EVERYBODY SELLS!

Have We Got a Review for You

People in business are clueless about selling, and snobbish too. They view it as a grubby activity, though it is vital to revenue.

The Art of the Sale

By Philip Delves Broughton
(Penguin Press, 291 pages, $27.95) 

L. GORDON CROVITZ

Modern economies are built by people agreeing to buy and sell for mutual benefit, but there is near-universal disdain for the sales process itself—including the people doing the selling. There is Arthur Miller's pitiful Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman," the most studied play in American schools, and the real-estate agents of David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross," who, in the words of Philip Delves Boughton, are "victimized, duplicitous, and desperate, Marx's capitalist nightmare made real." (click below to read more)

Mr. Delves Broughton is a British journalist who, in 2008, wrote a memoir about getting his midcareer M.B.A. at Harvard Business School. While there he noticed that, as a category of business activity, sales were largely ignored. The curriculum focused on apparently less grubby topics, like finance and leadership. In "The Art of the Sale," Mr. Delves Broughton argues that sales might just be the noblest of business callings.

Defending sales is, well, a tough sell. Mr. Delves Broughton might have quoted from "Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book," a best seller that since 1962 has indoctrinated children to regard selling with suspicion: "Five foot-weary salesmen have laid down their load. / All day they've raced round in the heat, at top speeds, / Unsuccessfully trying to sell Zizzer-Zoof Seeds / Which nobody wants because nobody needs."

Mr. Delves Broughton knows that as customers we have all had terrible sales experiences, but he reminds us of an American tradition—stretching from Benjamin Franklin to Sam Walton—that considers sales the great leveler. "It holds that in a properly functioning democracy, no matter the condition of your birth, if you can sell, you can slice through any obstacles of class, status, or upbringing in a way inconceivable in more hidebound societies," Mr. Delves Broughton writes. "Selling well, in this view, is also a reflection of a healthy character. It means you are the sort of person people are drawn to—hardworking, clean living and trustworthy."

Yet in American corporations today there is a "class division," he notes. Many people in business "are clueless about one of the most vital functions, the means by which you actually generate revenue." Salespeople are viewed as some sort of breed apart. "They need conventions in Las Vegas and complex commission structures," Mr. Delves Broughton writes. They must be "goaded to perform and reined in when they sell too hard. They are patronized as 'feet on the street' by those who prefer to imagine that business can be conducted by consultants with dueling PowerPoint presentations."

"The Art of the Sale" profiles a variety of salespeople, defining the sales function broadly. One of his most striking subjects is Abdel Majid Rais El Fenni, who has built a business in Tangier, Morocco, selling high-end rugs and other furnishings, rising above the typical merchant in the souk. Majid (as he is known) keeps "loose robes," meaning that he tries to be open and honest with customers, especially customers who fear that they are going to be hustled or cheated. Not that his customers always drive a hard bargain. Majid once closed a sale quickly after realizing that a tourist from Texas didn't care much about quality so long as he knew he was buying the most expensive rug—that is, he "equated quality with price" and "wanted more than anything to tell visitors to his home that he had bought the best rug in Morocco, at a price to prove it."

Not every sales wizard is in the street or the souk. Mr. Delves Broughton cites Steve Jobs's genius for wedding Apple products to a philosophy of "making the complex simple and living rich lives at the intersection of art and technology." Apple, he says, "inspires more than a commercial relationship. It inspires faith." And the company's fans are happy to pay a premium to be among the faithful.

Sales is a form of persuasion beyond commercial interest, we're told. Nelson Mandela used his long imprisonment in South Africa to learn the language and culture of the ruling white Afrikaners. He advanced his anti-apartheid case by speaking their language—for instance, by discussing rugby, a game generally loathed by the black minority. The Dalai Lama is brilliant at what the book calls "adaptive selling," tailoring his calls for rights in Tibet as circumstances warrant. Sometimes the Dalai Lama presents himself as a modest monk and sometimes as a sophisticated critic of Beijing's politics and policies.

The book closes with a hopeful prediction that technology will create a "new sales culture neither hard nor soft, neither bullying nor sappy, but one that relies on transparent information and enhanced cooperation." He highlights Salesforce.com, the online company that provides software for tracking sales targets, organizing schedules and enabling salespeople to share their success stories. "Technology," he says, "provides the transparency that leads to trust."

"The Art of the Sale" reminds us that the best salespeople are resilient optimists—and that we all engage in sales of one sort or another. Parents sell the idea of eating vegetables to their children; reporters sell their latest story idea to editors; university presidents sell their institution's neediness to potential donors. We might as well approach sales with good cheer and confidence, Mr. Delves Broughton says, not least because the upbeat approach seems to work best.

Theodor Geisel (the real name of Dr. Seuss) may have ridiculed salesmen as flogging something that "nobody needs," but he was a good salesman himself. He crisscrossed the country pushing his product, sometimes arriving for book signings in a helicopter. To date, the Seuss brand has moved about 200 million units. Mr. Delves Broughton, promoting the idea that sales is a virtuous calling, may have a harder time attracting customers, but he makes an appealing, contrarian pitch.

Mr. Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is co-founder of Press+, a technology company acquired by RR Donnelley.