To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others Read Online Free PDF

craftspeople. Begun with essentially no outside investment in 2005, Etsy now has more than 875,000 active online shops that together sell upward of $400 million of goods each year. 7 Before Etsy came along, the ability of craft makers to reach craft buyers was rather limited. But the Web—the very technology that seemed poised to topple salespeople—knocked down barriers to entry for small entrepreneurs and enabled more of these craft makers to sell. Ditto for eBay. Some three-quarters of a million Americans now say that eBay serves as their primary or secondary source of income. 8 Meanwhile, many entrepreneurs find fund-raising easier thanks to Kickstarter, which allows them to post the basics of their creative projects—films, music, visual art, fashion—and try to sell their ideas to funders. Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, 1.8 million people have funded twenty thousand projects with more than $200 million. In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States. 9
    While the Web has enabled more micro-entrepreneurs to flourish, its overall impact might soon seem quaint compared with the smartphone. As Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist who in the early 1990s created the first Web browser, has said, “The smartphone revolution is under hyped.” 10 These handheld minicomputers certainly can destroy certain aspects of sales. Consumers can use them to conduct research, comparison-shop, and bypass salespeople altogether. But once again, the net effect is more creative than destructive. The same technology that renders certain types of salespeople obsolete has turned even more people into potential sellers. For instance, the existence of smartphones has birthed an entire app economy that didn’t exist before 2007, when Apple shipped its first iPhone. Now the production of apps itself is responsible for nearly half a million jobs in the United States alone, most of them created by bantamweight entrepreneurs. 11 Likewise, an array of new technologies, such as Square from one of the founders of Twitter, PayHere from eBay, and GoPayment from Intuit, make it easier for individuals to accept credit card payments directly on their mobile devices—allowing anyone with a phone to become a shopkeeper.
    The numbers are staggering. According to MIT’s Technology Review , “In 1982, there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber. Today, there are seven billion people in the world—and six billion mobile cellular-phone subscriptions.” 12 Cisco predicts that by 2016, the world will have more smartphones (again, handheld minicomputers) than human beings—ten billion in all. 13 And much of the action will be outside North America and Europe, powered “by youth-oriented cultures in . . . the Middle East and Africa.” 14 When everyone, not just those in Tokyo and London but also those in Tianjin and Lagos, carries around her own storefront in her pocket—and is just a tap away from every other storefront on the planet—being an entrepreneur, for at least part of one’s livelihood, could become the norm rather than the exception. And a world of entrepreneurs is a world of salespeople.
    Elasticity
    Now meet another guy who runs a company—Mike Cannon-Brookes. His business, Atlassian, is older and much larger than Brooklyn Brine. But what’s happening inside is both consistent with and connected to its tinier counterpart.
    Atlassian builds what’s called “enterprise software”—large, complex packages that businesses and governments use to manage projects, track progress, and foster collaboration among employees. Launched a decade ago by Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar upon their graduation from Australia’s University of New South Wales, Atlassian now has some twelve hundred customers in fifty-three countries—among them Microsoft, Air New Zealand, Samsung, and the United Nations. Its