【第145回】“To sell is human”, Daniel H. Pink

This is the Pink’s latest book which has not been translated into Japanese yet. As is often the case with his other books, this book is interesting and has many implications in order to think about our work and career.

As this title means, considering about current business condition, we have to rethink about the role of selling. Let’s think about 20 or 30 years ago. At that time our roles and skill sets tended to be fixed for a long time, because most big organizations were highly segmented. We didn’t have to worry about much outside our career domain, because other people covered other roles.

But the business world has changed dramatically. Especially because of rapid innovations of IT, flat organization movements and globalizing business conditions punished fixed skills. What we do day to day on our job now must stretch across functional boundaries. We start to have to care about outside of our static job descriptions.

According to author the most important key factor to stretch our functional boundaries is selling skill. In order to work with other sections we should collaborate and suggest many things to them. When we kick off a project team, we have to make good team through human skill as soon as possible. When we want our plans to be approved, we have to make a nice presentation to all our stakeholders. All these skills which ‘once’ belonged to salesperson are NOT needed for almost all salesperson today.

Then the author says selling ABC has changed. Old ABC meant Always, Be, Closing, say pushing sales style. New ABC means Attunement, Buoyancy, Clarity. According to latest ‘Wiktionary’, attunement is “the quality of being in tune with something”, buoyancy is “the ability of an object to stay afloat in a fluid”, and clarity is “the state, or measure of being clear, either in appearance, thought or style”. He, of course, puts emphasis on latter ones, and explains each points.

He warns that we often neglect human related factors because we put too emphasis on work itself saying as professionalism. But we should change our mind and be cared for concrete and personal issues. The value of making the matter personal has two sides. One is recognizing the person you’re trying to serve, and the other one is putting yourself personally behind whatever it is that you’re trying to sell.

And he also suggests that we should move from ‘upselling’ to ‘upserving’. Former one is an old style of sales. Latter one is doing more for the other person than he expects or we initially intended. To do upserving, it is important for us to take the extra steps that transform a mundane interaction into a memorable experience for other person.

“FREE AGENT NATION”, D H. Pink, BUSINESS PLUS, 2002
“How will you measure your life?”, Clayton M. Christensen
“HPI essentials”, George M. Piskurich, ASTD Press
“The Inventurers (third edition)”, Janet Hagberg / Richard Leider