Dan Pink: Like It Or Not, You're Probably a Salesperson | Big Think

The Death of a Salesman might be a great play, but it’s far from the truth about what’s happening in the workforce today. If you look at the U.S. economy, you have about one in nine people in the U.S. workforce who are in sales. That is, their job is to sell stuff. They’re selling wholesale seafood, consulting services, or motorcycles.

But if you look at those other eight and nine, eight and nine people in the workforce, they don’t have sales in their job title. They don’t have sales on their business card. But they’re spending an enormous amount of their time selling in a broader sense. They’re persuading, influencing, convincing, cajoling. We have data showing that people are spending on average about 40 percent of their time on the job in this thing that I call somewhat clumsily non-sales selling.

You’re selling, but the cash register’s not ringing. You’re selling, but money’s not changing hands. You’re selling, but the denomination isn’t dollars, it’s time, effort, attention, and energy. That’s a big amount of time, and one of the conclusions that you get from looking at both the labor market data and some interesting ways that people describe their own work is that today, like it or not, we’re all in sales.

First of all, there are a couple of interesting things here. One of them I already noted, which is that people are spending on average, as I said, about 40 percent of their time on the job persuading, influencing, convincing, cajoling. What’s interesting is that if you look at actual sales in the United States, it’s about one out of nine.

But the labor markets around the world seem all to converge around this number. In Japan, it’s about one in eight. In the UK, it’s about one in ten. In the EU, it’s about 13 percent. So despite having this incredible communications and information firepower at our fingertips, it seems like the economies of the world still need a certain portion of people simply to sell stuff.

And this idea that salespeople would be rendered obsolete, that the Internet would create the death of a salesman just hasn’t happened. We did a really interesting survey of about 7,000 adult full-time workers where they said they’re spending enormous amounts of time on the job in this thing called non-sales selling.

Now, what is that? That means that they are an individual who’s trying to get their boss to free up resources for a project. They’re selling. You’re a boss trying to get employees to do something different or do something in a different way. You’re selling. You come to a meeting and pitch an idea. You’re selling. And it’s a big part of how we spend our time.

What’s also interesting is we ask people to talk about how important that aspect of their work was to their overall effectiveness. And what was very interesting about that is that people rated the importance of it – of that task, of non-sales selling very, very high. Indeed, in excess of the amount of time they were doing it.

So what we got from people was saying, yeah, this is a big part of what I do, but in order to be effective on the job, I actually have to do it a little bit more.