Scared Buyers Don't Buy

The advice going around says bury your prospect in pain. Here's what that actually does to your win rate.

There's a sales technique making the rounds in the coaching and expert space right now, and I think it's gross.

You already know the classic version. Agitate the pain. Make them sick, make them well. Get the prospect to feel they're in deep trouble unless they hire you. If you don't fix this, your business is going to suffer. If you don't move today, forget the goal.

The new version some gurus are selling takes that and cranks it. Don't just agitate the pain. Bury them in it. Take the agitation up tenfold.

I think that's garbage, and I have two reasons.

Reason one: I can see you coming

I've been on the receiving end of this. I bristle instantly. I don't like manipulation, and I do this for a living, so I clock it early. The open-ended question. The long dramatic pause. The lean-in. I know exactly what you're doing, and now I'm not thinking about my problem anymore. I'm thinking about you.

Nobody enjoys being handled. Your prospects are as savvy as you are.

Reason two: it doesn't work

Here's the part that should actually change your behavior.

Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna studied 2.5 million recorded sales conversations for their book The JOLT Effect. They found that between 40% and 60% of deals today are lost to customer indecision. Not lost to a competitor. Lost to a customer who wanted to move and couldn't pull the trigger.

Then they looked at what reps do when a prospect gets cold feet. Most go back to the top and relitigate the problem, and some get desperate and hype the fear. In 84% of those interactions, that pattern made the deal more likely to be lost.

Read that again. Turning up the fear on a hesitant buyer is not a neutral move. It's an actively losing one, most of the time.

The reason is simple biology. When a person gets genuinely scared, you get one of three responses. Fight, flight, or freeze.

Fight means they push back and write you off as a bozo. That's me, in every one of those meetings.

Flight means they ghost you. You created enough stress that disappearing became the cheapest option.

Freeze is the most common and the most expensive. They do nothing. This is omission bias at work, and it's a well-documented heuristic. We feel far less blame for harm we allowed than for harm we caused. If I do nothing, nobody dings me for it, at least not soon.

So you spent the whole call raising the emotional temperature, and the result is a buyer too scared to buy.

What Trevor taught me

Trevor Bragdon is part of the Misfit crew and a persuasion expert. He works with foundations and nonprofits on seven-figure donor campaigns and teaches ethical persuasion around the country.

He told me something once that stuck.

He said he doesn't really push in a sales meeting. Because if he has to push that hard and they say yes, it's a grind. They come in kicking and screaming. They're not motivated. It never works out.

His line was: if you want to work with me, you're going to want to work with me. I don't need to push you into it.

He does his part. He provides the information. He lets people decide.

The alternative: increase the clarity

Instead of agitating the pain, increase the clarity.

I've worn glasses since I was eight, so I've sat through a lot of eye exams. You know the drill. They drop the lenses in front of you and ask, does this look better, or this? Better, or this? They keep flipping until the chart snaps into focus.

That's your job in a sales conversation. You're the one turning the lens.

You're clarifying two things.

One: what they actually want. Most prospects cannot tell you this. They know they don't like where they are. They know things aren't working. They're frustrated. That is not the same as knowing what success looks like. So you consult. Is it really a dollar amount? Sometimes it is. How did you land on that number? If you grew half that much, would you consider yourself a failure? Keep flipping the lens.

Two: what happens if they don't get there. Notice this is the same territory pain agitation is trying to cover. The difference is who's holding the pen. You're not telling them their life will fall apart. You're asking, and you're finding out together. What would it look like if you just let this ride another year? Is that fine, or not?

That second question is not softer than pain agitation. It's often harder, because the prospect says it out loud themselves instead of hearing it from a stranger with a quota.

Why this is yours to do

Because you're the expert. That's the whole job.

Clients rarely arrive with clear goals. They arrive with a mess and a hunch. And if you don't help them get clear, they'll go somewhere else for it. Increasingly that means typing their situation into a chatbot and walking out with a dog's breakfast of a self-diagnosis. That's not better for them and it's not better for you.

This is the most conversational, most curious, most compassionate approach to selling I know. You could call it sales. I think it's just another way of being an expert.

And it doesn't feel like a pitch. It feels like a useful conversation with someone who knows things. Your prospect leaves with the information they need to make an informed decision about hiring you. Sometimes that's a no. The no shows up early and cheap instead of six weeks into a bad engagement.

A friend paid me a real compliment a couple years back. She said, Stephen, you're my biggest cheerleader. I loved it. And Christine, our Breakthrough Coach at Band of Misfits, is famous for using "and" where most people say "but," so let me use it here. I loved it, and I'd put it differently. I'm not a cheerleader. I'm a champion.

A cheerleader tells you that you can do it. A champion fights for you.

You cannot fight for someone while you're busy scaring them.

Profits + Peace ✌️

— Stephen