In our information age, when prospective customers often have as much data as the seller touting a product or service, old-style salesmanship is dead or dying. Indeed, as American author Daniel Pink forcefully argues in his new book,
To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (Riverhead Hardcover, 272 pages), it’s now extremely difficult for sellers to exploit a knowledge gap in a buyer’s assessment of a purchase.
Pink elaborates on this point in an interview with NPR.com: “Well, something curious has happened in the last 10 years in that you can walk into a car dealership with the invoice price of the car, something that even the salesmen/women at car dealers didn’t know too long ago. And so in a world of information parity, or at least something close to it, we’ve moved —
caveat emptor [buyer beware] is still good advice, but equally good advice for the sellers is
caveat venditor, seller beware.” This being the case, Pink says, sales can no longer be scripted; they are more like an improvisation, with all that this implies about pursuing a common goal and making your prospective buyer look good.
In a review of
To Sell Is Human in the January 6, 2013 issue of the
Los Angeles Times, Andrew Hill, an editor of the
Financial Times of London, welcomes this development: “For people who hate selling and being sold to, it is nice to think the process has become a cooperative venture, with the ‘always be closing’ ABC of the hard sellers… replaced by a mantra of attunement, buoyancy and clarity.”
Read “Death Of The (Predatory) Salesman: These Days, It’s A Buyer’s Market,” an interview with Daniel Pink about To Sell is Human, in NPR.org now!Read Andrew Hill’s book review of Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human in the Los Angeles Times now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Daniel H. Pink, an American author and journalist, had previously written four books that focus on the changing workplace, all of which made it to
The New York Times best seller list:
A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future and
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us as well as
Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself and
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. His articles on business and technology have also appeared in
The New York Times,
Harvard Business Review,
Fast Company, and
Wired.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In “Power of Suggestion,” an article he wrote for the January 30, 2013 issue of
The Chronicle Review, senior writer Tom Bartlett makes an incisive look at the recent scandals and doubt that have beset the field of social psychology. “Formerly high-flying researchers like Diederik Stapel, Marc Hauser, and Dirk Smeesters saw their careers implode after allegations that they had cooked their results and managed to slip them past the supposedly watchful eyes of peer reviewers… Plus there’s the so-called file-drawer problem, that is, the tendency for researchers to publish their singular successes and ignore their multiple failures, making a fluke look like a breakthrough. Fairly or not, social psychologists are perceived to be less rigorous in their methods, generally not replicating their own or one another’s work, instead pressing on toward the next headline-making outcome.”
Read Tom Bartlett’s “Power of Suggestion” in The Chronicle Review now! 
