Summary of To Sell Is Human Book by Daniel H. Pink

About a year ago, in a moment of procrastination masquerading as an act of reflection, the author decided to examine how he spends his time. He opened his laptop, clicked on the carefully synched, color-coded calendar, and attempted to reconstruct what he’d actually done over the previous two weeks. He cataloged the meetings attended, trips made, meals eaten, and conference calls endured. He tried to list everything he’d read and watched as well as all the face-to-face conversations he’d had with family, friends, and colleagues. Then he inspected two weeks of digital entrails — 772 sent emails, four blog posts, 83 tweets, about a dozen text messages.

He stepped back to assess this welter of information — a pointillist portrait of what he does and, therefore, in some sense, who he is — the picture that stared back was a surprise: He is a salesman!

He does not 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 he spends a significant portion of his days trying to coax others to part with resources.

Sometimes he is trying to tempt people to purchase books he has written. But most of what he does do not directly make a cash register ring.

You’re probably not much different. Dig beneath the sprouts of your own calendar entries and examine their roots, and 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? 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 and deceit get the speaking parts while honesty and fairness watch mutely from the rafters. Still, others view it as the white-collar equivalent of cleaning toilets — necessary perhaps, but unpleasant and even a bit unclean.

We’ve gotten it wrong.

This is a book about sales. But it is unlike any book about sales you have read (or ignored) before. That’s because selling in all its dimensions — whether pushing Buicks on a car lot or pitching ideas in a meeting — has changed more in the last ten years than it did over the previous hundred. Most of what we think we understand about selling are constructed atop a foundation of assumptions that has crumbled.