To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (4 page)

The graph below offers a way to understand the striking interplay between what people find valuable and what they actually do. On the vertical axis is a weighted index, based on survey responses, showing the level of importance assigned to non-sales selling tasks. On the horizontal axis is an index, again based on survey responses, showing how much time people actually spent on these tasks. Bisecting the chart on a diagonal is a line indicating a perfect match between time spent and importance. If an activity is plotted below that line, that indicates people are expending time on something that’s not commensurately important and presumably should be doing it less. If it’s above that line, they’re saying that the activity is so critical, they probably should be devoting even more time to it.

Look where non-sales selling falls. It’s fairly high on time spent, but even higher on importance. What’s more, as demonstrated by the graph below, which breaks out respondents’ answers by age groups, the older someone is, and presumably the more experience that person has, the more she says that moving others occupies her days and determines her success.

The
What Do You Do at Work?
survey begins to provide a richer portrait of the twenty-first-century workforce, as exemplified by the world’s largest economy. The existing data show that 1 in 9 Americans works in sales. But the new data reveal something more startling: So do the other 8 in 9. They, too, are spending their days moving others and depending for their livelihoods on the ability to do it well.

Whether it’s selling’s traditional form or its non-sales variation, we’re all in sales now.

Without fully realizing it, each one of us is doing what Norman Hall has done for nearly half a century and what his Fuller predecessors did for more than a half-century before that. The salesperson isn’t dead. The salesperson is alive. Because the salesperson is us.

Which raises a question: How did
that
happen? How did so many of us end up in the moving business?

2.

Entrepreneurship, Elasticity, and Ed-Med

I
n Chapter 7, you will learn something called the “Pixar pitch.” Built on the work of Hollywood’s famed animation studio, the technique involves offering a short summary of the point you’re trying to make, rendered in the narrative structure of a Pixar film. So, in the hope of modeling behavior I’ll later recommend, let me entice you into this chapter with a Pixar pitch.

Once upon a time, only certain people were in sales. Every day, these folks sold stuff, the rest of us did stuff, and everyone was happy. One day, the world began to change. More of us started working for ourselves—and because we were entrepreneurs, suddenly we became salespeople, too. At the same time, large operations discovered that segmenting job functions didn’t work very well during volatile business conditions—and because of that, they began demanding elastic skills that stretched across boundaries and included a sales component. Meanwhile, the economy itself transformed so that in the blink of a decade, millions of additional people began working in education and health care—two sectors whose central purpose is moving others. Until finally, in ways we’ve scarcely realized, most of us ended up in sales.

That’s the basic story. To understand it more deeply, let’s talk about pickles.

Entrepreneurship

It’s easy to poke fun at a place like Brooklyn Brine. The company sells artisanal pickled vegetables (no, really). It’s located in Brooklyn. And the people who work there freely use terms like “lavender asparagus,” “garlic scape,” and “vegan blogger.” But ventures like this—one owner, ten employees, fourteen varieties of pickle—are becoming an integral part of the current economy. In the process, they’re placing new importance on selling in all its dimensions.

Brooklyn Brine embodies the first of three reasons why more of us find ourselves in sales: the rise of small entrepreneurs.

When we think of the differences between very large enterprises and very small ones, we often focus on differences in degree. The former, by definition, have more revenue, more customers, and more employees. But equally important are differences in
kind
. What people actually do inside tiny operations is often fundamentally different from what they do within massive ones. In particular, large organizations tend to rely on specialization. A two-person company doesn’t need a human resources department. A two-thousand-person company can’t survive without one. In bigger companies, selling is often a specialized function—a department, a division, a task that some people do so that others can specialize in something else. But proprietors of small operations don’t have that luxury. They must wear several hats—often at the same time—and one of these hats is the selling cap.

Shamus Jones, the founder of Brooklyn Brine, calls himself a “reluctant capitalist.” He started his career as a chef, grew disenchanted with the restaurant industry, and three years ago ventured out on his own to turn his sometime practice of pickling seasonal vegetables into a full-time business. Without any background in production, operations, or management, he began experimenting with pickle recipes in a restaurateur friend’s commercial kitchen from ten at night until eight in the morning. Word spread—you’ll now find Brooklyn Brine jars on the shelves of high-end food shops in the United States and Asia—and today Jones spends his time moving product and moving others. He works seven days a week meeting distributors, telling the company’s story, and trying to convince stores to stock his wares. When he’s back at his factory-cum-storefront, he says his job is to influence employees—so they do their jobs with zeal and with skill. “I want everyone to be happy. I want everyone to be stoked to come into work.” He hopes to make money, but that’s not the only point. “I want to put out an honest product in an honest company,” and that demands traditional selling and non-sales selling in equal measure. Such is the life of a small entrepreneur. Instead of doing one thing, he must do everything. And everything inevitably involves a lot of moving.

To be sure, the world economy includes plenty of planet-straddling behemoths—companies so enormous that they often have more in common with nation-states than with private firms. But the last decade has also witnessed a substantial increase in very small enterprises—not only those like Brooklyn Brine that offer products, but one- or two-person outfits that sell services, creativity, and expertise.

Consider:

• The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the American economy has more than twenty-one million “non-employer” businesses—operations without any paid employees. These include everything from electricians to computer consultants to graphic designers. Although these microenterprises account for only a modest portion of America’s gross domestic product, they now constitute the majority of businesses in the United States.
  ¹
  
• The research firm IDC estimates that 30 percent of American workers now work on their own and that by 2015, the number of nontraditional workers worldwide (freelancers, contractors, consultants, and the like) will reach 1.3 billion.
  ²
  The sharpest growth will be in North America, but Asia is expected to add more than six hundred million new soloists in that same period.
  
• Some analysts project that in the United States, the ranks of these independent entrepreneurs may grow by sixty-five million in the rest of the decade and could become a majority of the American workforce by 2020. One reason is the influence of the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old generation as it takes a more prominent economic role. According to research by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 54 percent of this age cohort either wants to start their own business or has already done so.
  ³
  
• In sixteen Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries—including France, Mexico, and Sweden—more than 90 percent of businesses now have fewer than ten employees. In addition, the percentage of people who are either a “nascent entrepreneur or owner-manager of a new business” is far higher in markets such as China, Thailand, and Brazil than in the United States or the United Kingdom.
  ⁴
  
• In our
  What Do You Do at Work?
  survey, we asked a question designed to probe the issue of micro-entrepreneurship, phrasing it in a way that recognized that many people today earn a living through multiple sources: “Do you work for yourself or run your own business, even on the side?” Thirty-eight percent of respondents answered yes.
  

Given these numbers, “Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight, we might look to them as guides to the future of the . . . economy,” says
New York Times Magazine
columnist Adam Davidson.
⁵
Harvard University’s Lawrence Katz, perhaps the top labor economist of his generation, agrees. He projects that middle-class employment of the future won’t be employees of large organizations, but self-sufficient “artisans.”
⁶

Whether we call them artisans, non-employer businesses, free agents, or micro-entrepreneurs, these women and men are selling all the time. They’re packaging pickles for customers, of course. But because they’re responsible for the entire operation, not merely one facet of it, they’re enticing business partners, negotiating with suppliers, and motivating employees. Their industry may be gourmet food or legal services or landscaping—but they’re all in the moving business.

One essential—and ultimately ironic—reason for this development: The technologies that were supposed to make salespeople obsolete in fact have transformed more people into sellers. Consider Etsy, an online marketplace for small businesses and craftspeople. Begun with essentially no outside investment in 2005, Etsy now has more than 875,000 active online shops that together sell upward of $400 million of goods each year.
⁷
Before Etsy came along, the ability of craft makers to reach craft buyers was rather limited. But the Web—the very technology that seemed poised to topple salespeople—knocked down barriers to entry for small entrepreneurs and enabled more of these craft makers to sell. Ditto for eBay. Some three-quarters of a million Americans now say that eBay serves as their primary or secondary source of income.
⁸
Meanwhile, many entrepreneurs find fund-raising easier thanks to Kickstarter, which allows them to post the basics of their creative projects—films, music, visual art, fashion—and try to sell their ideas to funders. Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, 1.8 million people have funded twenty thousand projects with more than $200 million. In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States.
⁹

While the Web has enabled more micro-entrepreneurs to flourish, its overall impact might soon seem quaint compared with the smartphone. As Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist who in the early 1990s created the first Web browser, has said, “The smartphone revolution is
under
hyped.”
¹⁰
These handheld minicomputers certainly can destroy certain aspects of sales. Consumers can use them to conduct research, comparison-shop, and bypass salespeople altogether. But once again, the net effect is more creative than destructive. The same technology that renders certain types of salespeople obsolete has turned even more people into potential sellers. For instance, the existence of smartphones has birthed an entire app economy that didn’t exist before 2007, when Apple shipped its first iPhone. Now the production of apps itself is responsible for nearly half a million jobs in the United States alone, most of them created by bantamweight entrepreneurs.
¹¹
Likewise, an array of new technologies, such as Square from one of the founders of Twitter, PayHere from eBay, and GoPayment from Intuit, make it easier for individuals to accept credit card payments directly on their mobile devices—allowing anyone with a phone to become a shopkeeper.