Norman Hall

My favorite part so far about the Pink’s book To Sell is Human, is the stories he tells about his adventures in following Norman Hal around the busy downtown streets of San Francisco. Norman Hal is the last door to door salesman for this old cleaning company. It dates my youth that I don’t have the name of the company memorized, and the text is far away from me, so for us it’s just a cleaning company. I spent some time living in San Francisco, so Pink’s tale of he and Norman traveling up and down the crowded streets, visiting office building after office building, going up and down the tall floors checking in on each business really comes alive for me. How Norman is still able to afford living in San Francisco off of a door to door salesman salary amazes me. I know just from that he gets pretty far with his work.

Pink does a good job at pointing out the outdatedness of a couple of Norman’s strategies. He is the only one left in his industry, and approaches customers in person without any reference. He does in fact, go door to door, person to person and uses a selling strategy where he knows everything about his product and the customer doesn’t know a lot about the products he is selling. The customer could easily check the internet for some of this information, but nonetheless.

However, some of Norman’s strategies appear to be timeless. He is after all, creating enough success in his field to support his own livelihood in San Francisco. That’s really an achievement. So, what is he doing right? Norman is persistent with customers and people. He is soft spoken, humble, and keeps trying. He keeps bouncing back, as Pink spoke about in the chapter on Buoyancy. He talks to himself about how his day went, and provides logical, calm reasons for why people said no without discrediting future chances with these potential customers.