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Mastering the Art of Sales and Persuasion: Understand the New Playing Field to Enhance Clarity with Dan Pink, Author, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Another dimension of effective selling of yourself, an idea, a product, a service is clarity. Clarity has two dimensions. The first is this. We tend – in the old days there was an advantage in having access to information so if I had access to information and you didn’t, that gave me a comparative advantage. That allowed me to provide something useful to you and to sell to you. Well, now everybody has access to information. Think of it in the old days. Only realtors had passwords to the multi-listing service that showed what houses were for sale and for what price. Now everybody has access to that information. So accessing information doesn’t matter as much.
What matters more is making sense of information, curating information, distilling information to its essence, separating out the signal from the noise in information. The second aspect of clarity is this– a lot of salespeople like to say, “I’m not really a salesperson. I’m a problem solver.” And God bless you for being a problem solver. The thing is it’s less valuable today than ever because if you’re in, say sales sales, and your customer or your prospect knows precisely what it’s problem is, they can find the solution without you. They don’t need you very much. Where are you more valuable? When they don’t know what their problem is or they’re wrong about their problem and so the premium has shifted from the skill of problem solving to the skill of problem finding. Can you identify problems people don’t realize that they have? Can you surface latent problems? Can you anticipate problems? And so clarity is moving from accessing information to curating it and from solving existing problems to identifying hidden problems. And it’s essential in any form of sales, persuasion or moving people.