Pink, however, came up with a more modern “ABC” for sales – attunement, buoyancy and clarity. Attunement, he noted, is the idea that sales requires a better understanding of people. It’s a mastery of perspective, he added, especially the ability to be able to glean the other person’s perspective on the sale.
Buoyancy, he said, was inspired by something Pink once heard from a Fuller Brush door-to-door salesman. “When you are in sales, the man said, you face an ocean of rejection. The key was to know how to stay afloat in that ocean of rejection. That is buoyancy.”
The third term – clarity – reflects the importance of making sure you have all of the right information before going into a sale. “If you are in sales and your subject knows what his problem is, he can probably find the solution on his own,” Pink said. The key for the salesperson, he added, is to anticipate the subject’s problem and offer a solution. “It is problem identification, [figuring out] when they are wrong about their problems or don’t know that they have a problem. That makes a good salesperson – and that can work in any modern job.”
After establishing the “ABCs” of becoming a good salesperson, Pink set out to learn what personality type is best at selling. The common belief is that extroverts excel as salespeople, while introverts struggle. “To a certain extent, that was true – extroverts were better than introverts,” he said. But more important was the finding that the group that was best at selling were the people in the middle – those who had the best traits of both extroversion and introversion.
People in the middle, Pink noted, know when to push and when to pull back, when to talk and when to shut up. After laying out his findings on a seven-point scale, the plot points for success in sales created an almost-perfect turtle hump. The people who fell in the three-or-four range on the chart did better, whether it was at actually making a sale, persuading a colleague to do something or convincing someone to go out on a date.
Extroverts, Pink added, often do not take the time to understand what the person getting the sales pitch wants, since they are often too busy talking about themselves. The introverts are not persuasive enough, or maybe a little too empathetic. “Once again, it is not the general past wisdom that was right about sales, which is another reason why it may have a stigma.”
Pitches with panache
Next up for Pink was figuring out which style of persuasion – the “pitch”, whether it be in actual sales or daily life – was most effective. Again, he found surprises.
