Persuasive Sales Versus Manipulative Closes

On a recent call, one of my protégé students had posted to our forum something that illustrated yet again one of the most important points in selling and that's the difference between persuasive sales versus the manipulative close.

When I was about 19 or 20 years old I owned a health spa which I started from scratch. I was sitting at my desk one day with older gentleman who had asked for an appointment. He wanted to come and talk to me about radio advertising and I agreed because I thought it was an interesting idea with some opportunity. He started off with the typical manipulative, shtick, "If I could show you in 30 minutes time how you can make a lot of money and cut some of your costs you would be interested in this, wouldn't you?"

Ugh. It was already starting badly. Then he pulled out a thick book and began to go page by page telling me about where the company began, who he was, et cetera. It was light on content and heavy on pictures. It was a very slow process where only 10 minutes had passed, it felt like hours.

Finally I said, "Stop. I see how thick this book is and I see that you've already been going for 10 minutes. I'm surprised I've let you talk this long, but if we've got to get through that entire book, you aren't going to be here 30 minutes, you're going to be here for hours, and that simply isn't going to happen. Can you summarize for me what you can do for me? Yes or no?"

He stammered and mutter, "I'm going to show you back here if you'll just give me the opportunity to get there."

I said, "I'm not going to. That's the point. I'm not going to give you the opportunity if you can't give me a yes or no."

He tried to argue, "Well, I asked you for 30 minutes."

I said, "I'm asking you, can you summarize what you can do for me, yes or no?"

At this point, he was unable to come up with anything and I had to ask him to leave. I wasn't trying to be a jerk. Initially, I really did want to hear if he had something I could benefit from, but if he couldn't get to the value of his service, how was it going to benefit me if I only had 30 second radio ads in which to get to the point about my business.

There was no persuasion involved at all in his presentation. By belaboring me, by not being able to come up with anything for me to hang my hat on, and not even bothering to look for what my criteria was, he was the epitome of manipulative sales.

In the vein of the old fashioned, features and benefits kind of selling, Zig Ziglar once said, "This I do know beyond any reasonable doubt. Regardless of what you are doing, if you pump long enough, hard enough and enthusiastically enough, sooner or later the effort will bring forth the reward."