How to sell without being pushy (a guide for people who hate selling)
You can talk about your work for hours. You'll happily explain to a stranger at a barbecue why their damp problem is a ventilation problem, or why their website isn't bringing in enquiries.
Then someone says "so what would that cost?" and your mouth goes dry, you knock twenty percent off before they've blinked, and you finish with "but no pressure, have a think".
If that's you, you're in good company. Most small business owners we meet are brilliant at what they do and deeply uncomfortable asking to be paid for it. They say "I'm just not a salesperson" as if it's a fixed trait, like being tall.
It's nothing of the sort. Hating selling nearly always means hating one particular idea of selling, and that idea deserves a closer look.
Why selling makes your skin crawl
When author Daniel Pink was researching his book To Sell Is Human, he asked people for the first words that came to mind when they thought of sales. Of the 25 most common adjectives, 20 were negative, including "pushy", "sleazy" and "dishonest".
HubSpot asked buyers to describe salespeople in one word and the number one answer was the same: pushy.
So the picture in your head when someone says "selling" is a stranger who won't take no for an answer. Nobody wants to be that person, so you swing hard the other way:
You under-explain
You apologise for your prices
You never ask for a decision
And you call it being polite.
Pink's research turned up something else, though. He surveyed around 7,000 US workers and found that people spend about 40% of their time at work on what he called non-sales selling: persuading, influencing and convincing other people, with no till in sight.
You already do this all day. You do it when you talk a client out of a bad idea, or get a supplier to deliver early. You're good at it. You only seize up when money enters the sentence.
What pushy means
Pushy is a set of behaviours, and it helps to be specific about them, because asking someone whether they'd like to go ahead isn't on the list.
Pushy is:
Talking over people
Pitching before you've understood the problem
Inventing urgency ("this price is only good until Friday") when there isn't any
Hearing "no" and carrying on as if they'd said "convince me"
Selling someone a thing that won't help them
Now look at what's missing from that list:
Telling someone clearly what you do
Naming your price
Asking whether they want to go ahead
Checking in when they said they'd come back to you
None of that is pushy. It's clear, and customers find clear a relief.
Flip it round and think like a buyer. You've asked two builders for a quote.
One rings a few days later to see if you've got questions and whether you'd like to book in. The other sends a PDF and vanishes, leaving you to do all the chasing.
The second one might think they're being respectful. What they've done is hand you their job.
Seven ways to sell that won't make you cringe
1. Ask before you tell
The fastest way to feel pushy is to launch into what you offer before you know what they need. Start with their situation. What's going on, what's it costing them, and what would a good result look like?
When you understand the problem properly, recommending the fix feels like giving advice, because that's what it is.
2. Say what you'd do if it were your money
"If I were you, I'd start with the smaller package and see how it goes" is one of the most persuasive things a person can say, mostly because pushy people never say it.
Recommending the right thing, even when it's the cheaper thing, builds the sort of trust that brings people back and gets you recommended.
3. Say the price like you're telling them the time
No run-up, no apology, no "I know it sounds like a lot". Say it, then stop talking.
The silence afterwards will feel like a fortnight. It's about four seconds. They're thinking, which is what you want. The moment you fill that silence, you'll fill it with a discount.
4. Stop discounting before anyone's asked
If you drop the price unprompted, you're negotiating against yourself and telling the customer the first number was made up.
If someone does ask for a lower price, change what's included and leave the rate alone. "I can do it for that if we take out the second visit" protects your margin and your self-respect.
5. Ask for the decision
This is the one people skip. You have a lovely conversation, send the quote, and wait.
Asking doesn't need a clever closing line. Any of these will do:
"Would you like to go ahead?"
"Shall I book you in for the 14th?"
"What would you need to see to say yes?"
A plain question, asked once.
6. Make "no" easy to say
It sounds backwards, but it works. "If it's not right for you, that's completely fine, just tell me" takes the pressure off both of you.
People who feel free to say no are far more comfortable saying yes, and you find out where you stand, so you're not left wondering for a month.
7. Agree the next step before you leave
"I'll send this over today. Shall I give you a ring on Thursday to see what you think?"
Now Thursday's call is something they agreed to, not an interruption. Most of the dread around chasing disappears when the chase was their idea too.
Write down the bits you dread
Confidence in selling comes from the same place as confidence in anything else: having done it before.
If there's a moment you always fumble, whether that's the price, the "we'll think about it" or the "can you do it cheaper?", write down what you'd like to say, in your own words, and say it out loud a few times. In the car is fine.
It feels daft. It works because the wobble comes from making it up on the spot while your heart's going. With a sentence ready, you can concentrate on the person in front of you.
Three to prepare this week:
How you say your price
What you say when someone asks for a discount
How you ask for the decision
When it's more than nerves
Sometimes the discomfort is pointing at something real.
You can't say your price without flinching. Check whether you believe it. Owners who've never worked out what a job costs them to deliver tend to price on a hunch and then defend it badly.
Every conversation feels like a hard sell. You might be talking to the wrong people. When marketing brings in people who are a poor fit, selling to them will always feel like pushing. Our guide to why your marketing isn't working covers how to spot that.
The conversations go well and then nothing happens. The problem is what comes after: no next step, and no record of who's waiting on what. That's a gap in the process, and we've written about it in why sales and marketing don't talk to each other.
Selling is a skill, which is good news
Nobody is born knowing how to run a sales conversation, any more than they're born knowing how to read a balance sheet. It's learnable, and it gets easier quickly once you've got a structure to lean on.
That's what our sales workshops are for. I run them through No Graft No Glory, the sales consultancy I set up after 16 years leading sales teams in high street banking, in partnership with Qrios.
The groups are small and the sessions are built around your business, covering things like discovery calls, objections and asking for the business without needing a lie down afterwards.
If the issue is bigger than confidence, sales consultancy looks at the whole route from enquiry to paid invoice, and our guide to whether you need a sales consultant will help you decide.
You don't need to turn into someone else to sell well. You need to be as clear about your price as you are about your work.
Get in touch if you'd like a hand. The first half hour is free.