Edition #67 is here!

That’s a big cultural milestone I think…

Sponsorships | Subscribe

A thread on r/sales recently turned into a debate about what to do when something you say on a call lands flat. Some good replies came in, but one great one stood out.

Here’s the move: when a moment goes cold, label the emotion you think they're feeling. People love correcting and hate being corrected. Guess slightly wrong and they'll jump in with the real answer you maybe wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

The default ask may be something like "what's your hesitation?" it feels like the safe, professional version. But it’s actually the weaker version for three reasons.

Naming it lowers the temperature. Putting a feeling into words reduces amygdala response compared to other ways of processing the same negative stimulus, and increases activity in the prefrontal cortex instead. The researchers themselves call the effect modest, which is the right expectation to hold. It's a small, reliable nudge toward a conversation the buyer can think clearly in.

A guess protects their autonomy. People get motivated to defend themselves the moment they feel their freedom to choose being squeezed. Softer, autonomy-supporting language draws less resistance than controlling language. "What's your hesitation" is a demand for disclosure. It makes them produce something on the spot. A wrong label hands them the easiest social move available, which is disagreeing with a specific claim.

They don't actually know why they went cold yet. The most understood part here. People believe they understand things with far more depth and precision than they really do. In the research, participants rated their grasp of everyday objects highly, wrote out a step-by-step explanation, then rated themselves lower. Producing the explanation is what exposes the gaps.

Same thing happens mid-demo. The buyer's read on why they lost interest is fuzzy. Ask openly and you get whatever shallow answer is already loaded. Hand them a specific wrong diagnosis and they have to build a case against it. Building that case is what surfaces the real objection, to them as much as to you.

Where it gets slippery

Someone in the thread extended this to ghosted deals. Assume you offended them, email an apology, offer to hand their notes to a coworker. It works, and it's a rougher version of something negotiation trainers have taught for years: a walk-away question like "Have you given up on this project?" which gives the other side safety and control while pushing them to explain where they actually stand.

This difference matters. The walk-away line is true when you send it. The apology version requires inventing an offense that never happened, and the day a buyer reads the attempted fabrication, you've spent exactly the trust you were trying to build.

There's also a delivery question in play. Someone in the thread said the self-aware callout would make him think he was talking to a bot; he's not wrong about the generic version. A label lifted straight from a book sounds like a script because, well, it is one.

A guess specific enough to be interestingly wrong can only come from someone who was actually paying attention.

It’s almost like listening matters!