By Abigail Mitchell
Buyers increasingly prefer to make decisions without a salesperson in the room, and they make worse decisions when left entirely alone. This piece argues that the gap between those two facts is where suppliers should be working, drawing on a conference talk and on the answers of six people who heard it.
The most useful thing that ever happened to my business was a prospect telling me he was not interested.
He had looked at what my agency does, decided it was not for him, and said so. The conventional response is a sequence of follow-up emails designed to overcome the objection. I did not send them. He kept asking technical questions over the following week, and I kept answering, which cost me very little because the tools needed to answer were already built and sitting on my laptop.
About a month later he came back and admitted he could not do the work himself. A couple of months after that he became a client.
I described that sequence in September at the SaaS SEO Alliance conference near Delhi, in a talk called “How I Sell to the US and UK as a Guy From a Third World Country”. Of everything in it, the part people wanted to discuss afterwards was not the part about winning clients. It was the part about what to do with the ones who had already said no.
That surprised me at first. Most sales conversations are about the prospects still in play, and the ones who have declined are treated as finished business. But the room was full of people who run small agencies and software companies, and for them the declined prospect is not a rounding error. It is most of the list.
The Buyer Does Not Want a Salesperson in the Room
There is a temptation to treat the give-first approach as a matter of temperament, something that suits people who are bad at selling. The buying data suggests it is closer to a structural adaptation.
Gartner’s research on the business-to-business buying journey reports that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience. Three buyers in four would rather work it out themselves than sit through a conversation with somebody whose job is to close them.
The same research adds a complication that is easy to miss. Purchases made entirely through self-service are considerably more likely to end in regret, and buyers are 1.8 times more likely to complete a high quality deal when they use a supplier’s digital tools alongside a sales representative rather than on their own.
So buyers do not want to be sold to, and they do not do especially well when left completely alone.
That gap is the whole opportunity. What buyers appear to want is not an absence of the supplier but a different kind of presence: someone available to answer a question without treating the question as a buying signal to be pounced on. This is roughly what happened with the prospect who said no. I was not selling to him. I was simply the person who replied when he asked something.
It is worth being precise about what the rep-free preference actually expresses, because it is easy to read it as a statement about technology. Buyers are not saying they would rather use software than speak to a human being. They are saying they would rather not enter a conversation in which the other party’s incentive is misaligned with their own. A buyer asking a question of a salesperson has to spend part of their attention discounting the answer. That is tiring, and given the option of finding out for themselves, most people take it.
Remove the incentive from the conversation and the preference reverses almost immediately. Everybody would rather ask somebody who knows. The obstacle was never the conversation.
Ankit Jaitly, Founder at Authority Radar, builds software for search marketers, a category where the reflex is to lead with the feature list. Asked what he had taken from the session, he named exactly this distinction: “How to exactly help and not just sell.”
The word doing the work in that sentence is exactly. Most people accept the principle in the abstract and then fail on the mechanics, because helping and selling can look identical from the outside and feel completely different from the inside. The test is simple enough. If the help only makes sense as a step towards a purchase, it is a pitch. If it would still have been useful to the person had they never bought anything, it is help.
Pitch the Fix, Not the Thing You Sell
Every industry develops a vocabulary for what it sells, and buyers are almost universally indifferent to it.
In my own field the temptation is to describe a link by its metrics and its price, because those are the attributes that distinguish one from another inside the industry. One of the slides in the talk put the alternative bluntly. You are not pitching a backlink. You are pitching the fix for what you found.
The same is true well outside search marketing. An accountant does not sell a set of year-end filings. The client is buying the absence of a letter from the tax authority. A web developer is not really selling a faster site either. The owner wants fewer people abandoning the checkout on a phone. In each case the supplier’s vocabulary describes the work, and the buyer’s vocabulary describes the result, and only one of those gets a reply.
The shift is not cosmetic. Describing the fix rather than the product forces you to know something specific about the buyer’s situation, which means the work has to happen before the conversation rather than during it. That is inconvenient, and it is most of why so few suppliers do it.
It also changes what the first message looks like. A pitch can be written once and sent to a hundred people. A description of a fix can only be written for one, because it depends on having looked at that particular business and noticed something. The first is quicker. The second is the one that gets read.
Automation Has Not Changed the Requirement
The argument for helping first gets stronger, not weaker, as outreach becomes easier to automate.
Harsh Dhameja, a founder working in software, compressed the point into six words: “Don’t sell and provide value instead.”
There is no shortage of tooling on the other side of that advice. Platforms such as Skylead will run a LinkedIn and email sequence to a thousand people on your behalf, with conditional branches depending on who replies. The mechanics of reaching people have essentially been solved.
What has not been solved, and cannot be, is whether the message is worth reading when it arrives. Cheap distribution raises the volume of outreach everybody receives, which lowers the attention any individual message gets, which means the only durable advantage is having something specific and useful to say. Automation makes the generic message cheaper to send and less likely to work at the same time.
This is the part that tends to surprise people who have invested heavily in tooling. The tooling is fine. It just cannot manufacture the one ingredient that determines the outcome.
Why So Few Suppliers Actually Do This
If the argument is this straightforward, the obvious question is why the approach remains unusual. There are three reasons, and none of them is that people disagree with it.
The first is that it does not fit a reporting cycle. A favour is an activity with no field to record it in, no stage in a pipeline and no attributable revenue. Anybody working to a quarterly number is being measured on things this approach does not produce, and a sensible employee optimises for the thing being measured. It is notable how much easier the method is for owners than for employees, which has little to do with belief and a great deal to do with who is being held to what.
The second is that it does not scale in the way businesses want things to scale. Ten minutes of genuine attention cannot be delegated to a junior or automated into a sequence without becoming a different and much weaker thing. A company that grows from four people to forty usually loses the capacity to do this somewhere in the middle, not through any decision but because nobody notices it leaving.
The third is simple impatience. The return arrives late, arrives indirectly, and frequently arrives through somebody other than the person who was helped. A supplier who tries the approach for six weeks and abandons it will conclude, accurately on the available evidence, that it did not work. The evidence only changes shape at about the one-year mark, by which point most people have stopped.
None of these is a reason to avoid the approach. They are reasons to expect it to feel unproductive for longer than is comfortable, which is useful to know in advance, because the discomfort is the part that makes people quit.
Be Somebody They Would Ring Anyway
The give-first approach is often described as a technique. The people who practise it well tend to describe it as a relationship, and the difference shows up in how they talk to clients.
Much of business-to-business selling still runs on a kind of performed formality: surnames, careful deference, and a reluctance to disagree with the person paying. My own habit is the reverse. First names, the same level, real questions, and the willingness to say so when I think a plan is wrong. There is a diagnostic benefit to this as well as a relational one. A prospect who needs the formality will usually be difficult later, so the way somebody responds to a direct and friendly tone tells you something useful about the engagement ahead.
Smith Shah, Founder at WaitDelta, builds the whole sequence on that footing: “Be a friend to your client and help them before you go for their pocket. I truly believe that if you give before asking, it makes both parties happy and the relationship stronger.”
The phrase “before you go for their pocket” is blunter than most sales training would allow, and more honest. Everyone in the conversation knows money will eventually change hands. The question is only whether the buyer has seen enough of you by then to be comfortable with it.
David Johnson, Founder and Managing Director at LoudCrowd, has turned the same instinct into an operating decision. His agency works with small firms in Sheffield and gives each client one consultant from the beginning of the relationship to the end of it. “Make your customers feel wanted, like friends.”
That is a structural choice rather than a cultural one, and it is worth distinguishing between the two. Plenty of companies describe themselves as friendly while routing a client through four account managers in a year. Small firms are not asking for warmth. They are asking for one person who knows their business and answers the phone, which is a staffing model, not a tone of voice.
The Principle Does Not Stop at the Contract
Most sales advice ends at the signature, which is a strange place to stop, since that is the point at which the relationship starts costing the client money.
Kiran Chaudhari, Co-Founder at ParkMedia360, described the return rather than the initial win: “I like the way of not selling to the client but helping the client, so they will return to you in future.”
A client who has been genuinely helped once does not need to be persuaded the second time. They have already run the experiment. Whatever the first project cost them in uncertainty, the second one costs nothing, which is why second sales tend to close in a fraction of the time and why the economics of an agency depend so heavily on them.
Lokesh Jaral, Head of Customer Success at viaENS, sees the same principle from the far side of the transaction: “The best thing I learned today: never go to sell. Always go for help.”
In customer success that is not a philosophy so much as a job description. Accounts renew and expand when somebody solved a problem before anyone mentioned an upgrade. Accounts churn when the only contact a client has had since signing is an email about renewal dates. The mechanism is identical to the one that won them in the first place, applied to a person who is now paying.
It is worth noticing how unevenly most companies distribute their effort across that line. Considerable energy goes into the twelve weeks before a contract is signed and remarkably little into the twelve weeks after, despite the second period being the one where the client can actually observe whether the claims were true.
The Reordering Is Small and the Consequences Are Not
None of this amounts to a new methodology. Nothing here requires a change of positioning or a new piece of software. The sequence is the only thing that moves: be useful, then be available, then let the buyer decide when the conversation becomes commercial.
What makes it difficult is not complexity but patience. The approach produces no pipeline you can show a board, no forecast, and no obvious way to attribute a deal that closes eight months after a ten minute favour nobody wrote down. It is genuinely worse than a pitch on every metric that can be measured inside a quarter.
The prospect who told me he was not interested did eventually become a client, and no report anywhere in my business would have connected that outcome to the week I spent answering his questions for nothing.
That is the trade. Whether it is worth making depends mostly on how long you intend to be doing this.
