Libraries as Hubs of Non-Sales Selling (pt.1)

I just re-watched Daniel Pink's webcast on To Sell is Human, as he presented it  to ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) members and it wasn't difficult to take the sales principles he was applying to trainers and apply them to the wonderful people who work in libraries.

First of all, if you haven't read any of Dan Pink's books I enthusiastically say, "go get them now!" If you're reading this and you live in Washington, Allegany, or Garrett counties, then I can tell you with 100% confidence that your libraries own his books (I checked). What are you waiting for? If you're not sure which one to start with, I'd recommend reading Drive first, then A Whole New Mind, then read To Sell is Human.

Getting back to the webcast - which you can watch for yourselves by the way by clicking on this link - Dan Pink's thesis for his book and for the webcast is that everyone is in selling.

Everyone.

You. 

Yes, you.

Now, we aren't selling cars or clothes or furniture, which are classic examples of sales selling But we are engaging heavily in non-sales selling. Dan differentiates between sales selling and non-sales selling by asking this question,

"What percentage of your work involves convincing or persuading people to give up something they value (attention, effort, money, time, etc) for something you can offer."

Let's think about this for a moment. We who work in [public] libraries rely on other people giving up their time, effort, money, and attention to patronize our services and resources. How does this break down?

Time: we want our community members to spend time in our buildings browsing our collections, using our computers, attending our programs. We want them to spend time on our websites using our electronic resources, liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, and re-pinning our Pinterest boards.

Effort: we want our community members to make an effort to advocate on our behalf by contacting their local representatives and telling them how much we need libraries and to please not cut their funding (oh, yeah, and that takes time, too). We want our community members to make an effort to find parking spaces (sounds like money, too) so they can, in turn, spend their time utilizing our spaces. We want our community members to make an effort to be our volunteers (hello again, time).

Money: we want our community members to pay their fines, of course, but even more so we need our community members to donate funds to special projects like capital campaigns that lead to new buildings or building renovations or service enhancements like hardware and software upgrades for the computers which are in such high demand. Sometimes this take more effort and time than just writing a check; attending fundraising events can vary in the amount of time and effort requested from someone.

Attention: we want our community members to pay attention to us, to recognize the value we bring to the community, to recognize the services we offer - mostly for free - to anyone who can either walk in the door or who can click on our website. We want the community to pay attention (which takes effort) and spread the word (more effort) about why we're valuable and should continue to exist.

So, what's the answer to Dan's question? What percentage of our work in libraries involves convincing or persuading others to give up something they value for something we can offer?

Given the four paragraphs above, my first thought is that we must spend at least 80% of our time engaging in non-sales selling. But what do you think? 

In my next post, I'll explore the notion of non-sales selling by how I view the departments and/or roles that exist in public libraries.