Notes: To Sell is Human

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.

by D. Pink.

• the new ABCs of moving others. A - Attunement. B - Buoyancy. C - Clarity. 
• E test - snap your fingers 5 times, then draw capital E on your forehead. Shows self-centered or perspective-taking. 
• Attuning yourself with others hinges on: 1. Increase your power by reducing it. Inverse relationship between power and perspective taking. Those with lower power  are keener perspective-takers. Attunement as persuasion jiu-jitsu: using an apparent weakness as an actual strength. Start your encounters with the assumption that you're in a position of lower power. 
• 2. Use your head more than your head. Getting in their heads more efficient than empathy/ than in their hearts. 
• 3. Mimic strategically / subtly. Waitresses who repeated orders word for word got 70% more tips. Touching. Lightly on arm or shoulder. 
• Humility - #1 ... reducing their power. Curious, asking questions - #2 ... getting inside their heads. In synch, connecting ... #3 ability to "chameleon."
• Ambivert advantage. Right in the middle. Best movers because they're the most skilled attuners. 
• Best way to start conversation: Where are you from?
• Strategic mimicry - watch, wait, wane ... less conscious, less effort, subtle. 
• Meeing. Pull up an empty chair. That represents the customer. Forces you to attune yourself to others. 
• Conversation with a time traveler. Forces you to care about the worldview of the other person. 
• Discussion map. Map who's talking, and to whom. Circles each time they talk, Xs and arrows to whom they talk to. 
• Find uncommon commonalities. Can help you attune yourself to others. Similarity is a key form of human connection.
• Buoyancy -- how to deal with sea of rejection and still go on. 
• Before: Interrogaive self-talk. Ask a question. Can we fix it? Can we do it? From making statements to asking questions. To get out the door. The pre-talk. First component of buoyancy.
• During: Positivity. 2nd component. Ratio. 3 to 1. Three positives to one negative thoughts, comments, emotions. Interrogative self-talk when preparing to move someone, but positivity during. Once positive emotions hits 11:1 more harm than good. 
• After: Explanatory style. People who give easily, who become helpless explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal. Flexible optimism - optimism with eyes open. 
• Buoyancy in practice. Prepare - can i move these people? Answer it directly and in writing. 5 specific reasons why answer is yes. Monitor positivity ratio. 
• Tweak explanatory style. How we explain negative events has an enormous effect on our buoyancy and ultimately our performance. When something bad happens, ask yourself these three questions and come up with an intelligent "no" to each: 1. Is this permanent? 2. Is this pervasive? 3. Is this personal? 
• More you explain bad events as temporary, specific and external, more likely you are to persist in the face of adversity. 
• Learned Optimism. Book
• CLARITY - the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identity problems they didn't realize they had. Ability to move others hinges less on problem solving than on problem finding. 
• Clarity involves problem finding and putting it in the right frame. Clarity depends on contrast. Compared to what? 
• the five frames: 1. Less frame. Limit choices. Less is more. 2. Experience frame - happier with experiences than material purchases. 3. Label frame - merely assigning positive labels. 4. Blemished frame - negative info must follow positive. 5. Potential frame - when selling ourselves, emphasize potential rather than achievements. 
• Finding off-ramp - once you've find problem and framed it right, need to give off ramp. Specific directions to make it easier for people. Details on how to act, what to do.
• Clarify motives with two irrational questions. Instant Influence (book). On a scale from 1 to 10 ... and why wasn't a lower number?
• Jolt of the unfamiliar. Change your routine. 
• Become a info Curator. In old days, the challenge was assessing info. These days, our challenge is curating it. 1. Seek -- list of best sources; 2. Sense -- creating meaning out of it; 3. Share. 
• Learn how to ask better questions. 1. Produce your questions; 2. Improve your questions; 3. Prioritize - choose the three most important questions. 
• Read these books: Influence, R. Cialdini; Made to Stick, C. Heath; Switch, C. Heath; Mindless Eating, B. Wansink; Nudge: Improving Decisions ... , R. Thaler. 
• the Five Whys. to find out what kind of problem. Ask why five times. 
• What to do. Pitch, improvise, and serve.
• Pitch - ability to distill one's point to its persuasive essence. 
• Hollywood. If the catcher of pitch categorized the pitcher as "uncreative" in first few minutes, meeting doomed. In the most successful pitches, pitcher didn't push her idea until she extracted a yes. She invited in her counterpart as a collaborator. The more the suits were able to contribute, the better the idea became. Purpose of pitch isn't necessarily to move others to adopt your idea, but to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings other person in as participant. 
• Kinds of pitches: 1. One-word pitch; 2. Question pitch - by making people work just a little harder, question pitches prompt people to come up with their own reasons for agreeing; 3. rhyming pitch - rhyme can enhance processing fluency of your listeners, allowing message to stick; 4. Subject-line pitch (email) - Utility and curiosity. People opened useful messages for extrinsic reasons (something to gain or lose); opened other messages for  intrinsic reasons (just curious). Your subject line should be obviously useful or mysteriously intriguing BUT NOT BOTH. 
• Third principle - specificity. 
• 5. Twitter pitch - 140 characters or less. Mark of effective pitch - it engages recipients and encourages them to take the conversation further, by responding, clicking a link, or sharing. Best were: Tweets that asked questions, and provided info and links. 
• 6. Pixar pitch. Pixar code, every Pixar film shares the same narrative DNA, a deep structure of storytelling that involves six sequential sentences: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
• Actual Pitching: Answer three questions: 1. What do you want them to know? 2. What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do?
• Add a visual to your pitch. 
• After pitching, comes improvising. Three essential rules of improv theater: 1. Hear offers; 2. Say "Yes and."; 3. Make your partner look good. 
• Listen game - wait 15 secs before answering. Listening without some degree of intimacy isn't really listening. Must listen without listening for anything. Once we listen in this new, more intimate way, we begin to hear things we might have missed. Offers come in all shapes and sizes. Only way to hear them is to change the way we listen and then the way we respond.
• "Yes and" spirals toward possibility. 
• Make your partner look good. Win-win thinking. Arguing or debating, polite questions not statements, change the rules of engagement and therefore the nature of the interaction itself. Curious questions. Respectful interaction. 
• Improvise in action: Listen twice as much as talk. Wait five seconds before responding. 
• To Serve. Ultimately about service. About improving people's lives and in turn, the world. Need to make it personal and make it purposeful. 
• Focus not on the self but on the target group. Making it personal works better when we make it purposeful. Servant-leaders - serve first and sell later. 
• Don't upsell, UPSERVE. 
• from Seth Godin -- "why not always act as if the other guy is doing the favor?" Connects with attunement ... lowering your status can enhance your powers of perspective-taking, and the wisest and most ethical way to move others is to proceed with humility and gratitude. 
• Emotionally intelligent signage. Makes it personal and purposeful. Expresses empathy with person viewing the sign (personal) or by triggering empathy in that person will understand the rationale behind the posted rule (purposeful). 
• Imagine the person you're dealing with is your grandmother. This is ultimate way to make it personal. 
• Always ask and answer these two questions: 1. If the person you're selling to agrees to buy, will his life improve? 2. When you're interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? 
• If the answer to either of these questions is no, you're doing something wrong.