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Resources for product teams from industry experts.

Sales and non-sales selling are developing along a similar path — because the stable, simple, and certain conditions that favored scripts have now given way to the dynamic, complex, and unpredictable conditions that favor improvisation. Beneath the apparent chaos of improvisation is a light structure that allows it to work.

Understanding that structure can help you move others, especially when your astute perspective-taking, infectious positivity, and brilliant framing don’t deliver the results you seek. In those circumstances and many others, you’ll do better if you follow three essential rules of improvisational theater:

  • Hear offers.
  • Say “Yes and.”
  • Make your partner look good.

— To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. The time is ripe for the sales version of Greenleaf’s philosophy. Call it servant selling. It begins with the idea that those who move others aren’t manipulators but servants. They serve first and sell later. And the test — which, like Greenleaf’s, is the best and the most difficult to administer — is this: If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? Servant selling is the essence of moving others today. But in some sense, it […]
  2. The key is to understand how intuition—specifically, informed intuition—actually works. Unlike numerical analysis, it does not rely on processing a statistically significant sample of data in order to achieve a given level of confidence. Rather, it involves conclusions based on isolating a few high-quality images—really, data fragments—that it takes to be archetypes of a broader and more complex reality. These images simply stand out from the swarm of mental material that rattles around in our heads. They are the ones that are memorable. So the first rule of working with an image is: If you can’t remember it, don’t […]
  3. At its simplest, a strategy is a plan for achieving a goal — a bird’s-eye view of the path that will take us from where we are now to where we want to go. It’s important to understand the distinction between strategy and tactics if we’re to elevate ‘story’ in our organisations and use it as more than just a communications tool. If a strategy is the path to your goal, tactics are the specific steps you take as you navigate that path. Imagine your business purpose and vision as a mountain peak. Your strategy is the route map […]
  4. Winning over one or two customers in each of five or ten different segments—the consequence of taking a sales-driven approach—will create no word-of-mouth effect. Your customers may try to start a conversation about you, but there will be no one there to reinforce it. By contrast, winning four or five customers in one segment will create the desired effect. Thus, the segment-targeting company can expect word-of-mouth leverage early in its crossing-the-chasm marketing effort, whereas the sales-driven company will get it much later, if at all. This lack of word of mouth, in turn, makes selling the product that much […]
  5. Being curious means asking questions about why things work the way they do, and embracing unfamiliar situations or topics with a sense of wonder. Being observant means training yourself to see the details that most others often miss. Being fickle means capturing ideas without feeling the need to fully understand or analyze them in that moment. Being thoughtful means taking the time to reflect on a point of view and share it in a considered way. Being elegant means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful and simple way for easy understanding. — Non-Obvious: How to […]

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