Taste Note - Amazon Sales & Selling Best Sellers
To Sell Is Human: Why Everyone Is in Sales Now - and the New ABCs
A Kurums Book Taste review of To Sell Is Human for leaders whose teams move others all day without ever calling it selling.
Why this book fits Kurums
Pink's survey data says people now spend a large share of their working time in non-sales selling - persuading, pitching, and moving others without a transaction attached. Managers selling change, founders selling visions, finance selling discipline: the skill went universal while its reputation stayed stuck in used-car caricature.
For the Kurums Sales audience the book is the bridge between the profession and everyone else in the building: it modernizes the core stance (the new ABCs) and ships practical drills - six pitch formats, question scripts, buoyancy routines - that work as well in a budget meeting as on a sales floor.
What the book argues
The opening argument is structural: information asymmetry, the old foundation of high-pressure selling, is dead. When buyers know as much as sellers - prices, alternatives, reviews - caveat emptor gives way to caveat venditor, and the manipulative toolkit stops working. What replaces it is Pink's new ABCs: Attunement (perspective-taking, including the counterintuitive finding that lowering your sense of power improves it), Buoyancy (surviving an ocean of rejection - interrogative self-talk, healthy explanatory style, positivity ratios), and Clarity (moving from problem-solving to problem-finding: identifying issues the buyer did not know they had).
The attunement chapters carry the most usable research: mimicry done subtly builds trust, ambiverts - not extraverts - top the sales performance curve, and asking 'where is this person coming from?' outperforms 'what do I feel?' in negotiation outcomes. Buoyancy reframes rejection management as an athletic discipline with named techniques rather than personality.
The final third is the sample case: six successors to the elevator pitch (the one-word pitch, the question pitch, the rhyming pitch, the subject-line pitch, the Twitter-length pitch, and the Pixar pitch - 'Once upon a time... every day... until one day...'), plus serve-and-improvise rules borrowed from theater and the closing standard: sell only in ways that pass the mother test - would you do this to your mother?
Key ideas, translated to your desk
Problem-finding beats problem-solving
When buyers can research solutions themselves, value migrates to the seller who identifies the problem they missed. Lead meetings with the reframe, not the demo.
Ambiverts win
The loud-extrovert hiring stereotype is empirically wrong; the middle of the introversion curve sells best. Adjust your hiring profile accordingly.
Ask, don't pump up
Interrogative self-talk - 'can I do this?' answered with reasons - outperforms declarative pep talks, because it rehearses strategy instead of mood.
Use it at work
- Retrain discovery around problem-finding: open with the industry problem the prospect has not priced yet.
- Rewrite your pitch inventory in the six formats and A/B the question pitch against your current opener.
- Screen sales hires for ambiversion and perspective-taking instead of raw extraversion.
- Teach buoyancy explicitly: pre-call interrogative self-talk, post-loss explanatory-style review.
Read it if
- You lead people who must move others - sales or otherwise - and want research over folklore.
- Your team confuses energy with attunement and pays for it in stalled deals.
- You want Drive's evidence-based style applied to persuasion.
You can skip it if
- You need complex-deal machinery - pair SPIN and Challenger for that.
- You have internalized the ABC reframe already; the drills are the remaining value.
- You want closing scripts; Pink is anti-script by design.
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