The Hard Truth About Soft Selling

Over the last 35 years the pendulum has swung away from the stereotypical “hard sell” of the fifties and sixties, to the “soft sell” of the seventies and beyond.  Although many of the manipulative “moves” of the hard sell salesperson have been discredited along with the stereotype, we must be careful not to discredit the entire act of persuasion.

In their book entitled the Hard Truth About Soft Selling, George Dudley and John Tanner discuss the evolution of sales training programs over the last fifty years.  Here is how they explain it:

A new kind of sales training program emerged on the American business scene in the early 1970s.  Touted as a revolutionary alternative to traditional “hard sell” sales approaches, these programs quickly found favor among battle weary sales managers, eager to defeat what they perceived was a long-standing negative attitude toward the sales profession.  Lured by promises of increased productivity, higher retention rates and happier salespeople, sales organizations everywhere began to abandon existing training structures in favor of this progressive new approach.  The soft sell revolution had begun.

Today, the transformation from traditional selling to a new soft and fuzzy way to sell is almost complete in the United States.  Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and several other countries are close behind and catching up quickly.  Like statues of Lenin in the dying days of the Soviet Union, playwright Arthur Miller’s grinning, glad-handing icon, Willie Loman, has been toppled.  In its place is a shiny new ideal of the successful salesperson: kinder, gentler, less self-interested, less manipulative, more empathetic.

Today, soft selling and its new sell variants have become the sales profession’s wishing well, it’s Mardi Gras, it’s circus.  The result is a massive, tectonic shift in attitudes, methods and intent away from closing and toward relating.  But is the new paradigm a harbinger of good things to come, or merely wishful thinking? [i]

There is a big difference between persuasion and manipulation. Persuasion is a form of influence.  It is the process of guiding people toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and emotional means.  It is a problem-solving strategy, and relies on “appeals” rather than force.  Persuasion is meant to benefit all parties in the end.

Persuasion is often confused with manipulation. Manipulation is the act of guiding another person towards something that is not in their best interest by subverting their thought processes.  Manipulation means to influence a person or a group of people in such a way that the manipulator tries to get what he or she wants or makes a person believe something in a calculating, indirect and dishonest way. Manipulation is deceptive, surreptitious and adversarial.  It is designed for one person to win at the others expense.  It is a form of psychological abuse.

Selling is about persuasion. Persuasion is straightforward, overt and collaborative.  Persuasion is designed so that both parties win.  If you would not be comfortable having someone do to you what you are doing to them in the act of persuasion, you have crossed the line from persuasion into manipulation.  You are no longer selling.

Endnotes:

[i] George Dudley and Dr. John F. Tanner, Jr., The Hard Truth About Soft-Selling (Behavioral Sciences Research Press, 2005) pp. 1-2

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