When I first started selling my software and services, I ran into the problem of: "What if they get mad because component X doesn't work like they thought it did and want a refund? What if they yell at me? What if something goes wrong!?"
Tons of different avenues you can convince yourself will happen. First, chill out, they haven't happened yet. Second, deal with them when they do.
I once worked for a company that trained it's salespeople to be hard sellers and gave tons of ways to try to do this (it was for a gym and I was a personal trainer; gyms are notorious for this sales tactic). Because I didn't feel comfortable with that (since I hate it when people do it to me), I did the exact opposite. I was the softest salesperson around, but would find other non-threatening hacks to try to get people to buy personal training. Within a month I was the number personal trainer (in sales) for Dallas/Ft. Worth using my tactics. My clients loved me.
We'd probably all be a lot better off using softer sales tactics.
Yes.
> We'd probably all be a lot better off using softer sales tactics.
That doesn't follow.
Suppose that 10% of the population responds best to soft sales tactics and that the other 100 sales folk are using hard tactics. You got that 10% to yourself while the other 100 folks are sharing 90% of the sales. Your numbers will be better despite using the "wrong" technique for the majority of the population.
The correct strategy is to find an underserved subpopulation. If enough "everyone else" is using a given strategy, the exact opposite is likely to work well. If a mix of strategies are being used, you need more information.
Granted, if you hear enough of the same objection, it may be something that you want to add to your product, but you want to keep that as part of an existing engineering workflow instead of treating every object as an urgent request to help get a sale.
