By Kevin Grossman
My youngest daughter, she really knew what she wanted that very moment the other day, right after the moment of her initial entertaining realization. All it took was the first time of me blowing up the red balloon, letting it go and watching it fly all over the living room. She giggled and then our joint laughter caught fire.
“Again!” she shouted.
And so I did it again. And again. And again.
In the world of childhood discovery, it’s always been a seller’s market. But at some point in recent memory – a point that’s been highly accelerated day after day since the Internet became a reality – it’s become a buyer’s market. There’s never been a time like today where consumers can research everything and anything they want, online, before they consume it. Everything and anything. Both my young daughters will be savvier about navigating the “information superhighway” (remember that term?) than my wife and I could ever imagine.
This was the primary message of
Daniel Pink’s keynote at this year’s
SHRM Conference & Exposition. For those who don’t know, Daniel Pink is an American author who has written five books about business, work and management, one of the most popular being Drive.
Dan’s latest book is all about selling and that today “we live in a world of ‘seller beware,’ not buyer beware.” In fact, he shared that:
• About 1 in 9 Americans – 15 million people – work in sales.
• And yet about 41% of workers spend their time “convincing people to give something up” in exchange for something else.
The bottom line is that a good many of us in the world of work (and life) at some points in our careers spend a lot of time convincing, persuading and influencing people to make a change. That couldn’t be truer for human resources and people management folk.
Convincing, persuading and influencing – and being at the big show SHRM Conference was a “macro-microcosm” of these activities, an event of over 14,000 people, from the keynotes to the track sessions to the media and influencers to the expo floor where HR technology companies and others pitched and attendees hemmed and hawed while bagging up the giveaways.
Those who know how to “sell” are also critical to the enterprise, and not just for literal sales or HR either. These are the empathic folks inside and out who can reach across any divide and drive value, emotional connection,
collaboration, engagement,
performance and positive change throughout the world of work and want it kept simple and straightforward – from
recruitment to
workforce planning to long-tail retention.
These are the change makers who embrace the simplicity of the empathic pitch and who understand that selling is a buyer’s market for the better.
Plus, they bring their own red balloons.
- See more at:
http://www.peoplefluent.com/blog/world-at-work-selling-is-a-buyers-market#sthash.wGa5Kac5.dpuf
