Hard Sell VS Soft Sell

I just wanted to talk about an interesting difference between a “hard sale” and a “soft sale“.  These are important business terms and useful strategies to know and understand.

A hard sale is very aggressive and “in your face”.  The whole point is trying to sell something.  You just keep explaining why your product is good and why the person should buy it now.

A soft sale technique is quite different.  You try to build trust and build a relationship with a person.  You don’t put pressure on them to buy something and you just recommend a product and let the person make their own decisions.

Both of these can work.  I personally prefer using soft sale strategies.  I like it because it seems friendlier and I like to let people make up their own minds.  If you have a good product and can build trust, a soft sale technique should work well.  Friends recommending products to other friends is a little bit like doing soft selling.  The friend doesn’t really care if someone else buys the product.  They are just giving their honest opinions and trying to be helpful.

I sell a product that does really well online.  I have used both hard and soft sales strategies.  The soft strategies work better and make for happier customers.  But that is just my experience.  I think it depends on the type of customer and the type of product.

I make an online spoken English course that sells very well.  I’ve sold over 8000 of these last year.  Some people buy immediately after looking at the site but I truly believe that you should try out the free PDF ebook and make a decision later.  You can see some examples of both hard and soft selling together on the website.  The reason it looks a little fake (hard selling) is because Google finds that type of writing style more easily.  I’d prefer to use a different writing style on the website but I have no choice or no one would find it.  Anyway, it should be interesting to take a look at my website for my spoken English course to understand some of these sales strategies.

Tags: Spoken English Course

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.