To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

“People usually know themselves way better than I do.”

means trying to elicit from people what their goals are for themselves and having the flexibility to frame what we do in that context.”

Ferlazzo makes a distinction between “irritation” and “agitation.” Irritation, he says, is “challenging people to do something that we want them to do.” By contrast, “agitation is challenging them to do something that they want to do.” What he has discovered throughout his career is that “irritation doesn’t work.” It might be effective in the short

To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.

A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions—and that’s our world—punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones.

The technologies that were supposed to make salespeople obsolete in fact have transformed more people into sellers.

his job is to influence employees—so they do their jobs with zeal and with skill.

a “reluctant capitalist.”

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, t