Play or Download this Episode (Recorded live on 01/25/2013)

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About the Show

This is BizCraft, the podcast about the business side of web design, recorded live almost every two weeks. Your hosts are Carl Smith (@carlsmith) of nGen Works and Gene Crawford (@genecrawford) of UnmatchedStyle.

Episode Overview

This episode features an interview with best selling author Daniel H. Pink (@danielpink). Daniel Pink is the author of five provocative books about the changing world of work — including the long-running New York Times bestseller, A Whole New Mind, and the #1 New York Times bestseller, Drive as well as To Sell Is Human.

Here are the questions we covered in the interview:

Delivering newspapers was your first job, and they didn’t trust you enough to give you your own route. Now you have best selling books on business psychology. How did that lack of trust impact you over the years?

You’ve talked about ambiverts being the best salespeople as well as the relevance of improvisational theater skills. How would you define yourself on the 1 to 7 scale? Any improvisational theater in your background?

Do you see yourself as a business?

What does the ecosystem around a best selling author look like?

Much of your research in Drive covers 4 decades. Yet many businesses still ignore intrinsic motivation. Why do you think that is? What will it take for them to get it?

I saw your daughter’s film “Honk if you Love Someone.” It was a touching and motivating piece of work. You jokingly said you knew the filmmaker when you posted it on your blog. Do you worry about how to help your children without overshadowing them?

What are the challenges you face being a husband and a dad with what appears to be a demanding career?

You have quite a social media following and you are very active online. You even have a published email address. Do you feel your accessibility and responsiveness have enhanced your success? Do you enjoy it? What challenges does it present?

For our audience, we work in one of the most distracting mediums known, the internet. How would you recommend we stay motivated and focused when our work environment can become an amazing distraction? Especially given that many of us work on distributed teams.

What’s a day in the life of Daniel Pink like? How do you keep yourself motivated? Do you still have to sell?

Now that you’ve achieved this level of success, what surprises you the most about the journey?

Questions from the kids:

From: Dave Onkels

Hey craft beer-loving friends,

I co-lead a design and dev shop out of Dallas. I’m a jack of all trades and master of none so I tend to wear all sorts of hats. I’ll code, I’ll design but most importantly, I sell. (I worked on the front lines and behind the scenes for a retailer for 14 years so I sincerely dig the sales process.)

We’ve been quite successful at Dotvita these past couple of years but I still find myself overselling our firm before qualifying a customer. It’s that process of “you probably didn’t know websites could cost {insert 5-digits} but here’s why”. It’s also recognizing that some customers are simply never going to pay for a car when they expected a bike.

How do you manage to extract perceived budgets out of a prospective lead’s head before spending 4+ hours in the sales process? We ask them their budget very early on in the conversation but most people only have a rough idea of they think it should cost or throw out some lowball number because they think we’re negotiating. Their true budget gets determined if/when we can show the real value of a well designed brand and website.

Beers from the end of the show

Carl: Sierra Nevada, Ruthless Rye IPA
Gene: Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat

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