Hard Selling Versus Gentle Persuasion

There are two kinds of marketing methods that people use to increase their businesses.

The most common way that people use to ‘GET’ the sale is through push marketing, where the seller leverages on sales pressure and ‘pushes for the close‘ through emotional manipulation and confrontational sales tactics. This type of marketing, in and of itself isn’t wrong because human nature requires a push sometimes - people are just afraid to make an investment in something because every once of fibre in their body is giving negative reasons and signals to the brain why they shouldn’t make a purchase and they need someone to get them to take action if their are indecisive.

People who are geared for confrontational selling will find these methods useful, but most others are just not built for ‘going in for the kill’ or ‘pushing for the close’. They prefer a softer, more gentler approach in order to get the sales.

The drawback of hard selling is that even after they make a sale, the prospect is often left with ‘buyer’s remorse’ as their emotions are the faculties making the purchase and not an informed, feasible business-oriented decision.

21st century marketing is all about developing a type of marketing service that uses a different model - something called relationships-of-trust.

In order to develop a system to get more new clients, you have to embrace a different mind set that is less confrontational and leverages on the ‘pull’ factor to attract prospects to be the ones who ‘raise their hands’ first. There is no cold calling, hard selling or strong arming required as the prospects are the ones coming to you instead of you hunting them down like a hunter.

These type of marketing strategies are also very useful because they leverage on free information such as business reports, video presentations, slide presentations and other informative sources to gently persuade their prospects. The prospects make informed decisions and they do it with all their faculties intact (no emotional manipulation at play here).

If you are looking for a good marketing coach, it is best to find someone who teaches you how to build trust, credibility and business relationships with their clients rather than hard selling - after all, consumers are getting more and more intelligent and we should give them credit for knowing how to make an informed decision - our role as sellers are to provide useful information to facilitate that process.