Revue de presse
"Full of aha! moments . . . timely, original, throughly engaging, deeply humane."
—strategy + business
“A fresh look at the art and science of sales using a mix of social science, survey research and stories.”
—Dan Schawbel, Forbes.com
"Artfully blend(s) anecdotes, insights, and studies from the social sciences into a frothy blend of utility and entertainment."
—Bloomberg
"Excellent…radical, surprising, and undeniably true."
—Harvard Business Review Blog
“Pink has penned a modern day How to Win Friends and Influence People... To Sell Is Human is chock full of stories, social science, and surprises…All leaders—at least those who want to ‘move’ people—should own this book.”
—Training and Development magazine
"Vastly entertaining and informative."
—Phil Johnson, Forbes.com
"Pink one of our smartest thinkers about the interaction of work, psychology and society."
—Worth
"A roadmap to help the rest of us guide our own pitches."
—Chicago Tribune
“Like discovering your favorite professor in a box…packed with information, reasons to care about his message, how and why to execute his suggestions, and it's all accentuated with meaningful examples… this book deserves a good, long look.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An engaging blend of interviews, research and observations by [this] incisive author"
—The Globe and Mail
Extrait
About a year ago, in a moment of procrastination masquerading as an act of reflection, I decided to examine how I spend my time. I opened my laptop, clicked on the carefully synched, color-coded calendar, and attempted to reconstruct what I’d actually done over the previous two weeks. I cataloged the meetings attended, trips made, meals eaten, and conference calls endured. I tried to list everything I’d read and watched as well as all the face-to-face conversations I’d had with family, friends, and colleagues. Then I inspected two weeks of digital entrails—772 sent e-mails, four blog posts, eighty-six tweets, about a dozen text messages.
When I stepped back to assess this welter of information—a pointillist portrait of what I do and therefore, in some sense, who I am—the picture that stared back was a surprise: I am a salesman.
I don’t sell minivans in a car dealership or bound from office to office pressing cholesterol drugs on physicians. But leave aside sleep, exercise, and hygiene, and it turns out that I spend a significant portion of my days trying to coax others to part with resources. Sure, sometimes I’m trying to tempt people to purchase books I’ve written. But most of what I do doesn’t directly make a cash register ring. In that two-week period, I worked to convince a magazine editor to abandon a silly story idea, a prospective business partner to join forces, an organization where I volunteer to shift strategies, even an airline gate agent to switch me from a window seat to an aisle. Indeed, the vast majority of time I’m seeking resources other than money. Can I get strangers to read an article, an old friend to help me solve a problem, or my nine-year-old son to take a shower after baseball practice?
You’re probably not much different. Dig beneath the sprouts of your own calendar entries and examine their roots, and I suspect you’ll discover something similar. Some of you, no doubt, are selling in the literal sense—convincing existing customers and fresh prospects to buy casualty insurance or consulting services or homemade pies at a farmers’ market. But all of you are likely spending more time than you realize selling in a broader sense—pitching colleagues, persuading funders, cajoling kids. Like it or not, we’re all in sales now.
And most people, upon hearing this, don’t like it much at all.
Sales? Blecch. To the smart set, sales is an endeavor that requires little intellectual throw weight—a task for slick glad-handers who skate through life on a shoeshine and a smile. To others it’s the province of dodgy characters doing slippery things—a realm where trickery
