Selling Without Pushing

Most sales books are written for a culture where no is cheap. Somebody does not want your thing, they tell you, you both move on, no harm done.

I did not work in that culture. For thirty years I worked in Thai industry, and in those rooms saying no directly to a person’s face costs the speaker something. So people do the graceful thing instead.

They say yes. Then they stop answering.

The polite yes is not a yes

Western sales training has a name for this. Stalling. The recommended response is to press: create urgency, isolate the objection, ask for the close again.

Do that here and you will win the meeting and lose the account.

What you have actually done is force someone to choose between two costs. Disappoint you to your face, or agree and then disappear. Almost everyone picks the second one, because it protects both of you in the moment and the damage arrives later, when you are not in the room to see it.

The polite yes is not dishonesty. It is a kindness aimed at a situation you created by making no expensive.

Make no cheap and the truth shows up

The whole technique is one move. Hand them a door they can walk through without losing anything.

“This may not be the right fit for you.”

“If the timing is wrong, tell me and I will come back next year.”

“I would rather you said no today than yes in March.”

Say it early, say it plainly, and mean it. The first few times you will feel like you are talking yourself out of a sale. What you are doing is removing the social cost of honesty, and the moment that cost drops, people stop performing agreement and start telling you what they actually think.

That is when the conversation becomes useful. Sometimes the answer is a real no, which you now get in five minutes instead of five months. Sometimes it is a real objection you can finally work with, because it came out.

The silence is part of the method

There is a pause after you ask a genuine question. Ten seconds, sometimes twenty. It is uncomfortable if you are used to filling it.

Fill it and you have taken the question back. The other person was assembling a real answer and you interrupted it with a softer version of the same question, which tells them you were not really asking.

I learned to count. Not out loud, obviously. Long enough for the tea to go cold.

Most of the deals I remember closing did not close because of anything I said. They closed in a silence I did not interrupt.

What this is not

This is not passivity, and it is not a trick with the polarity reversed. Telling someone it might not be right for them, while privately being certain it is, and using the line to squeeze them, is just pushing with better manners. People can tell. The Thai word for it is not polite.

It also does not mean you stop being clear about what you sell, what it costs, and what it will not do. Clarity is not pressure. Most of what gets called pushy is actually vagueness that keeps returning for another meeting.

The test

At the end of a conversation, ask yourself one question.

Could this person have said no, easily, without it costing them anything with me?

If the honest answer is no, then whatever they said, you do not have an answer yet. You have a performance, and you will find out in about six weeks.