📄 How to make selling fun: don't sell, but enroll instead

It’s easy to miss when we’re doing it:

Those moments when we’re trying to persuade someone, when we try convince them of the usefulness or the validity of our point of view, or indeed: when we’re trying to goad 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’.

A buyer shouldn’t be persuaded, but instead should be shown an insight about the purchase - one that helps them decide whether or not to make that purchase.

A child shouldn’t be forced to eat their veggies - your job as a parent is to figure out what makes them want to eat them. (tough job, from what I hear).

When an employee underperforms, threatening to fire them isn’t helpful. Much better to figure out what’s going on that prevents them from being their best. After all, there’s always a reason.

Force and persuasion may work in certain situations, but always at a high cost.

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 convince or present a compelling argument or anything like that.

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 a process of decision-making, in the other person, causing them to buy in voluntarily.

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’.

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.

But 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 that asserting that you’re right makes the issue about you.

If you want to enroll people and create the kind of results that everyone benefits from, you’ll need to make it about them.

And you do that by stepping into their world.

That's where the magic - and the sale - happens. In the buyer's world.

You want to learn how to do that - how to enroll buyers without ever having to push or persuade and convince?

Good. Let's talk.