There is an old saying I learned years ago:
“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”
I don’t know who originally said it. It has been attributed to several people over the years. But I know this: after more than 40 years in sales, I believe the principle behind it is true.
And continuing research into human behavior keeps giving us more reasons to understand why.
People don’t like to be pushed.
They don’t like to be made to feel stupid.
They don’t like having someone tell them what they should believe, particularly when the belief we’re attacking is connected to a decision they’ve already made.
Yet salespeople do this all the time.
A seller tells us their home is worth $750,000.
We know the comparable sales don’t support it.
So what do we do?
We pull out more comps.
We show them another chart.
We explain absorption rates.
We tell them what buyers are doing.
We bombard them with facts until we believe we’ve proven our case.
And sometimes we succeed in proving we’re right while completely failing to influence the customer.
That’s an important distinction.
Selling Is Influencing Thought
Years ago, I heard what I still consider the best definition of selling I’ve ever learned:
Selling is influencing thought.
I’ve carried that definition with me for a long time.
Notice what it doesn’t say.
Selling isn’t winning an argument.
It isn’t overpowering an objection.
It isn’t getting somebody to surrender to our superior knowledge.
It is influencing thought.
And you can’t effectively influence someone’s thinking until you understand how they’re thinking in the first place.
That’s where I think a lot of sales training gets this wrong.
When someone disagrees with us, our natural reaction is to explain.
When they continue to disagree, we explain harder.
We keep adding facts as though the problem must be that they haven’t received enough information.
But sometimes the information isn’t the problem at all.
What Are They Really Defending?
Maybe the seller believes $750,000 because that’s what they need to get in order to buy their next home.
Maybe their neighbor told them their house was worth that much.
Maybe they’ve spent $100,000 remodeling it and can’t emotionally accept that the market isn’t going to return every dollar.
Maybe they’ve already told their spouse, their children and everyone at work that they’re getting $750,000.
Or maybe they simply don’t trust us enough yet to accept something they don’t want to hear.
Those are very different problems.
And none of them gets solved by throwing another comparable sale on the kitchen table.
Research into motivated reasoning and psychological reactance helps explain some of this. When information threatens a belief we’ve already adopted, we don’t always evaluate that information objectively. Sometimes we discount it. When we feel someone is trying to control our decision or take away our freedom to choose, resistance can actually increase.
Even recent research into confirmation bias has found that giving people a strong, conclusive recommendation can sometimes make them more likely to defend what they already believe.
Think about what that means for selling.
The harder I work to convince you, the harder you may work to resist me.
That doesn’t mean we hide the facts.
It doesn’t mean we agree with something we know isn’t true.
And it certainly doesn’t mean we manipulate people into reaching our conclusion.
It means we need a better way of getting to the truth.
Meet Them Where They Are
Instead of immediately telling the seller why $750,000 is wrong, I might ask:
“Help me understand how you arrived at $750,000.”
That’s a very different conversation.
Now I’m learning.
Maybe I ask:
“If $750,000 is the right price, what would we expect buyers to do during the first few weeks we’re on the market?”
Now we’re thinking together.
Showings?
Second showings?
Offers?
Positive feedback?
Great.
Then maybe the next question becomes:
“If those things don’t happen, what do you think that would tell us?”
I haven’t forced the seller to admit they’re wrong.
I haven’t made them defend themselves against me.
We’ve created a way to evaluate the decision together.
That preserves something I think is incredibly important in professional selling:
Autonomy.
The customer needs to know the decision still belongs to them.
Truth Follows Trust
This is where trust becomes so important.
Truth Follows Trust doesn’t mean we earn someone’s trust so they’ll finally do what we tell them.
That’s manipulation dressed up as relationship selling.
We earn trust so an honest conversation becomes possible.
A customer should be able to say, “I don’t agree with you.”
And we should be comfortable enough to respond:
“Okay. Help me understand what I’m missing.”
Maybe we’re wrong.
Forty years in the business doesn’t make us infallible.
And maybe we’re right.
But if we’re right, asking another question may help the customer discover something that another ten minutes of explaining never would.
There’s an ethical distinction here that matters to me.
Professional influence should increase the customer’s clarity and preserve their freedom. Manipulation does the opposite.
Manipulation is trying to get someone to make the decision I want them to make.
Professional selling is helping someone think clearly enough to make the decision that best serves their goals.
Those are not the same thing.
And this principle isn’t limited to selling houses.
It applies to leading employees.
Coaching agents.
Negotiating.
Parenting.
Marriage.
Almost any place where one human being is trying to influence another.
We often become so focused on getting the other person to see what we see that we stop trying to see what they see.
Maybe that’s why the old saying has lasted all these years.
“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”
We don’t need better arguments nearly as often as we think.
We need better questions.
We need deeper listening.
We need enough patience to meet people where they are before trying to move them somewhere else.
And we need enough respect for the other person to remember that the decision belongs to them.
If selling really is influencing thought, then our job isn’t to do the customer’s thinking for them.
Our job is to help them think better.
That’s Time Tested Mastery.