The Need for the Hard Sell

In a conference session about marketing, there was rather a long digression on the difference between selling and offering that seemed to be belaboring the difference in the hard-sell and soft-sell approaches, in favor of the latter.   In the presenter’s mind, the days of hard selling are over and it’s time that all industries switch to a soft sales process.    I cannot disagree more.

Soft selling is a tool, a good tool, and the right tool for most jobs – most, but not all.   The soft sell works when there is a motivated and informed customer, who has accurately recognized and diagnosed his problem, correctly identified the solution (product) he needs to achieve his desired goals.   And while customers today are more informed than the information starved masses prior to digital media, there is a significant difference between “having access” to information and actually “accessing” it – and then understanding and applying it.

For the customer who does not recognize that he has a problem, who has not accurately diagnosed it, who does not feel empowered to solve it, or who does not know the correct way to solve it, hard selling is still necessary.   You cannot simply sit back and wait for the customer to come to you, but must convince the customer that he can and should leverage your product to solve a real problem.   You have to go to him, help him recognize the problem, show him the solution, and make him feel empowered and motivated to act.

All of this can be snake-oil in the wrong hands: making people believe they have problems when they really do not, suggesting your product is a solution when it really is not, and stirring people to action that they really don’t need to take.   It depends on the situation.   And the soft-seller is not immune to unethical selling – when he passively allows a deluded person to purchase his product and shrugs off any responsibility for the negative consequences because he played no active role in helping the customer make the appropriate decision. He is the proverbial “good” man who does nothing when action would prevent harm, which is not a very good man at all.

Ethics in salesmanship means matching customer problems to commercial solutions – regardless of the sales tactic – a prerequisite to which is accurately recognizing the level of sales assistance that is needed.   Where customers accurately recognize and diagnose problems and identify and employ solutions, stay out of the way and give them what they ask for.   Where the cannot do all of those things, provide assistance – and whether it is ethical assistance or unethical pressure depends on the customer, the product, and the situation.

It is no more correct to soft-sell in all circumstances than it is to hard-sell in all circumstances – and to suggest otherwise is an act of ignorance and immorality unto itself.

Infomercial Sales Tactics

This past weekend, I settled into one of my periodic bouts of melancholy and ennui and did what I suspect quite a few people do when they find themselves in the doldrums - deposited myself on the couch and watched mind-numbing junk on television for a couple of hours until disgust and self-loathing prompted me to find something else to do with my time (i.e., housework). In particular, I watched a series of infomercials for products I am wholly uninterested in buying and have a difficult time understanding why anyone would - while that kind of thing is candy to my inner cynic, it is also interesting to study the sales patter to understand how hammy sales tactics are intended to work.

The old-school hard selling tactics are contrived and obvious, following a four-step process:

1. Tell the mark that they have a problem
2. Show the mark how your product solves this alleged problem
3. Convince the mark that your product is cheap and easy to obtain
4. Usher the mark to the register 

In a commercial or infomercial, this sequence is repeated multiple times.   One of the infomercials I watched managed to do this seventeen times in thirty minutes - which is impressive, but hardly the theoretical maximum: I've seen thirty-second spots that run the process twice, so in theory a half-hour infomercial could repeat the sequence 120 times.

My sense is that once is likely enough - or more aptly, 0.25 times is likely enough for most prospects, because they can likely determine whether they are interested at the end of the first step: do you have trouble getting grass stains out of your umbrella?  Do you spend hour after tedious hour peeling hard-boiled eggs the old fashioned way?  Do you have trouble figuring out how to use a blanket?   If the answer is "no," everything else that follows isn't worth your time or attention.

As an aside, I have the sense that this is where the specious claims about the dwindling attention span of the American public comes from - the reason we tune out after seven seconds is we have already decided that it's not worth paying attention to the rest.  It's not a matter of diminishing capacity to pay attention, but improving abilities to decide whether it's worthwhile to pay attention to filter out the clutter in our environments.   But that's a different rant entirely.

What I was most stricken by is that even softer and more sophisticated sales tactics also fail at the first hurdle: they begin by assuming that the prospect has a given problem  and if they do not, then they stop paying attention: they ignore the sales patter, toss the direct mail piece in the trash unopened, or simply do not give attention to anything online that seems to have the appearance of being an advertisement.

This leads directly to the conclusion that advertising needs to be better targeted in order to be effective.   But even that is assumptive - in that it presumes that anyone at all would be interested in the product that is being sold ... that somewhere out there, there are a sufficient number of people who are mortified by the grass stains on their umbrellas, struggling to peel a crate hard-boiled eggs, and can't figure out how a blanket works.

It likely doesn't help my argument that some of them are entirely right about that, as products that solve these ridiculous problems sell by the millions and make their inventors very wealthy indeed.   But I would posit that these are the exceptional cases rather than the typical and that, these exceptions aside, the problem of selling in general is less to do with the tactics than the presumption of the needs of the prospect.

Getting Urgency Right

As a customer, I've found myself if a few situations lately in which a seller has turned me to the competition - not because they were not interested in selling, and not because I was not interested in the product, but because they made a critical mistake regarding the urgency of the purchase.   In their desire to march me to the cash register, they made some critical mistakes that soured me on the prospect of buying from them.  This is not a new experience, and I have a sense it's a much broader problem that sellers mistake their customers' level of urgency and behave in a highly inappropriate manner in attempting to close the deal.

It's likely worthwhile to consider the nature of urgency itself, because like many terms it has been garbled by misuse - something is said to be "urgent" simply because someone feels a sharp desire to have it, which is to say that it's important to them - but that does not make it urgent.   Urgency is more than the importance of taking an action.   It pertains specifically to the speed at which it must be done - which is to say something is only urgent if there is a cost to doing it tomorrow rather than today, or next month rather than this week.   If there is no consequence for failing to act immediately, then it is not urgent, however important it may be for reasons other than time.

From the perspective of the seller, revenue is urgent all the time.   Having money today means being able to invest or spend it before it loses its value - though that's less important in the current economy.  These days, a dollar in January is worth 99 cents in December because inflation and interest rates are nearly flat.  There once was a time it would be worth only 90 cents, or even less, because of the rates of inflation and interest were much higher.   But even though the financial rationale for urgency is less poignant, it still remains a psychological need that relates to security - the more time it takes a customer to decide, the more likely it is they will decide to buy from someone else.   There is an almost palpable sense of fear that failing to close the deal today means losing the deal forever.

That shouldn't be a fear for brands that are confident in their quality of their product and the fairness of their pricing - in such a position, a firm should have the confidence to say "take your time and shop our competition, we're confident you will be back."  For that reason alone, companies that want customers to close the deal as soon as possible seem a bit shady and convey the sense that there is a better deal to be had somewhere else and they are nervous the customer will find it, given time. In the incidents in which I have walked away from a too-eager vendor, this anxiousness has been the "red flag" that made me step back from the "buying" process and back into the "shopping" one to find a different vendor, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

As I consider this problem, I also recall instances in which the vendor's lack of urgency caused me no small amount of frustration: I was at the point where I was ready to purchase and a salesman continued to provide information about the product.   Or in a more direct sense, having to wait in line to complete a purchase represents a situation in which the customer's sense of urgency is poorly accommodated by a vendor who puts its own processes ahead of the customers' priorities - though this is generally for a different reason (the customer's sense of urgency comes from a desire to use their own time efficiently, rather than an immediate need for a product).

The essence of the problem in either instance is the seller's inability to appropriately accommodate the customer's level of urgency - to rush them into completing a purchase too quickly or to prevent them from completing the purchase quickly enough.   Given that, I don't expect there can be a single answer to the question of how fast is fast enough, because it largely depends on the customer's priorities - which differ from person to person and moment to moment.

Consider the way in which customers purchase an umbrella.   When it is not raining, there's little sense of urgency and the customer can inspect the merchandise casually, considering whether it is durable and the color he might prefer and whether he might get a better deal if he waits a week or a month for a sales event.  When it is raining, all of this is set aside - he does not care about the style of the item or its durability, color, or price (within reason) but needs a quick solution that will help him avoid getting wet.

In the same examples, the seller must react accordingly.   The attempt to close the deal on an umbrella on a sunny day is difficult to the point of being nearly impossible - and attempting to convince the customer that it might start raining at any moment is not likely to give the customer a sense of urgency he lacks.  By the same token, discussing the features and qualities of the item during a rainstorm is likely an annoying waste of time to a customer who is in urgent need of a solution and isn't thinking about the value of the product beyond its ability to serve the needs of the moment.

Of the two, a seller whose urgency exceeds that of the buyer is likely the more detrimental.   It's rare for an eager buyer to break off of the process and seek another vendor because the seller is not moving quickly enough, likely because the eager buyer recognizes he will have to invest time (that he doesn't want to spend) in finding another vendor.   On the other hand a leisurely buyer who is confronted by an anxious seller is willing to take time, not necessarily in interacting with vendors, before making the purchase and is more inclined to stall or walk away.

And it's also inherent to the nature of commerce that, for financial and psychological reasons, sellers are more prone to want to create a sense of urgency than to encourage slower pace - though the (few) sellers who do so are likely to be regarded as qualified and confident in the quality and price of their product.   As such, a less stressful selling process is likely not only a more pleasant experience for the customer, but gives them a long-term impression of the quality of the brand.

But ultimately, success is a matter of properly assessing and accommodating the customer's level of urgency - and the more difficult prospect of letting the customer control the speed of the process rather than attempting to control them to suit the seller's own desires.