The urgency you push onto the customer is the urgency you're feeling yourself.

There’s a scene I’ve watched repeat in many companies, and every time it produces the same effect. A salesperson, at the end of a quarter that isn’t going as planned, starts behaving differently with prospects. Emails get more frequent. Follow-ups more insistent. Callback calls arrive less than 48 hours apart. The implicit message, even when it isn’t said out loud, is decide now.

The customers, almost always, stop responding. The salesperson reads it as a sign of a soft market. It’s another wrong diagnosis.

The urgency the salesperson was transferring to the customer wasn’t the customer’s urgency. It was theirs. It was the anxiety of the closing quarter, of the manager’s pressure, of the missing revenue. When the seller’s anxiety isn’t recognised, it disguises itself as a sales strategy and gets dumped onto the customer. The customer feels it, even if they can’t name it. And they protect themselves the simplest way they can: by going silent.

This is one of the subtler principles of selling, and one of the least discussed. The urgency the customer perceives is almost never the urgency the customer actually has. It’s a projection of whoever is on the other side. When the seller is calm, the customer decides on their own time. When the seller is anxious, the customer feels the anxiety and pulls back.

I tell this often to salespeople who tell me about markets that have cooled down. Almost never has the market cooled down. Almost always what’s changed is the energy you’re showing up with. A pitch made at the start of a quarter, when numbers allow you to be relaxed, and a pitch made halfway through the third month, when the quarter is closing badly, are completely different experiences for the customer. Same product, same company, same salesperson. But the air in the room has changed, and the customer chooses on the air, not on the product.

There’s an important practical consequence. Working on the salesperson’s internal anxiety is almost always more productive than working on their techniques. A stressed salesperson doesn’t sell less because they’re missing techniques. They sell less because they’re transferring stress to the customer. The techniques, in that case, are just how the stress shows up on the surface. Fixing the bottom is more effective than sharpening the top.

The same applies, at a larger scale, to companies. When a company is under growth pressure and that pressure transfers to the sales team, the sales team transfers it to customers. Conversion drops. The diagnosis gets made as we need to push harder. Internal pressure goes up. Conversion drops further. You enter a spiral where the more you tighten, the worse you convert. The cure isn’t more pressure. It’s less pressure, better applied, on decisions that make sense.

There’s an exercise that almost always works when a salesperson has entered this spiral. Skip a follow-up. Leave the customer alone for ten days after an interesting conversation, even when the instinct says to call them on day three. Most of the time, the customer comes back. When they come back, they come back on their own time, and when they come back they’re available to decide. When instead we call on day three, they go silent, and we step into the pattern described before.

The urgency you push onto the customer is the urgency you’re feeling yourself. It’s an uncomfortable principle because it puts the responsibility inside. But it’s also, after many years of watching, one of the most reliable. When you feel the need to tighten the grip on a customer, stop. Ask yourself what you’re feeling inside. Almost always the answer is somewhere other than the customer, and that’s where to start over.