The “No-Sell” Sell: A Counterintuitive Approach To Make Customers Come To You, Instead of Chasing After Them

It's about conversations, not conversions.

🏴‍☠️ Welcome to another Category Pirates mini-book. This foundational series shares category design principles, strategies, and actionable frameworks to help you design and dominate new and different categories.

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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

It’s human nature to feel wanted. 

It’s also human nature to get the ‘ick’ when that want becomes a need.

Think about how most high schoolers act toward their first crush. Every day, they're on a mission to impress that person. Their cologne levels are off the charts. They dress meticulously, make over-the-top gestures, and go out of their way to be seen. They think they're doing everything right to look attractive and engage.

Often, they just look desperate. 

When they decide to spill their feelings, they drown their crush in a tidal wave of emotion. The response? A polite rejection, with a side of sympathy. 

Too much pursuit can turn admiration into aversion.

This is also how many salespeople, consultants, entrepreneurs, and business owners approach potential customers, partners, investors, and potential employers.

They spend thousands of hours (and dollars) qualifying leads, only to pitch, poke, and prod until they get a call on the books. Once they’re on the call, they have one goal: convert. Since the leads are ‘qualified,' they’re given loose scripts of how to say the right things, move leads down the funnel, and close. In doing so, they put the prospect on a pedestal—essentially submitting to whatever gets the job done for the sake of conversions. 

It’s (often) a failing method. 

It also makes you, and your business, seem desperate.

Just like your crush, the moment you come off as too needy is the moment you set yourself up for a money-losing situation. 

Your prospect has options. Chasing them until they finally ‘go out’ with you only puts more pressure on you. So, you do whatever it takes to hold their interest and keep the relationship alive—all while they flirt with other options. 

Said differently: You give them all the power.

The key is to create an irresistible energy that pulls customers toward you.

Whether you’re a solopreneur looking to land your Superconsumers, an entrepreneur scouring for seed investment, or an S&P 500 company trying to revitalize sales, your goal is to create so much magnetic energy and value that customers flock to you. You want to pull. Not push. 

The "No-Sell" Sell is a tactic to generate demand, attract business instead of chasing it, and prove that you, your product, or your service is incomparable.

The strategy: You sell to people by not selling to them. 

You do this by creating so much value for someone that they fight to work with you. They chase you—you don't chase them. Not only does this help position your company/offering as high-end and elite, but it also shows how you’re different from anyone else. 

Why “go to market” when you can make the market come to you?

Here's one example:

McKinsey folks are famous for saying, “McKinsey doesn’t sell.” This may seem like an odd statement from a consulting firm with $13.5 billion in revenue. But it's an expression of ethos, energy, and elitism that McKinsey doesn’t need you as much as you need McKinsey. But the most successful senior partners at any consulting firm know the “No-Sell” Sell is far more about radically generous, strategic servant leadership, and the right sprinkle of swagger. 

This is how the No-Sell Sell works at McKinsey and for practically every other great senior partner:

• First, you identify senior decision-makers you genuinely like and want to help. If you like the person, you'll come off as a missionary instead of a mercenary. 

• Second, you listen and be curious about their biggest business problems. Don’t bring up a proposal or anything commercial. 

• Third, you become radically generous and add a ton of value through casual conversations, helpful articles/data, and introductions to experts. 

• Fourth, you proactively frame huge upside opportunities and clever ideas for solutions for them. 

• Lastly, you wait…until they eventually say, “Please help me unlock this opportunity. What will it cost?” You then charge them a fraction of the upside.

Successful senior partners have 8+ of these conversations going on at any time. 

Of course, if someone keeps taking advantage of your generosity over time, shifting your attention elsewhere is okay. But you also want to recognize that timing is everything for large-scale consulting projects. Those 8+ conversations are enough for portfolio theory to kick in (where 1-2 projects will keep you busy at any given time). 

Here's the emotional insight: 

People tend to be grateful if you serve them, which makes you feel good. 

Often your thought leadership can scale across these 8+ relationships, so you feel forward progress as a consultant and creator. You don’t feel rejected, because you haven't put someone else in a position to say no to you. Instead, you feel generous, creative, and accepted, which gives you the energy to keep going. This allows your persistence to pay off in the long run, often leading to a successful career as a senior partner. 

This “just make yourself valuable” thinking is also a core ethos in Silicon Valley. 

There's a very clear unwritten rule that people help each other. 

More senior, experienced, connected people throw down a rope to the next generation. Friends and colleagues make intros, look over slide decks and business plans, or simply act as sounding boards. This pay-it-forward approach is a massive cultural advantage. Not to mention, reciprocity is hardwired into the universe—when you become known as someone who makes a difference, your life gets different.

If you don’t use the “No-Sell” Sell, you'll get stuck in an endless cycle of following up and relying on promotions to land sales.

Have your doubts? 

The opposite of the “No-Sell” Sell is the Beg-Beg-Please.

Here's a snapshot of the Beg-Beg-Please sales "strategy" most companies resort to over Black Friday/Cyber Monday. This is a small sample of the hundreds of promo emails Pirate Katrina got that week. (If you’ve been on the Pirate Ship for some time, you know there’s a different approach for successful short-term holiday marketing.)

If anyone can name a company below by its clear missionary message, we'll give you a free year of Category Pirates!

Now, the "No-Sell" Sell might seem nerve-wracking at first because who wants to turn away opportunity, revenue, and customers? 

But you won't lose anything other than a world of hurt, broken customer relationships, and unpleasant experiences serving people who are constantly comparing you to somebody else they thought could have done it better, faster, or cheaper. This is not about turning away opportunities. It's about sparing you from an anchor that will slow you down and could eventually destroy your business. (We're sharing a Client Compatability Checklist in this mini-book to help you decide if a client/partnership is right for you in just 10 questions.)

So, stop the follow-up emails and put down the perfume.

It's time to build your "No-Sell" Sell category design swagger.

The “No-Sell” Sell