of trying to hardwire this non selling sales type method that he’s describing.

So yeah, if you need to deprogram yourself from this alpha sales approach where you go door to door and create a pressure moment so that people feel compelled to buy from you, you’re probably doing it wrong. And I would hope you’ve been told that you’re doing it wrong.

This is the kind of thing that you would expect people to be doing already. I know this, in the sales field, people talking about sales enablement, and inbound marketing and sales where, because people have access to the internet, they know what their problems are, and are actively searching for solutions. And they’re not going to allow themselves to be put in these kinds of situations.

So yeah, a lot of this is going to be confirmation of what hopefully a lot of sales people are reading and learning and putting into practice already.

D: Yeah, I think the main thing is be nice.

Like you say, everyone can go online and find what they need. So the only reason to really talk to someone for sales is for the actual human experience and network.

You know, we still have printed books when we can buy them online, we still have stores where we could also get everything online. People want that human interaction. And if that human interaction is still going to be the stereotype of a car salesman, refusing to let you have a look under the hood, because he doesn’t quite want that and trying to force a sale out of you in the old way, then people just going to turn away and go somewhere else, because they have that option now.

And I think coming with that is listening. Like you say, we have to understand our client’s problem in order to be able to tell them what they need in a nice way.

Don’t follow a script, have a conversation

N: One of the things that to be nice and to listen, absolutely true, but then to think about what that means when you’re pitching when you’re in a sales conversation.

I think it’s getting away from this idea that you can create your sales deck, you know, have a pitch deck, and every customer that you end up talking to, you just go through the script. I think that’s what this book is advising against.

And it might feel easier to get into these sales situations where you’re following a script. It’s the same as ever, this is the way that you do things, this is the way that you present your solution that you offer, don’t do that. That’s not listening. That’s not really being nice just to deliver your script.

You might be nice on the call when you’re delivering these things, but it’s not truly listening and trying to understand the problem. In some ways, that is harder. But I think the whole thesis of the book is that it’s actually more human to act that way.

You can listen, try and fundamentally put yourself in the shoes of the person across from you. So that then you’re demonstrating that not only do you understand the problem, you have several solutions to offer and you can compare them to each other and give the client, the person you’re pitching to, the ability to see that there are many ways to solve their problem and the one that you’re offering makes sense.

And so it is a conversation. It’s not this scripted pitch.

So yeah, I can imagine that it’s harder because it feels like you’re not going into a conversation with this certain conversation, this certain outcome, this certain way of the discussion going. But you will be more successful because you know you’re having a real conversation.

People don’t like being pitched to. They don’t like being sold to.

I think the whole point of the book is to get away from this idea of being sold to, sales is a conversation. You’re trying to persuade, you’re trying to influence and all of these techniques are just essentially ways to have a realistic conversation, to understand the problem that someone has or the urgent need that they have, and help them understand why your solution is best.
And I think if you do that, then you will benefit by getting more sales because these conversations just lead to the obvious next step is you go from pitch straight into project and it’s not this ‘I’m delivering my pitch, will they get back to me and do they buy it?’. You’ve started that sales process during that conversation because you’ve invited the person in, you’ve actively listened to help them picture themselves in this bright future that you’re situated that your solution presents.

I get that the book is essentially trying to be a toolkit to allow you to do that. I think it might be a bit light in places. But overall, it’s obviously a well received book.

In 2020, everyone has access to information, a salesperson cannot hold information to create these high pressure situations, we have to understand that people can access all of this information themselves. And so your job as a salesperson is to curate, it’s to help the people understand this hoard of information they have access to, that’s the job you’re doing for them. Your solution is based on solving a specific problem, because you actively listen and really understand what the problem is.

What to read next: Book recommendations

N: Ultimately this book is more about influencing and persuading than about structuring a sales team and, really, a business, on how to set up a sales process and go through your sales cycle; it’s not about that techie side.

I don’t know if you have a list on the go but Robert Cialdini’s Influence The Psychology of Persuading is an industry classic and that’s a really good place to start.

Another one is Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and then one that is slightly just outside of this kind of influencing and persuading, it’s more of a negotiation book but Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Robert Fisher and William Murray.

That one is more about creating win-win situations and I think that leads on from what Dan Pink has been saying about collaborative approach to sales and like bringing people in. So even though it’s about negotiation, it’s not directly a sales book.

I think that idea of how to structure conversations where you’re inviting the other person to participate in the pitch as opposed to delivering them an ultimatum, essentially.

So those are some good places to move on to if you’ve enjoyed this: how to present yourself and how to pitch.

That’s our view on To Sell Is Human by Dan Pink!

Thanks for the chat!