There’s a single fundamental premise I’d like to equip you with, for all your interactions with people, be it buyers or team members or personal relationships:
Enroll, don’t sell.
Which means: instead of trying to figure out how to make people do what you want them to do, seek instead to enable their decision-making.
In other words: treat selling (or getting buy-in) as nothing more or less than choice-enablement. Buy/don’t buy, how can I help. That’s all.
Because that simple attitude prevents you from falling into the persuasion-trap, where we’re trying to convince the other person of the use or the validity of our point of view, or indeed, when we’re trying to goad or coerce someone else into some sort of action or decision.
And whenever we fall into that attitude, the results vary from ‘tiring and pointless’ to ‘outright disastrous’. (Also see: 📄 What to do when "the face ain't listening")
Force and persuasion may work in certain situations, but it’s no fun and it isn’t how nice people land their clients.
You’ll find it far easier, more productive, and a lot more fun, to simply enroll people.
And you do that by stepping into the other person’s world, also known as ‘perspective-taking‘.
Do that, and they’ll feel safe.
In the other person’s world, you don’t have to state your case, or present a compelling argument or reason against their objections, or, for Pete’s sake, do any pitching.
All you need to do is figure out what’s happening there, in that world, and identify which changes you can make about yourself and your narrative, so as to facilitate some process, or decision-making, or buy-in from the other person.
It’s said that ‘nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care’, and it’s true.
This is why taking the attitude of enrolling people is so effective.
They feel safe, they can tell that you care about them, and so they’ll be more willing to enroll in whatever solution you present.
Where it comes to relationships and communication, the solution when you meet resistance is rarely ‘more force’. And it certainly shouldn’t land in the world of ‘objection-handling’.
But that’s exactly the trap we tend to fall into: we use ‘force’ in terms of explaining harder, making a better case, appealing to their reason and common sense. Because hey, apparently we’re going to be able to overcome their objections.
(Sidenote: instead of objection-handling, try and figure out – right at the start – what might be the buy-blockers that could prevent the sale from happening. Very handy for not ending up with objections and lost sales at the end of the sales process.)
Anyway: using force means you’re making it about yourself, and about how right you know you are. Which you may or may not be, but whether you are or not doesn’t matter.
What matters is: asserting that you’re right makes the issue about you.
But if you want people to buy, your best bet is to enroll them, and you do that by making it about them – that’s what causes your buyer to enroll themselves. And you make it about them by being interested in them, asking questions, and doing your merry best to properly get what reality looks like to them.
That’s how you create a safe, non-pushy space for the other to consider other – your – point of view, and figure out for themselves whether or not they want to adopt it. And exactly because you’re not trying to push your agenda, you’ll make it far more likely that they’ll get on board with whatever offer or proposal you have in mind for them.