Thoughts on <To Sell Is Human>

Opening

While reading last time's book , I vividly imagined myself 6 months, 1 year, and 3 years from now. Writing out my goals for all three timeframes, I realized they all involve directly selling assets, products, or services with my own hands. It also brought back to mind something I'd always felt frustrated by at work: "I don't know how to sell well." And the thought grew stronger that as AI and technology advance, making something well is becoming easier and more accessible — but the final step of actually selling it, persuading someone, and getting the result you want is something that technology cannot replace.

Just as we say that behind every screen in online activity there's ultimately a human being, the outcome of a sale is essentially a decision and responsibility of the person buying — so without people, the concept of selling/buying fundamentally cannot exist. In the middle of thinking these thoughts, a book that was once on my recommended reading list when I used to read a lot of marketing books — — came immediately to mind, because its title says everything I was thinking in one sentence. Wanting to become someone who "sells well," I decided to read it.

About the Book

The book satisfied my reading motivation — as described in the introduction — just as expected. And while before reading it my focus was squarely on "selling" as the title suggests, the book also covers "persuading" others in every corner of everyday life through what it calls "non-sales selling" — which made it more helpful than anticipated. Below I've pulled out content from the book that offers a perspective and information not commonly found elsewhere.

• Sales is essentially human nature itself.
• A doctor sells a prescription to a patient. A lawyer sells a verdict to a jury. A teacher sells the value of paying attention in class to students. Whatever your job, you're making presentations to colleagues and pitching to new clients.
• People spend about 40% of their time at work in non-sales selling — activities that don't directly induce someone to buy, but do involve persuading, convincing, and influencing others. That's roughly 24 minutes of every hour spent moving other people.
• Palantir has no salespeople. Instead, it has what it calls "forward-deployed engineers." These technical experts interact directly with clients to ensure the product meets their needs. The team doesn't hire salespeople — it puts real computer scientists in the field. They can solve a customer's problem on the spot, and — most importantly — they begin to identify new problems the customer hadn't even thought of.
  • Rather than sales training or process education for new hires, this team has them read nonfiction books about the 9/11 attacks — to help them understand what happens when the government fails to properly interpret information, and thus to understand why the company's product is necessary for the client.
• The negative impression we have of sales is mostly not because of something inherent in selling itself, but because of the chronic information asymmetry that has long plagued the selling process. But as time passes and information asymmetry decreases, everything about sales is changing.
• Sales isn't about reaching into the customer's pocket. "Empathy" and "persistence" are, surprisingly, more powerful drivers of successful selling. Try asking yourself: "How would I treat my mother if she were trying to buy this service?"
• 3 conditions for moving others' hearts (ABC):
  1. Attunement
     1. Empathy and attunement are different. Empathy is receiving the other person's feelings; attunement is adopting the other person's perspective.
     2. A great example of attunement: the "empty chair" in Amazon meetings
        1. In Amazon meetings, one extra empty chair is placed among all the meeting attendees. It's there to remind everyone that a customer is sitting in it — and that the most important person (= the customer) in the meeting must never be forgotten.
     3. The smartest, easiest, and most effective way to get inside someone else's head is to sit in their chair.
  2. Buoyancy
     1. The golden ratio of positive to negative emotions is 3:1. When this ratio exceeds 11:1, positive emotions begin to do more harm than good.
     2. Just as "buoyancy" and "gravity" are in constant tension, the optimal state is one where positive and negative emotions are appropriately balanced.
  3. Clarity → Honestly, I didn't "clearly" understand why this section was named Clarity. Even so, here are the passages that were most useful to me on their own terms:
     1. The problem lies in failing to connect your present self with your future self. → Oh, this is the same concept I read in — interesting.
     2. For people who don't respond to motivational framing, a yes/no question has little effect. Instead of a binary question, ask them to place themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 — this can reveal that someone who might have reflexively answered "no" actually has at least some inclination.
• 3 skills needed for sales + non-sales selling:
  1. Pitch: The ability to convey key points persuasively
     1. The Pixar Pitch: Pixar films share the same narrative DNA in 6 sentences.
        1. Once upon a time _____. Every day _____. One day _____. Because of that _____. Because of that _____. Until finally _____.
     2. Pecha-Kucha: Exactly 20 slides for exactly 20 seconds each. A remedy for terrible PowerPoint presentations. Every presentation should be designed to fit within this 6 minutes and 40 seconds to be most effective.
  2. Improvisation
     1. "Yes, and" instead of "Yes, but"
  3. Service
     1. When radiology scans sent to radiologists included a photo of the patient alongside the imaging, incidental findings increased by 80%. Care and accuracy improved dramatically.
     2. Adding a human element to professional work can improve performance and increase consideration for the other person.
     3. Two questions to ask when you truly need to move someone:
        1. If the person you're selling to decides to buy, will their life improve?
        2. When this transaction is complete, will the world be a better place than it was before?

Closing

As the book briefly touches on, I used to naturally form a negative image when I heard words like "salesman," "sales," or "marketing" — or feel a passive sense of "I can't do that well." So the greatest benefit I got from reading this book is a shift in perspective: the conviction that selling and persuading are the same thing, and that no matter how much technology advances and the world changes, knowing how to sell anything throughout your life is an incredibly valuable and useful ability to be proud of. With this new perspective, I'm going to actively try to sell one of my major assets. Creating one success story will help me get closer, faster, to becoming the "person who sells well" that I aspire to be. If you have similar concerns to what I described in the introduction, I'd recommend reading this book.