To Sell Is Human

Today, both sales and non-sales selling depend more on the creative, heuristic, problem-finding skills of artists than on the reductive, algorithmic, problem-solving skills of technicians.

them to invent a new product and devise an advertising campaign for it. As players contribute testimonials or demonstrations or slogans, they must begin each sentence with “Yes and,” which forces them to build on the previous idea. You can’t refute what your colleagues say. You can’t ignore it. And you shouldn’t plan ahead. Just say “Yes and,” acce

Positivity has one other important dimension when it comes to moving others. “You have to believe in the product you’re selling—and that has to show,” Hall says. Nearly every salesperson I talked to disputed the idea that some people “could sell anything”—whether they believed in it or not.

But the most effective self-talk of all doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories.

It’s the golden mean of well-being, the magic formula for flourishing, the secret numerical code of the satisfied: 3 to 1. What can you do to ensure your balance between positive and negative emotions reaches that elusive ratio? One way to begin is to visit Barbara Fredrickson’s website (http://positivityratio.com/). Take her “Positivity Self Test”

Finding the Right Problems to Solve

For instance, it established a set price for each car—no haggling necessary.

2. Improve your questions. Go through your list of questions and categorize each one as either “closed-ended” (questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no,” or just one word) or “open-ended” (questions that require an explanation and cannot be answered with “yes” or “no,” or just one word). Then, looking over the two types of questions, think abo

with what others need.

“In improv, you never try to get someone to do something. That’s coercion, not creativity,” Salit says. “You make offers, you accept offers—and a conversation, a relationship, a scene, and other possibilities emerge.”