“We’re all in sales” says author Daniel Pink. In fact, in a Gallup study people reported spending 40% of their time working in what Pink calls “non-sales selling,” convincing/influencing/moving people to decide or do that does not involve anyone making a purchase.
Dan Pink is always intriguing. Let’s look at a few things his book has to say that apply to managers. In my experience, the higher a manager is in the hierarchy, the more frequently he/she engages in non-sales selling and the higher stakes are.
He presents three strategies that have the most impact on your success moving (convincing) people: attunement, buoyancy, and clarity.
| 1. | Attunement. This is about building rapport and harmony even with those who disagree with your demand, request or plan. Say you are trying to get an employee or team to agree with your approach or perform differently. To create greater attunement, you act (and think) as if there is no power imbalance with employee(s). In other words, enter the interaction without your “boss” hat on. As Pink puts it, you increase your influencing power by reducing your power. Treating your employee as an equal in the (selling) conversation, opens him or her up to engaging in a dialogue, rather than resisting a boss imposed demand that he/she has had no part in creating. |
| 2 | Buoyancy. The thing most people hate when having to sell is rejection, dealing with “no’s.” These hurt, they’re discouraging, and they challenge our sense of our own competency and our judgment about what we are selling. What manager pushing for improvements and change doesn’t encounter the rebuffs, resistance and rejection that a sales professional would instantly recognize? Dan Pink has three approaches that will help the manager here: |
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| 3 | Clarity. An effective way to build credibility as a convincer is to help others see problems and opportunities that they don’t see themselves and then work with them to come up with a solution, a course of action. Dan Pink says you become as much a “problem finder” as a problem solver. If you have something you are pitching, you can position it in terms of one of these problems that have been identified. |
All this said, I don’t think this is one of Dan Pink’s better books. He does have some interesting ideas around the new world of selling where the buyer often has as much or more information than the seller. For managers, however, I suggest you look instead at Influencer (Patterson et al), The New Conceptual Selling (Heiman, et al.) and, for a really deep, cutting edge treatment, Immunity to Change (Kegan & Lahey).
