To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (3 page)

The song, almost always invoking Arthur Miller’s 1949 play
Death of a Salesman
, goes something like this: In a world where anybody can find anything with just a few keystrokes, intermediaries like salespeople are superfluous. They merely muck up the gears of commerce and make transactions slower and more expensive. Individual consumers can do their own research and get buying advice from their social networks. Large companies can streamline their procurement processes with sophisticated software that pits vendors against one another and secures the lowest price. In the same way that cash machines thinned the ranks of bank tellers and digital switches made telephone operators all but obsolete, today’s technologies have rendered salesmen and saleswomen irrelevant. As we rely ever more on websites and smartphones to locate and purchase what we need, salespeople themselves—not to mention the very act of selling—will be swept into history’s dustbin.
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Norman Hall is, no doubt, the last of his kind. And the Fuller Brush Company itself could be gone for good before you reach the last page of this book. But we should hold off making any wider funeral preparations. All those death notices for sales and those who do it are off the mark. Indeed, if one were to write anything about selling in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it ought to be a birth announcement.

Rebirth of a Salesman (and Saleswoman)

Deep inside a thick semiannual report from the Occupational Employment Statistics program of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lurks a surprising, and surprisingly significant, piece of data: One out of every nine American workers works in sales.

Each day more than fifteen million people earn their keep by trying to convince someone else to make a purchase.
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They are real estate brokers, industrial sales representatives, and securities dealers. They sell planes to airlines, trains to city governments, and automobiles to prospective drivers at more than ten thousand dealerships across the country. Some work in posh offices with glorious views, others in dreary cubicles with Dilbert cartoons and a free calendar. But they all sell—from multimillion-dollar consulting agreements to ten-dollar magazine subscriptions and everything in between.

Consider: The United States manufacturing economy, still the largest in the world, cranks out nearly $2 trillion worth of goods each year. But the United States has far more salespeople than factory workers. Americans love complaining about bloated governments—but America’s sales force outnumbers the entire federal workforce by more than 5 to 1. The U.S. private sector employs three times as many salespeople as all fifty state governments combined employ people. If the nation’s salespeople lived in a single state, that state would be the fifth-largest in the United States.
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The presence of so many salespeople in the planet’s largest economy seems peculiar given the two seismic economic events of the last decade—the implosion of the global financial system and the explosion of widespread Internet connectivity. To be sure, sales, like almost every other type of work, was caught in the downdraft of the Great Recession. Between 2006 and 2010, some 1.1 million U.S. sales jobs disappeared. Yet even after the worst downturn in a half-century, sales remains the second-largest occupational category (behind office and administration workers) in the American workforce, just as it has been for decades. What’s more, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the United States will add nearly two million
new
sales jobs by 2020. Likewise, the Internet has not had nearly the effect on sales that many predicted. Between 2000 and today, the very period that broadband, smartphones, and e-commerce ascended to disintermediate salespeople and obviate the need for selling, the total number of sales jobs increased and the portion of the U.S. workforce in sales has remained exactly the same: 1 in 9.
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What holds for the United States holds equally for the rest of the world. For example, in Canada, “sales and service occupations”—a broader category than the United States uses—constitute slightly more than 25 percent of the Canadian workforce. Australian Bureau of Statistics census data show that about 10 percent of Australia’s labor force falls under the heading “sales workers.” In the United Kingdom, which uses yet another set of occupation categories, adding up the jobs that involve selling (for example, “sales accounts and business development managers” and “vehicle and parts salespersons or advisers” and so on) totals about three million workers out of a workforce of roughly thirty million—or again, about 1 in 10. In the entire European Union, the figure is slightly higher.
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According to the most recent available data along with calculations by officials at Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, about 13 percent of the region’s more than two-hundred-million-person labor force works in sales.
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Meanwhile, Japan employed nearly 8.6 million “sales workers” in 2010, the last year for which data are available. With almost 63 million people in the total workforce, that means more than 1 out of 8 workers in the world’s third-largest economy is in sales.
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For India and China, larger countries but less developed markets, data are harder to come by. Their portion of salespeople is likely smaller relative to North America, Europe, and Japan, in part because a large proportion of people in these countries still work in agriculture.
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But as India and China grow wealthier, and hundreds of millions more of their citizens join the middle class, the need for salespeople will inevitably expand. To cite just one example, McKinsey & Company projects that India’s growing pharmaceutical industry will triple its cadre of drug representatives to 300,000 employees by 2020.
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Taken together, the data show that rather than decline in relevance and size, sales has remained a stalwart part of labor markets around the world. Even as advanced economies have transformed—from hard goods and heavy lifting to skilled services and conceptual thinking—the need for salespeople has not abated.

But that’s merely the beginning of the story.

The Rise of Non-Sales Selling

The men and women who operate the world’s statistical agencies are among the unsung heroes of the modern economy. Each day they gather bushels of data, which they scrutinize, analyze, and transform into reports that help the rest of us understand what’s going on in our industries, our job markets, and our lives. Yet these dedicated public servants are also limited—by budgets, by politics, and, most of all, by the very questions they ask.

So while the idea that 1 in 9 American workers sells for a living might surprise you, I wondered whether it masked a still more intriguing truth. For instance, I’m not a “sales worker” in the categorical sense. Yet, as I wrote in the Introduction, when I sat down to deconstruct my own workdays, I discovered that I spend a sizable portion of them selling in a broader sense—persuading, influencing, and convincing others. And I’m not special. Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students on the value of paying attention in class. Entrepreneurs woo funders, writers sweet-talk producers, coaches cajole players. Whatever our profession, we deliver presentations to fellow employees and make pitches to new clients. We try to convince the boss to loosen up a few dollars from the budget or the human resources department to add more vacation days.

Yet none of this activity ever shows up in the data tables.

The same goes for what transpires on the other side of the ever murkier border between work and life. Many of us now devote a portion of our spare time to selling—whether it’s handmade crafts on Etsy, heartfelt causes on DonorsChoose, or harebrained schemes on Kickstarter. And in astonishing numbers and with ferocious energy, we now go online to sell ourselves—on Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Match.com profiles. (Remember: None of the six entities I just mentioned existed ten years ago.)

The conventional view of economic behavior is that the two most important activities are producing and consuming. But today, much of what we do also seems to involve
moving.
That is, we’re moving other people to part with resources—whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention—so that we both get what we want. Trouble is, there are no data to either confirm or refute this suspicion—because it involves questions that no statistical agency is asking.

So I set out to fill the void. Working with Qualtrics, a fast-growing research and data analytics company, I commissioned a survey to try to uncover how much time and energy people are devoting to moving others, including what we can think of as non-sales selling—selling that doesn’t involve anyone making a purchase.

This study, dubbed the
What Do You Do at Work?
survey, was a comprehensive undertaking. Using some sophisticated research tools, we gathered data from 9,057 respondents around the world. Statisticians at Qualtrics reviewed the responses, disregarded invalid or incomplete surveys, and assessed the sample size and composition to see how well it reflected the population. Because the number of non-U.S. respondents turned out not to be large enough to draw statistically sound conclusions, I’ve limited much of the analysis to an adjusted sample of more than seven thousand adult full-time workers in the United States. The results have statistical validity similar to those of the surveys conducted by the major opinion research firms that you might read about during election seasons. (For example, Gallup’s tracking polls typically sample about 1,000 respondents.)
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Two main findings emerged:

1. People are now spending about 40 percent of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling—persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase
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   Across a range of professions, we are devoting roughly twenty-four minutes of every hour to moving others.
   
2. People consider this aspect of their work crucial to their professional success—even in excess of the considerable amount of time they devote to it.
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Here’s a bit more detail about what we found and how we found it:

I began by asking respondents to think about their last two weeks of work and what they did for their largest blocks of time. Big surprise: Reading and responding to e-mail topped the list—followed by having face-to-face conversations and attending meetings.

We then asked people to think a bit more deeply about the actual content of those experiences. I presented a series of choices and asked them, “Regardless of whether you were using e-mail, phone, or face-to-face conversations, how much time did you devote to” each of the following: “processing information,” “selling a product or a service,” and other activities? Respondents reported spending the most time “processing information.” But close behind were three activities at the heart of non-sales selling. Nearly 37 percent of respondents said they devoted a significant amount of time to “teaching, coaching, or instructing others.” Thirty-nine percent said the same about “serving clients or customers.” And nearly 70 percent reported that they spent at least some of their time “persuading or convincing others.” What’s more, non-sales selling turned out to be far more prevalent than selling in the traditional sense. When we asked how much time they put in “selling a product or service,” about half of respondents said “no time at all.”

Later in the survey was another question designed to probe for similar information and to assess the validity of the earlier query. This one gave respondents a “slider” that sat at 0 on a 100-point scale, which they could push to the right to indicate a percentage. We asked:
“What percentage of your work involves convincing or persuading people to give up something they value for something you have?”

The average reply among all respondents: 41 percent. This average came about in an interesting way. A large cluster of respondents reported numbers in the 15 to 20 percent range, while a smaller but significant cluster reported numbers in the 70 to 80 percent range. In other words, many people are spending a decent amount of time trying to move others—but for some, moving others is the mainstay of their jobs. Most of us are movers; some of us are super-movers.

Equally important, nearly everyone considered this aspect of their work one of the most critical components in their professional success. For instance, respondents spent the most time on “processing information.” Yet when they listed the tasks that were most vital in doing their job well, they ranked “serving clients and customers” and “teaching, coaching, and instructing others” higher. In addition, even though most people placed “pitching ideas” relatively low on the list of how they allocated their time, more than half of respondents said that this activity was important to their success.