Authentic Selling

Book excerpt: Whether you realize it or not, every day you are selling something. You might not consider yourself a salesperson and you might slam the door shut on the guy who comes to your house offering a widget. But from interpersonal relationships to job interviews to riffing about politics with your friends, life is a series of interactions involving the timeless skills of salesmanship. We often associate salesmanship with phoniness - used car dealers, telemarketers, snake oil salesmen - but in this engaging and humorous debut, Jeffrey Kirchick, an up-and-coming voice in the world of sales leadership, argues that what's missing in salesmanship is what's missing in life generally: authenticity. With Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning threatening to render whole professions obsolete, authenticity matters more than ever - and not only to people who work in sales. And at a time when groupthink dominates our discourse, authenticity is needed more than ever. In this brisk and engaging work combining entrepreneurial advice, political commentary, and memoir, Kirchick turns conventional business wisdom on its head, explaining why the customer is not always right, why being weird is good, and how being a failure can be admirable.