Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Daniel Pink - To Sell is human
Selling is no longer about protecting and purveying information. It's about curating it.
20th century big heads speculated the data economy would negate the role of the salesman, but it's done the opposite. The internet closing the information gap hasn't made us smarter, but lazier, and neurally more susceptible to part with what non-sales sellers want us to part with.
Pink brings his signature part-history, part-expose, part-self-help style to bear on what sales used to mean and how it applies to more heavily tilted toward entrepreneurship. Exchanging the old ABCs of Always Be Closing with that of Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity, Pink walks us through how versatility is a dish best served daily.
The presence of so many salespeople in the planet’s largest economy seems weird given the implosion of the global financial system and the explosion of widespread Internet connectivity of the past 2 decades, and yet, sales, or what is now covered under its umbrella, has never been a bigger function.
Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students on the value of paying attention in class. Entrepreneurs woo funders, writers sweet-talk producers, coaches cajole players. And now we go online to sell ourselves on Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Hinge profiles.
Today much of what we do also seems to involve moving. Moving other people to part with resources, tangibly with cash or intangibly with abstractions like effort and attention. In a world where even your thoughts are commodified, there’s nothing that isn't sales.
Seizing on concepts of social cartography, strategic mimicry, autosuggestion, interrogative self-talk, appropriate negativity, flexible optimism, deep structure story-telling, rejecting rejection, improv and probing, Pink runs the gamut on how we can mentally pivot to loose the skills of influence onto the world to positively affect our life, personally and professionally.
Speaking of selling, I'm pumped to join @tommybelgeri as an Account Manager for Artisent Floors. Our city streets may be doomed, but you can count on our mutli-family saturated city to be covered in fresh floors.