To Sell Is Human

Chapter 1: We’re All in Sales Now

Overview

Selling is assumed to belong to a distinct profession, one with sample cases, quotas, and a fading place in modern life. Meanwhile, the ability to move other people to act has become central to work that carries no sales title. What happens when the label and the task no longer match?

Norman Hall is seventy-five, wears a red paisley bow tie, and works the steep streets of downtown San Francisco with a leather binder of product sheets. He is the last Fuller Brush salesman in the city. At a small immigration law firm, he tries a $21.99 ostrich-feather duster, Kitchen Brush #300, microfiber cloths, and moth blocks without success. A stainless-steel sponge at $15 for three finally draws interest, and an electrostatic carpet sweeper closes the sale at $149.96. Hall has done this for forty years, now only two days a week, riding a ninety-minute bus from Rohnert Park and walking five or six miles a day. He knows he will not be replaced.

The Fuller Brush Man

Alfred Fuller arrived in Boston from Nova Scotia in 1903, an eighteen-year-old farm boy who was fired from his first three jobs before a brother got him a sales job at the Somerville Brush and Mop Company. Within a year he was making his own brushes at night and selling them by day. An ad in Everybody's Magazine brought 260 salespeople. By 1937, Fuller dealers gave away 12.5 million Handy Brushes. In 1948, 8,300 North American salesmen made nearly fifty million house-to-house calls across a country with fewer than forty-three million households. The Fuller Man became a cultural fixture, appearing in:

• Disney's Three Little Pigs
• a Donald Duck job
• Red Skelton's The Fuller Brush Man
• Lucille Ball's The Fuller Brush Girl

He was also, in American Heritage's account, a neighborhood presence who pulled teeth and delivered babies.

The obituary

Then the Fuller Man largely vanished. The company filed for Chapter 11 in February 2012. Two months later Encyclopaedia Britannica stopped printing its books, and a month after that Avon fired its CEO. These collapses fit a familiar story: in a world where buyers can research online and procurement software pits vendors against one another, salespeople are superfluous, slower and costlier than the alternatives. The story invokes Arthur Miller's 1949 play Death of a Salesman and predicts that selling will follow bank tellers and telephone operators into history. That obituary is premature. Hall may be the last of his kind, and Fuller may disappear, but the death notices for selling are off the mark.

The What Do You Do at Work? survey, drawing on the world’s largest economy, begins to provide a richer portrait of the twenty-first-century workforce. Non-sales selling falls fairly high on time spent and even higher on importance. Broken out by age, the answers show a steady pattern: the older the respondent, and presumably the more experience that person has, the more likely she is to report that moving others occupies her days and determines her success. The finding measures both allocation and consequence. People are not merely spending hours trying to move others. They believe those hours decide whether they succeed.

The Other Eight in Nine

Existing data show that one in nine Americans works in sales. The new data reveal that the other eight in nine also spend their days moving others and depend for their livelihoods on doing it well. The Time/Importance Matrix for Non-Sales Selling, broken out by age group, plots time on one axis and importance on the other, and it places non-sales selling high on time and higher on importance. The age breakdown suggests that recognition grows with experience. The existing count and the new finding are not rival statistics. One describes an occupation, the other an activity that runs across occupations.

Alive Because It Is Us

Whether the form is traditional sales or its non-sales variation, everyone is in sales now. Without fully realizing it, each person is doing what Norman Hall has done for nearly half a century and what his Fuller predecessors did for more than half a century before him. The salesperson has not disappeared. Selling survives because the sellers are ordinary people, which means us. That raises the next question: how did so many people end up in the business of moving others?

A footnote qualifies the Fuller history. A Fuller dealer was almost always a “he,” though in the 1960s, when the company launched a line of cosmetics, it recruited a group of saleswomen it called Fullerettes.

Key Takeaways

• Read the widely reported death of selling as a misdiagnosis: what is disappearing is a particular job title and distribution channel, not the work of getting other people to act.
• Pink's figures put one in nine Americans in a sales occupation, but the same research finds that the remaining eight spend their days persuading, bargaining and swaying people, and credit that ability with deciding whether they succeed.
• Expect the pull of this activity to grow with age and experience, which points to something learned on the job rather than handed out with a title.
• Keep occupation and activity separate when you assess your own role: selling as a job is a minority pursuit, while selling as a practice runs across nearly every kind of work.
• Treat the persistence of selling as evidence about how work actually gets done rather than about salesmanship, since almost every job depends on securing other people's cooperation.

Chapter 2: Entrepreneurship, Elasticity, and Ed-Med

Overview

Many people now earn their living by moving others, yet the identity, training, and structures around their work still treat selling as somebody else's job. The real question is practical: what does it take to persuade, motivate, and close when that work shows up without a title, a script, or a dedicated department?

Entrepreneurship

Shamus Jones founded Brooklyn Brine, a ten-employee company that sells fourteen varieties of pickled vegetables. He works seven days a week meeting distributors, telling the company's story, and persuading stores to stock his jars. A small owner can't specialize the way a big firm does. A two-person company needs no HR department, but its owner has to wear every hat, including selling. Jones calls himself a reluctant capitalist. This is the first reason selling has spread: the rise of small entrepreneurs. The U.S. Census counts more than twenty-one million non-employer businesses, a majority of U.S. businesses. Technology that was supposed to make salespeople obsolete instead created more sellers:

• Etsy has 875,000 active shops selling $400 million a year.
• eBay is a primary or secondary income source for 750,000 Americans.
• Kickstarter has funded 20,000 projects with $200 million since 2009, surpassing the National Endowment for the Arts.

Elasticity

Elasticity is the second reason: established companies now demand skills that stretch across boundaries. Atlassian, founded by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, had $100 million in revenue and 1,200 customers in 53 countries without a single salesperson. Cannon-Brookes says everyone is a salesperson. Customers download trials, support staff help without pressure, and engineers discover needs and build something compelling. Palantir, with more than $250 million in annual software sales and no salespeople, uses "forward-deployed engineers" who work beside clients, solve problems on the spot, and find new ones. Fixed skills suited segmented, predictable organizations. Flat organizations and unsettled markets punish them. The stretch always seems to include moving others:

• Valerie Coenen, a terrestrial ecologist, pitches clients and sells her firm's services internally.
• Sharon Twiss, a content strategist, says almost everything she does involves persuasion.
• Timothy Shriver Jr.'s title at The Future Project is Chief Movement Officer.
• Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, says every day involves selling.

Ed-Med

Ed-Med, education and health services, is now the largest U.S. job sector. In the last decade it generated more new jobs than all other sectors combined, and forecasters project that health care jobs will grow at double the rate of any other sector over the next decade. Larry Ferlazzo, a high school teacher, and his wife Jan Judson, a nurse-practitioner, embody the sector's core mission: moving people. Selling well means persuading someone to part with resources because they will be better off. A good algebra teacher does this with students' time, attention, and effort. Ferlazzo distinguishes irritation, challenging people to do what you want, from agitation, challenging them to do what they want. Irritation may work briefly. Deeper movement requires making students or patients full participants rather than pawns.

Treating a student or patient as a full participant rather than a pawn depends on two capabilities: attunement and clarity. Ferlazzo calls his approach "leading with my ears instead of my mouth." He draws out people's own goals and then fits the work to that context.

Bedside and Classroom

After a natural-disasters unit in his ninth-grade class, Ferlazzo asked students to write about the worst disaster. John refused. He had struggled through school, written very little, but still hoped to graduate. Ferlazzo told him graduation was unlikely without an essay, then asked about football. John's favorite team was the Raiders; his least favorite, the Giants. Ferlazzo assigned an essay arguing the Raiders were superior. John stayed on task, asked practical questions, and turned in a decent essay. He then asked to write another, about basketball, to make up for missing work, and produced another good piece. At a parent-teacher conference, his mother cried: in nine years of schooling, she said, he had never written an essay. Ferlazzo used agitation on graduation and his ears on football. The goal was not the disaster essay but writing skill. John gave up ego and effort, and moved himself.

Judson sees the same pattern at the bedside. The old health-care model casts clinicians as experts who tell patients what to do, but she has found, and the book reports that evidence confirms, that this has limits. She steps back and brings patients on board, telling them, "I need your expertise." People know themselves better than she does, and patients heal faster and better when they are part of the process.

A New White-Collar Type

Since Upton Sinclair coined "white-collar" around 1910 and C. Wright Mills made it widespread forty years later, that term has described experts and laypeople. Aging populations and more complex economies now point toward a white coat/white chalk economy, with Ed-Med dominant and moving others central to earning a living.

Four Questions

The test for whether this applies to you:

1. Do you earn your living convincing others to buy goods or services? Yes means sales; no, continue.
2. Do you work for yourself or run your own operation, even on the side? Yes means sales, likely traditional and non-sales selling; no, continue.
3. Does your work require elastic skills, crossing boundaries and functions, working outside your specialty, and doing varied things in a day? Yes means almost certainly sales, mostly non-sales selling; no, continue.
4. Do you work in education or health care? Yes means non-sales selling; no to all four means not in sales.

The likely result is an uneasy arrival in sales, a neighborhood that seemed to belong to someone else. Glengarry Glen Ross and Tin Men paint sales as greedy and dishonest, and that shady reputation lingers even under the gloss of non-sales selling.

Key Takeaways

• More than twenty-one million U.S. businesses have no employees. Self-employment is a mass condition, so the owner who pitches the company's story is as ordinary as the one who makes the product.
• Flat organizations and unsettled markets reward workers whose abilities cross boundaries. That turns persuasion into a general professional skill rather than a department's job.
• Education and health care now form the economy's largest job sector, and their central act matches selling: securing someone's time, attention, or effort by making that person a participant in the change rather than a passive recipient.
• The four-question test will usually return a verdict of sales even for people who never chose the label, so the profession's shady reputation covers only a narrow slice of what most white-collar workers actually do.
• Pressure that forces compliance works briefly. Lasting movement comes from tying the task to a goal the person already holds, whether the setting is a classroom or a hospital bed.

Chapter 3: From Caveat Emptor to Caveat Venditor

Overview

Selling has a reputation problem that honest sellers inherit whether they earned it or not. Buyers meet every offer with doubt, and that doubt does not discriminate between the trustworthy and the crooked. How do you sell anything when the transaction itself starts under a cloud?

Asked what word comes to mind when they think of "sales" or "selling," survey respondents said money most often. Of the twenty-five adjectives and interjections cited most, only five are positive: necessary, challenging, fun, essential and important. The most frequent of all is "pushy," and the negatives split into two camps.

• Discomfort with the act itself: tough, difficult, hard, painful.
• Distaste for the people who do it: pushy, aggressive, and a cluster implying deception, among them slimy, smarmy, sleazy, dishonest, manipulative and fake.

Asked for the first picture that comes to mind, people overwhelmingly described a man in a suit selling a used car. The leading answers, by a wide margin, were "car salesman," "suit," "used-car salesman," "man in a suit" and "pushy." The figure was male without exception: "man" made the top twenty-five, "salesperson" was rare, and no one said "saleswoman."

The Market for Lemons

The reputation is less wrong than obsolete. In 1967 George Akerlof, a first-year economics professor at Berkeley, wrote a thirteen-page paper on the used-car market. Two journals rejected it as trivial, a third called it mistaken, and The Quarterly Journal of Economics published "The Market for 'Lemons'" in 1970. It became one of the most cited papers in economics and won him a Nobel in 2001.

Akerlof questioned the assumption that both sides of a transaction are fully informed. Only the seller knows whether a car is a lemon, so buyers who suspect concealment pay little or walk away. Owners of good cars then settle for less or stop trying to sell, and dishonest dealing drives honest dealing out of the market. Warranties, brand names and lemon laws soften the problem, but the guiding rule is caveat emptor.

Information Parity

A shopper after a used Nissan Maxima can now find every nearby listing, check a dealer's reputation, research a private seller in fifteen minutes, read owner forums, price the car on Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds or AutoTrader, and pull the Vehicle Identification Number for its accident history. A bad experience can reach hundreds of Facebook friends, Twitter followers and blog readers. Buyers are not fully informed, but they are no longer helpless. The first word cloud is not wrong, only dated. The rule becomes caveat venditor: seller beware.

Joe Girard and Tammy Darvish

Joe Girard sold 1,425 cars in one year at Merollis Chevrolet in Detroit, one at a time rather than in fleet lots, a Guinness record. His Rule of 250 holds that everyone knows 250 people well enough to invite to a wedding or a funeral, so each satisfied buyer opens a new circle, and he paid customers $50 for each referral. He also invented vacations he had never taken, and his favorite cold call opened with a false claim that Mrs. Kowalski's ordered car had arrived, then worked around to when her husband would be home. Girard has not sold a car since 1977. He calls the internet junk and says nothing has changed, though he does say, "People want a fair deal from someone they like."

Tammy Darvish, vice president of DARCARS Automotive Group, outsold her peers in her first month at twenty. When she graduated, a car's factory invoice sat locked in a safe; today customers arrive already knowing the cost. Sellers have become curators and clarifiers of information rather than its gatekeepers. DARCARS rarely hires experienced salespeople and runs a one-week course on service and social media. What she looks for is persistence and empathy: "You can't train someone to care."

Two Dealerships

At SK Motors, a customer's lack of information is part of the business model. A young man with a collection-heavy credit report admires a three-year-old Nissan Altima priced at $16,500 but ends up test-driving a 1993 Ford Escort with 117,000 miles. Steve, the owner, will finance him at 24 percent with a tracking device if he makes a $1,500 down payment. He has no money for it and leaves. A man in a Jack Daniel's jacket bargains a burnt-orange Acura from $3,700 to $3,200. A 2003 Dodge Stratus with 70,000 miles goes to a woman buying for her teenage son. By closing, SK has sold two cars. Eight customers came through all day, and none seemed to have researched prices, competing deals or vehicle quality beforehand. SK's customers have limited options and damaged credit, so they will tolerate monitoring devices and high interest rates. Asymmetry still works there.

CarMax in Rockville, Maryland, about thirty miles away, reverses the conditions. Its customer parking lot holds more cars than SK had for sale. Inside are two dozen desks and more than forty salespeople. About half the customers arrive with printouts, while others use phones, tablets or the bank of computers CarMax provides. The company launched in 1993, became a Fortune 500 firm, and sells more than four hundred thousand vehicles a year on revenue above $9 billion.

CarMax's Inversions

• It sets a fixed price for every car, so haggling is unnecessary.
• Salespeople earn commissions, but the commission does not depend on the car's price.
• It gives customers free condition and history reports, plus warranties, certifications and guarantees aimed at the quality uncertainty Akerlof described in 1967.
• Each desk's computer faces outward, so buyer and seller see the same screen at once.

More than eight customers appear in the first fifteen minutes. Transparency is not merely enlightened: it is the engine of volume. The low road is harder to pass, and the high road of honesty, directness and transparency has become the more pragmatic long-term route.

Three Myths About Selling

The idea that everyone sells still meets resistance, and three myths keep it at arm's length.

• Myth of the blockhead: sales is where people who cannot handle engineering or law end up, a low-IQ pursuit. Alfred Fuller of the Fuller Brush Company observed that his sales force had not gone in for genius. As transactional tasks automate and information parity displaces asymmetry, moving people requires sophisticated skills and as much intellect and creativity as designing a house, reading a CT scan or writing a book.
• Myth of the moneygrubber: effectiveness requires greed and a coin-operated selling machine. Non-sales selling, especially in Ed-Med, has nothing to do with cash. Research cited in the book finds money is not the main driver for most people in traditional sales, and some companies have raised sales by eliminating commissions and de-emphasizing money.
• Myth of the natural: some people are born with sales chops and the rest are out of luck. There are no natural salespeople because everyone is naturally a salesperson. The human selling instinct means anyone can master the basics of moving others.

Key Takeaways

• The used-car stereotype described a market where the seller held the information advantage; once buyers can verify price, condition and reputation in minutes, that suspicion becomes a lagging indicator rather than a fair description.
• When buyers can check, risk shifts to the seller: reputation becomes the asset that decides whether a deal happens, and withholding information costs more than disclosing it.
• Transparency is profitable at scale because it lowers the buyer's cost of deciding; fixed prices and shared information close more sales than haggling does.
• Exploitative selling survives in pockets where customers lack alternatives, which makes punitive financing and surveillance terms a symptom of constrained competition rather than an inherent trait of the trade.
• Selling is neither a low-status fallback, a greed-driven exercise, nor a fixed talent; as routine transactions automate, the remaining work demands judgment and creativity, and the capacity to move others is ordinary enough to be developed.

Chapter 4: Attunement

Overview

Old sales advice assumed a seller who knew more and a buyer with fewer choices, and that assumption no longer holds. The harder question is how to move people when no one has that edge, and when the very instinct that once made you effective may now be working against you.

From Closing to Attunement

In the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin's Blake reduces sales to “Always be closing.” That creed assumes sellers with few competitors and an information edge. As more people sell and buyers can compare notes, the edge fades, so the old ABCs no longer fit. The replacement set is:

• A: Attunement
• B: Buoyancy
• C: Clarity

Attunement means bringing one's actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context, like adjusting a radio dial to a signal that is not immediately clear. It rests on three principles:

1. Increase your power by reducing it.
2. Use your head as much as your heart.
3. Mimic strategically.

The E Test and Power

Since the mid-1980s, social psychologists have used the E Test to measure perspective-taking. A person draws a capital E on their forehead, and the result shows whether they wrote it for themselves or for an observer. In a study led by Adam Galinsky at Northwestern's Kellogg School, people primed with power were almost three times as likely as low-power participants to draw a self-oriented E. In a restaurant email scenario, high-power participants expected a friend to read a sarcastic message as sarcasm, while low-power participants expected sincerity. The low-power group was more likely right because the friend lacked knowledge of the dinner. Galinsky's team concluded that power makes people anchor on their own viewpoint. Dacher Keltner at Berkeley found that lower-status people are keener perspective-takers. So the first principle is to assume you hold less power, using apparent weakness as strength. It does not mean becoming a pushover.

Head and Heart

Perspective-taking is cognitive, while empathy is emotional. In a 2008 gas station negotiation study by Galinsky, William Maddux of INSEAD, and colleagues, the buyer's top price was below the seller's floor, but hidden mutual interests made a deal possible. Perspective-takers reached a deal satisfying both sides 76 percent of the time, beating empathizers, who beat the control group but sometimes hurt creative solutions and self-interest. A recruiter-candidate negotiation repeated the pattern. The second principle is to use your head as much as your heart. It also means mapping relationships, called social cartography. Dan Shimmerman of Varicent Software described mentally mapping each decision maker's biases so he would not spend a year selling Mary only to learn Dave decides.

Strategic Mimicry

People naturally mirror accents, gestures, and expressions, the chameleon effect. Galinsky, Maddux, and Stanford's Elizabeth Mullen tested strategic mimicry by giving negotiators five minutes of instructions to copy mannerisms subtly. Mimickers produced more joint-benefit deals in the gas station and recruiter scenarios without hurting the other side. In a French retail study, 79 percent of customers bought from mimicking clerks versus 62 percent from non-mimickers. Nicolas Guéguen's touch research found petition signatures rose from 55 to 81 percent after a light upper-arm touch. Mimicry must stay subtle, since noticed imitation backfires, and pretending to share a prospect's history is lying, not attunement. Gwen Martin of NumberWorks called the needed quality humility, ceding the larger chair to the other person.

The Ambivert Advantage

Extraversion looks like the sales personality: sociable, assertive, lively, sensation-seeking. Yet the evidence is weak. Three meta-analyses covering 35 studies and 3,806 salespeople found a correlation of only 0.07 between extraversion and sales performance. Adam Grant at Wharton began investigating why by gathering data from a software company's call centers.

Grant's Sales Data

Adam Grant's call-center data began with more than three hundred sales representatives who completed personality assessments, including a 1-to-7 introversion-extraversion scale, before he tracked their revenue for three months. Introverts averaged $120 per hour and extraverts $125, but ambiverts, near the center of the scale, averaged nearly $155. The highest average, $208 per hour, belonged to salespeople scoring 4.0, exactly the midpoint. Plotting total revenue against the scale produced a curve that peaked between 4 and 4.5 and fell toward both ends. Grant's finding challenged the assumption that productive salespeople are extraverted; two Harvard Business Review studies found top performers less gregarious than below-average ones and the most sociable often the poorest. A large study of European and American customers identified excessive assertiveness and zeal, leading to contacting customers too often, as the "most destructive" sales behavior. Extraverts can talk too much and listen too little, missing others' perspectives and appearing pushy; introverts can be too shy to initiate and too timid to close. The useful position is the modulated middle: introverts are geared to inspect, extraverts to respond, and selling requires both. Ambiverts shift along the curve as circumstances demand, which makes them skilled attuners. Extraverts can practice asking more and declaring less; introverts can rehearse the ask, smile, sit up, and state a view. Most people already sit near the middle. Alfred Fuller of Fuller Brush observed that his salesmen were often shy rather than cartoon extroverts, masking it with studied confidence.

Opening Questions and Watch, Wait, Wane

Jim Collins's favorite opening question is "Where are you from?" It lets the other person answer about a hometown, an organization, or a hoped-for move, and it opens a conversation more gently than "What do you do?", which can make people defensive. Strategic mimicry can be practiced in three steps:

• Watch. Observe posture, leg and arm position, leaning, toe tapping, pen twirling, pace of speech, and favored expressions.
• Wait. Let the moment breathe; if the person leans back, count to fifteen before leaning back, and repeat an important point later rather than instantly.
• Wane. After deliberate practice, let the behavior become less conscious, as driving does, so it feels natural rather than false.

The Empty Chair

At important Amazon meetings, Jeff Bezos kept an empty chair beside the executives to represent the customer, a practice that began at Sears. The chair prompts attendees to ask what the customer is thinking, what she wants and fears, and how she would judge the proposal. It can stand in for an audience during a presentation, generate objections before a sales call, or remind a teacher to take students' perspective. Cathy Salit's "Conversation with a Time Traveler" builds the same muscle: pairs choose an item unknown three centuries ago, such as a traffic light, carry-out pizza, or airport screening machine, and one person explains it to a partner playing someone from the early 1700s. Explaining a Big Mac from a drive-through requires conveying automobiles, an amount of meat that would have seemed absurd, and trust in a stranger. The exercise forces attention to the other person's worldview.

Maps, Mirrors, Commonalities

A Discussion Map records the meeting's seating, marks an X for the first speaker and each later comment, and draws a line when someone addresses a particular person. It reveals who dominates, who stays silent, and who attracts criticism or flattery. A Mood Map rates the room from 1, negative and resistant, to 10, positive and open, at the start, midpoint, and end, showing whether the emotional weather improved or worsened. In "Mirror, mirror," partners stand face-to-face for thirty seconds, turn back-to-back, each changes one visible detail, wait sixty seconds, then turn around and guess what changed, repeating twice before debriefing. Robert Cialdini's research on liking and persuasion supports another exercise: groups of three or four spend five minutes finding uncommon commonalities, such as a shared younger brother, recent Disney visit, or hobby. Genuine similarity, not manufactured similarity, is a key form of connection.

Key Takeaways

• Assume you carry less power than you think when you need to read another person accurately; the research on perspective-taking points the same way, since holding power tends to pin people to their own point of view.
• Favor working out what the other side knows over feeling what they feel; empathy alone can blunt the creative trades that leave both parties better off.
• Mirror mannerisms, speech pace and body position only after a delay, then rehearse until the behavior stops feeling deliberate; obvious copying backfires, and inventing a shared past is deceit rather than connection.
• Sit near the middle of the introversion-extraversion scale and shift along it as the situation demands. Grant's call-center figures put ambiverts well above both quieter and louder colleagues in hourly revenue, with the peak at the scale's exact midpoint.
• Prepare the ground before a consequential conversation: open with a question about origins rather than occupation, keep an empty chair for the person who is not in the room, and map who speaks, who decides, and whether the mood is warming or cooling.