A Simple Approach for Supercharging Your Close

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Even seemingly minor tactics can easily trigger reactance. For example, have you ever received a cold outreach from a salesperson that ended with “…so, I’d love to talk to you about how we can help. I’m free on Wednesday at 2:30 PM. Will that work for you?” While the seller might think they are making their request easier for the buyer to comply with by removing the agony of meeting time choice, it’s often the opposite. The feeling of a simple meeting date and time being imposed on a buyer produces the same off-putting effect.



Modern buyers live in a world full of seemingly infinite choices and a highly evolved virtual purchasing experience. They have become more accustomed to having great power, knowledge, and freedom in the buying process. In fact, more and more purchase decisions are being made on the basis of that experience as much as they are on the solution itself. And when you impose your revenue and quota pressure on your customers, even by accident, the experience quickly erodes along with your pipeline.

The good news is that supercharging your sales motion by kuwait telegram data circumventing the reactance trigger may be simpler than you think. That is if reactance is catalyzed by a perceived restriction of freedom and choice, then restoring that sense of choice should neutralize the negative implications of the tactic.

In an effort to explore the reactance phenomenon, French behavioral scientists Nicolas Guéguen and Alexandre Pascual conducted an experiment. They had their assistants randomly stop passers-by in a popular mall on a sunny spring day and ask them if they had some extra coins for bus fare. In one set of experiments, the assistants simply asked the subjects for the money. In a second set, the assistants made the same request but appended it with a phrase indicating that the subject was completely free to accept or refuse. The results were staggering. In the first instance, compliance with the request for bus fare was 10%. In the second instance, the rate of compliance rose to 47.5. An almost 5X increase! Why? By establishing that the subject was completely free to refuse the request, the reactance response wasn’t triggered and they became more likely to comply with it.

So how can you leverage this approach in your selling motion? Here are some examples of how you can combine your request with a reactance “safety valve”.