People do not hate being sold to

People do not hate being sold to.

They hate being processed.

They hate the email that could have gone to anyone.

The discovery call where someone asks twelve questions in the order they appear in a template.

The demo that starts before anybody knows why they are there.

The fake curiosity.

The calendar link sent three seconds after a LinkedIn connection.

The "personalized" paragraph that proves a machine found their job title.

I have spent enough of my career in sales to understand why these things happen.

Scale matters.

Process matters.

Repetition matters.

A good system keeps important things from depending entirely on memory and talent.

The problem starts when the system becomes more important than the person moving through it.

You can feel that immediately as a buyer.

You say something consequential and the seller keeps going because question seven comes after question six.

You explain what matters and receive a deck organized around what the company wants to talk about.

You say the timing is wrong and enter a twelve-touch sequence anyway.

None of this feels like selling.

It feels like entering a machine.

Good selling feels different.

Someone understands your situation faster because they have seen similar situations before.

They ask a question that makes you reconsider something.

They tell you when their product is not the answer.

They bring information you did not have.

They remember what you said.

They make a complicated decision easier to think about.

Sometimes they challenge you.

Sometimes they persuade you.

That is allowed.

Persuasion is not inherently manipulative.

If I genuinely believe something will make your situation better, I should be able to make the strongest honest case for it.

The word doing the work there is honest.

Good sales is not the absence of an agenda.

Of course I have an agenda.

I want to sell something.

The buyer knows that.

Trust does not require pretending otherwise.

It requires my agenda to remain compatible with their reality.

That means being willing to discover that the deal should be smaller.

Later.

Different.

Or not happen at all.

This is where sales gets interesting to me.

The job is commercial, but the mechanism is deeply human.

Two groups are trying to decide whether making a commitment to each other will improve something.

That decision usually contains risk.

Career risk.

Financial risk.

Implementation risk.

Reputational risk.

The buyer is not simply evaluating a product.

They are evaluating the future story they may have to tell about choosing it.

A seller who understands that behaves differently.

They do not confuse pressure with momentum.

They do not hide the difficult part.

They do not answer objections before understanding them.

They do not pretend every stakeholder cares about the same thing.

They help make the decision more legible.

I think the best salespeople are excellent reducers of uncertainty.

They know which uncertainty their product can remove.

They are equally clear about the uncertainty it cannot.

This is why generic personalization misses the point.

Knowing where I went to college is not the same as knowing me.

Mentioning the company's earnings call does not create relevance by itself.

Relevance comes from consequences.

You understand what changed.

You understand why it matters here.

You have a credible idea about what could happen next.

That is valuable whether or not the person buys today.

The strange thing is that sales organizations sometimes optimize the humanity out of selling in pursuit of efficiency.

We make it easier to contact more people and harder for any one person to feel understood.

Then buyers become resistant.

We conclude they hate being sold to.

So we automate more.

There is another possibility.

Maybe people are not resisting commerce.

Maybe they are resisting being treated like inventory.

Every buyer is a person who has to carry the consequence of the decision after the salesperson leaves.

If I remember that, most of the job gets simpler.

Do the homework.

Listen closely.

Tell the truth.

Make the decision easier.

Earn the next conversation.

Selling does not need to feel like something being done to someone.

At its best, it feels like two people trying to get a consequential decision right.