Dotty Scott explains a sales tactic where you present a refusal form to prospects, forcing them to confront what they lose by not buying. The strategy works on fence-sitters by making inaction feel like an active choice with real costs.
When I sold life insurance, you know, plenty of people said no. And I got real smart after a while. I had it all typed out and I had a little sheet of white paper and I had the person's name there. I, so-and-so, realized that Deborah Morrison has proposed that I have— and I had a blank there because I didn't know what the amount of insurance that I was blank of insurance— and I'm choosing not to buy it at this time. And then I had the date filled in. And I had to sign. So I said, fine, Bill, I don't— it's a free country, it's fine. But because my manager really wants to know that I proposed this, you've decided against it. So if you just sign here, I'll take it back to my manager and everything will be fine. Well, the people look at this thing and like, I think like maybe one person signed it in all the time. They're like, OK, I'll buy it, because they hadn't thought about the cart. The consequence of them not buying. Wait a minute. You told me that if you died yesterday and you're making $50,000 a year, you wanted to buy your family 4 years of recovery time.
So if I'm hearing you right, what you basically just said was no matter what your business is, no matter what you're selling, if you have somebody that's on the fence, that you need to be able to tell them the consequences of not using your service or product. So that they're really thinking about whether they need it or not. That's genius.
