The Trouble With Nagging

I read an interesting but specious remark about selling: each time a salesman asks a customer to purchase and the customer refuses, it is 24% less likely the customer will ever buy.   The person who offered that up didn’t cite a source, and I won’t cite them because I strongly suspect it was a totally made-up number in an off-the-cuff remark – and more’s the pity because I have a sense that there’s some truth to that assertion that’s worth considering.

Old-school sales tactics suggest you should “always be closing” and that persistence means asking the same question over and over until you wear down resistance and the customer gives in.   But those tricks have never worked on me as a customer, and I have the distinct sense that I’m not alone in this because it runs contrary to a number of behavioral tendencies.

The first of these tendencies is priming: a person who refuses a salesman has set a precedent that it is OK to refuse them, making it easier to continue to refuse even after a convincing argument has been presented.   Asking them over and over merely gets them used to saying “no” to your advances, putting you in a position to overcome a level of obstinacy that you created.

Another tendency is to be suspicious of strangers: a salesman is essentially someone you don’t know who wants something of you, and there’s very little trust that they have your best interests at heart.   Especially when they seem eager to get you to commit to an agreement when you don’t know the details, that’s a danger sign that raises a level of suspicion about another person’s character.   So asking for a commitment too early creates a level of mistrust that you then have to overcome – and again, it’s your fault the customer is mistrustful.

Another tendency is to defend past decisions, even bad ones: a person who said “no” wants to feel that they made the right decision, and changing that answer to a “yes” means that they must admit to having been foolish to refuse the first time.   This can be avoided if the salesman has the patience to wait for a moment in which saying “yes” would build rather than undermine the self-image of the prospect.

Another tendency is the desire to have esteem: saying “no” to another person puts them beneath us, in terms of power and esteem.  The salesman who has made a customer refuse him has handed them the upper hand in the relationship by making them aware of their power to control the salesman merely by refusing his advances.  Admittedly, the customer always has that power and status, even from the very start, but making them acutely aware of it and eager to exercise it is a serious mistake.

There may be more to it than that – but those four tendencies come to mind immediately, and each of them causes the prospect to raise defenses that might not otherwise have been triggered, and each time a person says “no” they harden their position.

My sense is that the answer to all of this is simply to wait – work to establish trust with the prospect, convince them that purchasing your product is a smart decision, and put them in a position where saying “yes” is a demonstration of their power rather than a submission to your own.   I don’t have a sense there are any shortcuts to the goal, and while the degree to which prematurely and repeatedly pushing someone toward a commitment they are not ready to make might not be 24% exactly, I have the sense it’s not very far from the mark.