Dan Pink certainly thinks so, says Jan Hills, as she picks out her top insights from his latest book
The new book from Dan Pink, ‘To sell is human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others’, is getting mixed reviews. The book follows his traditional style of summarising lots of science and giving you some simple exercises to help implement the ideas.
But are we all in sales? Are these ideas that HR or even business leaders want to adopt? Pink admits that historically sales has a poor reputation. Traditional sales skills are about the ABC of selling which is all about pushing and closing. Over the last 10 years or so there has been an acceptance that people are more sophisticated and pushy sales will not work. People have more information and so can combat some of the techniques, or take the advantage from the sales person. Concepts like relationship sales and consultancy sales have all tried to address these changes.
Alongside the shift in ‘real’ sales roles there has been an acceptance that many more professions are about trying to get people to do things they either don’t want to do or didn’t realise they should do. In other words to sell. Pink claims, in his survey, that eight out of nine people spend a fair amount time doing this type of selling at work and at home. This includes managers who are trying to get people to; join the company; work differently; and accept a new strategy. So HR definitely has to do this even if we don’t like to call it sales. We call it persuasion, marketing, getting buy–in, stakeholder management, you get the picture.
It is in this area that HR professionals might want to take a look at the ideas in the book. The book calls this non-sales selling. Pink describes three skills, the new ABC’s of non-sales selling, to do this successfully. They are skills: attunement, buoyancy and clarity.
- Attunement – is about really understanding the other person, understanding their perspective and where they are coming from. Why they might want to do what you are suggesting, the WIIFM ( what’s in it for me) perspective and why they might not.
- Buoyancy –is about recognising life and work are tough and people need to deal with rejection. Preparation helps to maintain buoyancy. Have you got the data, have you got yourself in the best state of mind, do you really believe this yourself? These are all part of the preparation.
- Clarity – Pink argues most people have too much data so this skill is about being able to understand and translate the data to make it meaningful. This is very familiar territory for HR people even if there is still a way to go on information gathering for many HR departments. It also means being able to help people identify issues before others realise they have them. This for me is one of the key lessons for HR. We often have a perspective that managers and leaders do not have. We have data they don’t see in the aggregate. Helping leaders to see the potential impact, through data on for example demographic changes, the engagement scores or a competitor’s employee offering are part of HR’s role in adding value. We also use this in getting leaders to understand the potential impact, maybe the unintended consequence of their proposal. This is a key skill we found in both our HR business partner research and our HR leaders research. This is the strategic space for HR. Pink talks a lot about the use of powerful questions to shift perspective, understand consequences and get people to take a different course of action.
So are we all in sales? Well you may not like the title of ‘sales person’ but according to Pink’s definition I think we are. We are in the business of persuading others, usually for the good of the company and achieving strategic goals. Or at least that is what most people in HR aspire to do. You can see Dan Pink talking about his book in quite some detail if you don’t want to read it. . But remember he is putting the ideas in the book into practice here!