There’s a conversation I’ve had dozens of times, always more or less the same way. A founder arrives, tells me sales have been flat for a few months, and asks for help “selling better”. The word he uses, sometimes openly, sometimes obliquely, is persuasion. He’d like better copy, a more effective email sequence, a more convincing script. His diagnosis is simple: the customers are there, the offer is there, all that’s missing is the final push.
Almost always, that diagnosis is wrong.
He isn’t selling less because he can’t persuade. He’s selling less because even he is no longer clear what he’s selling, to whom, and why.
The exercise I take him through is simple. I ask him to describe his ideal customer in two sentences. The replies I get are mostly generic. Mid-sized companies that want to grow. Professionals who need to organise themselves. Founders who want to grow revenue. Sentences that could sit on a thousand other consultants’ websites.
Then I ask the second thing: why does a customer choose you instead of one of the ten companies doing similar things?. Here the answer almost always turns hesitant. There’s talk of experience, of quality, of a proprietary method. But rarely does a sentence emerge that, heard by someone else, would be remembered the next day.
The selling problem starts here. Not at the bottom, where the close happens. At the top, where you declare who you are. If you can’t answer those two questions with precision, no closing technique will make you sound convincing. Because persuasion, when it works, isn’t a coat of paint. It’s an amplification of something already there. If under the paint there’s no clarity, the paint doesn’t help. It makes things worse.
I see this clearly when I review the sales pages of people who ask me for “copy revision”. Almost never is the problem the copy. The problem is that the page speaks to everyone, and so speaks to no one with the necessary force. Rewriting those same sentences with a better copywriter, I’ve tried it on client insistence, moves the numbers a little, and not for long. Conversion rises by 10% maybe, and a month later it’s back where it was.
When instead, before touching the copy, you work on positioning, and you decide with precision who the target is and what makes you distinct, conversion can double. Without changing a single word of the existing copy.
This is the unpleasant part. Most sales problems don’t get solved by studying sales. They get solved by working on the product, on positioning, on the ideal customer description. Work that looks less interesting, because it lacks the air of an advanced technique. But it’s the work that actually moves the numbers.
Here’s a test I propose to people who insist the problem is one of persuasion. I have them write, in ten minutes, a thirty-word maximum sentence that describes who they are, who they work with, and why they’re useful. Then I ask them to send that sentence to three of their best customers, asking whether they recognise it. Almost always, at least one of the three replies with some doubt: I’m not sure that describes what you actually do for us.
That doubt is the diagnosis. It isn’t that the customer doesn’t understand. It’s that the sentence isn’t precise enough.
When that sentence tightens, and becomes precise enough that whoever reads it feels seen, selling starts to behave differently. The wrong prospects opt out before they ever request a call. The right ones arrive already half-convinced. The sales conversation, instead of being an exchange of objections, becomes a consultation in which two people assess whether it makes sense to work together. The close, in that frame, doesn’t require techniques. It only requires being there, present, and not breaking what’s already in place.
The line I keep telling myself, when a client asks for help “selling more”, is one. Before the sale comes the clarity. If the clarity isn’t there, the sale stays a permanent uphill climb. If it is, the sale becomes, in large part, a natural consequence.