February 21st, 2022 Read time: 20 mins

MasterClass Summary: Daniel Pink Teaches Sales

What We Get Wrong About Selling

Before we can discuss the process of selling, how to do it better, or where we make the biggest mistakes, we have to address the elephant in the room: most of us feel uncomfortable selling. As of this writing, my job is to be a salesperson, and even I'm uncomfortable selling. It can feel slimy, boastful, or downright sleazy. This misunderstanding of how selling should feel is key to Daniel Pink's lessons, and why so many of us are stuck in an older way of thinking.

Classic sales techniques, the kind of you imagine of a plaid-suit wearing used car salesman of the 1970s, are greasy, uncomfortable, and off-putting. And if you are still selling like that, you should feel uncomfortable because you're doing it wrong. Selling should not be about convincing someone through trickery or deception. It should be about uncovering truth and communicating real value. Pink's entire ethos of selling revolves around this concept, and it shows in his techniques for understanding your buyer, instigating a need for change in your buyer's behavior, and going through the rigor of the sales process.

Understand Your Audience

Proper selling involves story telling, and to tell a story with your audience as one of the main characters, you need to understand them. Trying to craft that story without first taking the time to get to know who is listening is at best a shot in the dark, and at worst a quick way to failure. However, getting into your buyer's shoes (or attunement) does not need to be a struggle, and there are some simple techniques to get there.

A mistake many of us make in selling and presenting is that we think we need to establish ourselves as powerful, capable people, the kind who dominate the room. That's fine if you're going to give an investor presentation or a TED talk, but in most selling cases you need to connect, and if you take up all the power in the room, connection is essentially impossible. Counterintuitive though it may be, reducing your power - speaking less, listening more, trying to empathize with your buyer's situation, and asking questions to understand their struggles - creates a deeper dialogue and helps you internalize what their needs are and how you can best help them.

On the point of asking questions, this is a foundational skill in selling. Your buyer often times knows more than you would think about their available options, and they certainly know more about the actual problems they face. Asking questions, listening deeply, and working on understanding their problems from all of its angles will insure that when you do begin to discuss solutions, your audience is not only more ready to hear what you have to say, but they'll be more inclined to trust you because you've established that you're truly invested in them and their needs. And if you're not invested in their needs, then you either didn't listen well enough, or you shouldn't be selling something to them.

At the end of the day, a good sale truly does have a win-win component. You want your audience to walk away with your product, services, or idea in a better place than before they bought it. One of the best ways to accomplish that is to make sure you've heard them and understood their needs, and placed your solution in the context of their unique experience.

Instigating Change

For a buyer, buying something at its core involves a change of their condition. They were hungry, they went and bought a sandwich. They didn't like that their car was dirty, they went and got a car wash. They didn't like their company's strategic vision, they bought a consultant's time to help them reframe their 5 year plan. There has to be a need for change on the buyer's end, and as a seller, you help them understand that need for change, even if they don't yet see it themselves.

I have to stop and note here, this is a part where I see dangers in how this skill set is used: making someone buy something they don't really need because you were able to convince them what they had was insufficient. That is something I personally don't agree with. That said (and Pink made this point as well), there are times when someone legitimately doesn't understand that their resources, tools, or ideas are stuck in the past or somehow inadequate, and that they need to learn about what is possible so that they would want to change their situation.

To instigate change, the process I interpreted from Pink's perspective involved framing the situation, distilling for clarity, and making change easy. With those 3 components, and the fact that you now understand your audience's needs, you can better position your solutions for the necessary change.

Framing can take many different forms, but its purpose is to provide context around both the situation at hand, as well as our own cognitive biases that we bring into these situations. Some examples of these biases may be loss aversion (losing $20 is a -5 on our emotional scale, but gaining $20 is only a +3 on our positive scale, so losses have a greater mental impact), anchoring (seeing a high number in one situation makes you expect a high number in another situation), and the paradox of choice (too many choices causes paralysis and unhappiness), but they all resolve around the question, "What is my audience going to think of this solution (given the context), and how can I help those thoughts with the right framing?". You can use this list² of cognitive biases to see how your situation might be influenced by these thought patterns and how to address those outcomes.

Once you've framed the situation, you want to get to clarity. In this case, clarity is about removing extraneous and distracting information and distilling the situation down to its clear implications. It's become cliche to say, "We live in an age of information overload", but that doesn't make it false. Curation of information is far more important than volume of information. This may mean reducing the number of arguments or case studies to back up your point, and instead relying on a few very specific ones that directly meet your audience's needs. Or it could mean narrowing down what is the core reason a home buyer wants to get into real estate, and simplifying their potential search criteria to match those properties that match their needs. Whatever the use case, clarity is almost always subtractive, not additive. Remove what is extraneous, and all you are left with is the core idea.

Lastly, to instigate change, it has to be easy. Our brains are lazy machines, and the thought of change is scary enough. Add a particularly difficult change on top of that, and switching behavior becomes a serious hurdle. So 'build off ramps', as Pink puts it. Whatever burdens you can think of, if you can ease them for your audience, they'll be much more inclined to go with your solution. After all, if our brains are lazy, you may as well use that fact to your advantage.

Facing the Struggle

True in sales and just about everything else in life, is that things will get hard. You will face setbacks, rejection, and failure. Having strong coping strategies that allow you to do the work again and again is key to eventually achieving success. Winston Churchill may be overly quoted, but he did have some good one liners: "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm". Pink's concept of buoyancy along with his suggested method of self talk do a great job of retaining this enthusiasm and mitigating frustration.

For self talk, Pink suggests that the modern movement of positive psychology, while not incorrect, is ultimately not enough to truly keep up momentum. Simply telling yourself, "I'm great! This is awesome!" can feel disingenuous, especially if you don't feel great, and the situation isn't awesome. Instead, his preferred technique is one of interrogative self talk, or asking yourself questions. By asking yourself, "How could you be great? How will this pitch be awesome?" you force yourself to think positively, to come up with those necessary approaches and feelings. Ultimately, it's a way to sell yourself to yourself, something we all have to do from time to time.

This interrogative self talk can also be used in the face of our normal negative self talk that may be pervasive and permanent (I'm bad at all things and I'll always be bad). Asking questions forces a more objective stance, and can short circuit this kind of self-sabotaging behavior. Life can be hard enough without our inner critics making it worse, and a buoyant attitude powered by good questions can keep you practicing again and again.

To Live is To Sell

We all have to sell ourselves as valuable members of the group, one way or another. Even if your value is as simple as being a good friend, we all bring value to those around us, and the people in our groups bring value to us. You can think of it less like 'selling' and more like 'showing your value', if necessary. You can't show value that isn't there, so you have to actually provide value, and if you actually provide value, you can't expect everyone to see it automatically. Maybe you have to communicate it, and if you're going to communicate it, you may as well do that effectively. That, at its core, is selling. Human connection, conveying value to one another.

Pink's ideas on the best way to convey value strike this very humanist approach, keeping the art of selling simple and personal. It's not about specific formulas for writing the perfect cold email, or recipes for how to make enough sales calls to meet your quota. It's about making genuine connection, and providing something meaningful to those you connect with.

Daniel Pink's MasterClass on Sales and Persuasion ↩
Broad list of cognitive biases you can learn to understand your own, and other's, flawed thinking ↩