To Sell Is Human Summary 📖 5 Rules, Tricks & Strategies

This is a book on selling written for everyone, not just salespeople. Wait, what?

Daniel Pink argues that selling is a part of our everyday lives. We do it whenever we persuade others to part with resources like their time, effort, or money.

That means we are actually selling every time we:

• Lead others,
• Share an idea at a meeting,
• Or even negotiate with family members!

When you look at it this way, selling is a critical skill for all of us to succeed in our careers. It’s also essential for entrepreneurs, who must sell their idea to investors, their vision to team members, and their product to customers.

Personally, I’ve run a couple of small online businesses and sales has always been an important part of my own income. However, I have not done much face-to-face selling. Instead, I learned how to sell through writing. That skill is called copywriting and it’s been described as “sales in print.” I’ll add some of my own original insights throughout this summary of To Sell is Human.

Who is Daniel H. Pink?

Daniel H. Pink (official site) is an author of bestselling books on psychology and human behaviour. Altogether, he has written seven books that have sold millions of copies around the world. Before that, he was the chief speechwriter for US Vice President Al Gore.

1. Non-Sales Selling: Almost all of our jobs now involve “moving others” in some way

Selling is not dead. Almost 1 out of every 9 workers in the United States is still employed in sales, according to the U.S. Department of Labour. Even more importantly, most workers are spending more of their time “moving others.” That is, convincing or persuading others to do something, which is a type of selling even if we don’t usually look at it that way.

(Some people who reviewed To Sell Is Human online disagreed with this new definition. They said: persuasion is persuasion, but sales is sales—it’s quantifiable. Many of those commenters were real-life salespeople, so I cannot argue with them!)

Daniel Pink says 3 trends explain the rise of “non-sales selling”:

1. More small businesses and startups exist today, because the internet has lowered the barrier to entry. Just look at how easy it is to start an eBay or Etsy store.
2. Flexible sales-related skills are required for more jobs today, like persuading others over email or understanding customer needs as a programmer.
3. Health and education are the fastest-growing parts of the U.S. economy. Both of these involve persuasion—convincing students or patients to do what’s best for them.

Most of us are not “traditional salespeople,” but sales-related skills are more important than ever. Why? Because of the rise of: mass entrepreneurship, jobs that require multiple skills, and the sectors of health and education.

2. Serve Others: Modern selling is not about pressure, but making other people’s lives better

Salespeople have a bad reputation. In a large survey conducted by the author, he found that most people connect “sales” with the image of a pushy used car salesman!

And there’s some truth to that. Salespeople in the past could get away with being deceptive because we relied on them for access to product information. And they could use high-pressure tactics because individual customers didn’t have much power to complain.

And because of that, we must change how we approach sales. We must sell in a way that offers value and service to others, not in a way that takes something of value from them.

To offer exceptional service:

1. Always keep in mind the person who you’re helping. Daniel Pink shares one study where hospital specialists found 5 TIMES as many “incidental” problems in medical scans… when they were shown a photo of the patient’s face at the same time!
   
   (Personally, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard for copywriting and advertising is to imagine that you’re writing to just ONE person, not a crowd of people. So you create a clear mental image of ONE target customer, then write directly to them. This tip definitely helped me to make a living from online businesses for over a decade!)
2. Connect your work to a noble purpose or cause. All the salespeople Pink interviewed said that you need to believe that your product sincerely helps improve customer’s lives.

Sales has changed because now the internet gives everyone access to product information and reviews. That means good selling has become about offering service—so always keep in mind the person you’re helping and make sure their life is improved after the sale.

3. Get In Tune: Great salespeople understand the buyer’s perspective by really listening

The core practical part of this book are what Pink calls the new ABCs of selling: Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity. Let’s talk about that first one.

Attunement is about being in tune with the person you are talking to, which means understanding what they are thinking and feeling.

While it’s impossible for us to truly see inside another person’s head, there are some proven tools we can use to increase our empathy. Here are a few that Daniel Pink discusses:

• Humility. Studies show when people are told to assume they are lower status in a situation, then they can better see the world through the eyes of others. Someone who feels high status won’t make the same effort.
• Imagination. Studies show thinking and imagination may be more important than feelings for getting in tune with others. For example, the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, always made sure every meeting had one empty chair to represent the customer.
  
  (In the most popular biography of Bezos, he is always emphasizing the supreme importance of keeping the customer in mind, rather than focusing on the competition as most entrepreneurs do. With that focus, Amazon became the pioneer of many website features that we now take for granted, like customer reviews and personalized recommendations.)
• Improvisation. Pink shares 3 rules from improv theatre that can help us:
  1. Listening carefully for small signals, like waiting 5 seconds before responding to someone,
  2. Responding with “yes and,” which means adding to what others said, rather than rejecting it,
  3. Helping others “win,” because then you also win, whether in a theatre or sales meeting.

A few years ago, I did a class in improvisation theatre. I met weekly with about a dozen other people and we did all kinds of strange exercises to help us respond to each other more spontaneously. At the end, we did a show for a room of friends and family. It was like being in a theatre performance, but with no script!

The most important lesson I learned was that you CAN create an entertaining story out of thin air, but you need to pay careful attention to the little cues or suggestions offered by the other performers. If you stop listening for even a moment, then you will not hear those cues and not know what to say next.

In a similar way, sales is often about hearing those little signals, especially about why they are saying no, so you can offer the appropriate response.

Attunement is understanding other people’s thoughts, feelings, and perspective. You can get better at this through deliberate listening (try pausing 5 seconds before you reply), or pretending you are lower status, or imagining what their world looks like, or responding with “yes and” rather than no.

4. Stay Afloat: Every successful salesperson must swim over the “ocean of rejection”

The most fascinating person interviewed in To Sell is Human is Norman Hall (SFGate.com), the last door-to-door salesperson for a company called Fuller Brushes. He spends hours walking up and down the hilly streets of San Francisco, trying to sell brushes, but often facing “an ocean of rejection.”