To Sell is Human

Now more than ever, the ability to sell ideas—products or projects alike—is a central pillar of professional effectiveness. Indeed, the author measured that, apart from the professional sales community, business people spend an average of 40 % of their time trying to influence others, either to obtain resources, to gain support for a project or simply to get their employees to focus on specific priorities. We all thus regularly act as salespeople.

Based on this observation, Daniel Pink examines what has changed in sales in recent years. In particular, he draws our attention to the fact that Internet has radically modified the rapport between buyer and seller, due to easier access to information. Consequently, the model of the pushy door-to-door salesman of the seventies and eighties, whose success was founded upon limited customer choices and access to information, is now seriously challenged.

To compete with the global supermarket of the Internet, “salespeople” can play three cards: their ability to get attuned with the audience in order to resonate with them emotionally, their optimism, because positive emotions are contagious, and their ability to position themselves as partners by helping their contacts move forward. For each of these cards, Daniel Pink provides a detailed description of the social and cognitive mechanisms that make them work.

A book, solidly supported by behavioral science research, which enables the reader to better understand how to “naturally” win the support of his or her audience.