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Blog posts that are articles.

More and More People Want a Less Manipulative Way of Selling

by Carl Ingalls and ChatGPT

It’s hard to put an exact number on how many people are actively searching for a less manipulative way to sell. But several trends make it clear that demand for a different approach is growing.

Distrust of traditional sales tactics is high.
Studies show that 60% of B2B buyers question the integrity of salespeople, and only about one-third find them genuinely helpful. Buyers want something more authentic.

Top sales performers are less manipulative.
Among high-performing salespeople, most rely little (or not at all) on manipulation. They succeed with honesty and transparency—and experience less stress while earning more trust from their clients.

Honest marketing is in demand.
In a recent U.S. survey, nearly half of respondents defined ethical marketing as truthful and transparent messaging. Three out of four believe companies that commit to ethical marketing will be more successful over the long term.

Even salespeople are speaking up.
On a public sales forum, one person summed it up:

“People love buying but hate being sold.”

The shift is happening. Both buyers and sellers are moving toward authentic, respectful approaches to selling—ways that focus on the real probability of a sale rather than trying to force one into existence.

That’s exactly what High Probability Selling is all about.

Why do they keep talking?

I have been cold call prospected at least 3 times this week. Yes, I still answer my phone.  Yes, I was born in the 1900s with all the other Luddites. 

And although it is currently not the 1900s, one persistent belief is still alive and kicking in sales.  The innocuous act of filling out an online lead magnet for some information by email has many hidden meanings.

One of those hidden meanings to many business people is that providing one’s email address to a business is immediately equated to becoming a hot lead for their product or service.

Fearing that my interest in their offering may suddenly go cold in 20 minutes, my phone rings and I answer it.  The call begins, most recently, with me trying to comprehend who the caller is and what they are offering.

The telephone prospector, often using a far eastern dialect (or AI) speaks as if we are in the latter part of an ongoing sales conversation.  They seem to believe that I already understand who they are and which company they are representing, because they rattle it off as if it’s a household name with instant recognition.  I am now of course confused at best.

For me, their business is not a household name. I don’t even remotely understand the caller’s name, if they even mentioned it. Their voice speeds up as the call goes further, perhaps trying to get in as many words as possible before I hang up?

30 long seconds into the call, I am absorbing less and less about what they are selling or offering.  They have spoken something like 150 plus words so far, most of which I can’t understand or relate to.  My brain has closed off 90 percent of my listening at this point.

Then it is time in their script to pitch the appointment with rhetoric promising the saving of time or the saving of money, which of course everyone will agree about.  When this approach doesn’t work, they try the alternate choice close on the appointment date and time.  At least 3 or 4 times.

By this time in their process, I no longer understand what they are selling, AND I no longer care.  All I want to do is to get off the phone.

I finally get a moment where I can interject something like, “I don’t have time for this and don’t need an appointment”.

My effort to be polite is of course ignored by the caller, who continues to repeatedly push for the appointment, while also claiming their intent to be brief.

I say no thank you, I don’t want an appointment because I have no idea what they’re even selling.

They finally say something least leaning towards goodbye, but then they have to profusely thank me for taking the time to listen to them and answer all of their shallow questions while they try one more time to set an appointment!

All I can think of at this point is WHY WHY WHY do they keep talking?  Everyone advises hanging up on them, sometimes preceded by an expletive, but with my brain offline, that’s easier said than done.

It’s 2025, aren’t they tired of all this talking yet?  I sure am.

The Foundation and the Heart of High Probability Selling

by Carl Ingalls, with significant contributions from ChatGPT

I asked ChatGPT, “What is the foundation of High Probability Selling, what is the heart of it, and what is the difference?”

Here is a summary of its answer.

The foundation is the mindset and belief system that underlies all behavior in the HPS process.  The foundation is internal—your beliefs, attitudes, and approach to selling.

The heart is the core practice—what makes HPS different in action.  The heart is external—the actual behavior and methods you use with prospects.

Without the foundation, the heart of HPS could become just another technique for manipulation.

Without the heart, the foundation remains a good philosophy, but doesn’t translate into real-world sales behavior.

Together, they form a system that is both honest and effective.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Please add your comments below, or use our Contact Us page.

When the Interviewer Says, “Sell Me This …”

Suppose you are applying for a sales job, and suppose you are a practitioner of High Probability Selling (HPS).

What would you do if the interviewer told you to sell them their laptop?

Here is a clever and entertaining situation and response found on Tumblr:

I was at a job interview today when the manager handed me a laptop and said: “I want you to try to sell this to me.“

So I put it under my arm, left the building and went home.

Eventually he called me and said: “Bring my laptop back now.“

I said: “$200 and it’s yours.“

Here is a response that I believe is a little more consistent with the principles of HPS, although not as entertaining.

Applicant: “Do you want this laptop?”

Manager: “No.”

Applicant: “Ok. I only sell to people who want what I am offering. Since that’s not you, I’ll find someone who wants it.”

Manager: “Convince me. Talk me into it.”

Applicant: “That’s not the way I work.”

Applicant: “What do you want to do?”

What principles of HPS apply here? Please put your thoughts in the comments, or use the Contact Us page.

Thoughts About Recipients’ Experiences When Receiving a Cold Call

The following is from a conversation between a fan of HPS and the author, and is published here with permission.

Hi Carl

Though I’m now retired I absolutely admire your HPS system, so enjoy following your posts etc including the latest “calling businesses/leaving messages”.

May I respond to this one with a thought.  Do your students have to consider what their recipients experience when they cold call?

My pet cold calling irritants as a recipient are when I hear their obvious sales pitch.  It instantly makes me immediately disinterested.

My pet hates are:

  1. “How are you today”
  2. Speaking their intro too quickly just to get it out of the way
  3. “I’m calling to save you money on your . . . Phone/energy/other “
  4. Thinking I should be interested in that!

So I wondered what others don’t like to hear when they get cold called.  Might help them understand what needs to be removed/modified.

Ian Clark

Hello Ian,

What you say makes a lot of sense. 

High Probability Selling was not created from any logical reasoning.  Jacques Werth observed and documented what the top producing salespeople were actually doing, regardless of whether any of it made sense or not.  So he discovered HPS.  He did not invent it. 

Most of your pet peeves are things that really effective salespeople already avoid doing.  So we teach our students to stop doing those things.  Not because it makes sense (even though it does), but because it works better. 

I find that making sense of something is useful, because it helps me remember details, but making sense doesn’t make an idea any truer. 

Aristotle had an idea about falling objects that made perfect sense (and still does).  It was so perfect that no one thought to question it for almost 2000 years.  Then Galileo actually tried it out. 

I think selling is a little bit like that.  Traditional selling makes a lot of sense, until you look at it much more closely. 

I’d love to put your thoughts (and my response) in an article on the blog.  May I have your permission to do that?  And if yes, do you want to be identified in that article, or not? 

Carl Ingalls

Please feel welcome to add comments with your own pet peeves about what salespeople say and do when they call.

About the HPS Community Forums (2025)

Please see the most recent update on our HPS Community Forum Series Webpage.

What.  We host a series of interactive meetings on Zoom where we talk about High Probability Selling (HPS).

Purpose.  To provide a community of like-minded individuals, who would otherwise feel very isolated in a non-HPS world.  We talk about HPS, but we do not try to teach how to do it in these meetings.

Who.  Anyone who has an interest in High Probability Selling is welcome.  No particular background is required.  No charge.  No registration required.  Just show up.

When.  We generally offer these forum meetings once per week on Thursdays.  Starting time is usually 9:30 AM or 1:30 PM (USA Eastern Time).  We are experimenting with different timing, to see what works best for our audience.

Topics.  We usually decide what to talk about a few days before each forum meeting.  We keep our options open.  We welcome suggestions from our audience.

Recording.  We record these Zoom meetings.  We email each recording link to the people who showed up at that meeting.  We will also email it to the people who request the recording ahead of time.

[Zoom access details removed]

If you want to be notified by email about the details for each forum meeting, send us your name and email address so we can put you on our mailing list.  You can use our Contact Us page for that.

Or, you can see our Google Calendar and search for HPS Community Forum.

Mystery of Sales Strategy – The Probability Game

Sales can be a bit of a mystery to many people.

People who do it, people who see it done, and the people who have never seen it done, but think they have. 

It has existed for a long, long time in the category of business alchemy and marketing. 

In the world of alchemy, what makes sense doesn’t work. What doesn’t make sense suddenly works. And then when we make sense of that, it doesn’t work anymore.

We look under every rock and internet resource and folklore and the rumor mill, constantly seeking that magic formula that will produce the results we seek.

The result we seek is for someone to say yes. 

In conventional sales techniques, gurus are all promising that they have the secret way to get everybody to say yes 100% of the time.

It’s been more than 100 years since assembly line style of scientific psycho selling has been invented.

We are all searching and seeking, drunk on dopamine that this one thing will be the one, the Holy Grail, the one phrase, the magic word, the technique that will get everyone we call and everyone we sit in front of and everyone we meet with to say, “Yes, where have you been my whole life?” 

Then something works.  We hear the yeses.  We draw the conclusion that we’ve been waiting for decades to draw, that we finally found the formula. 

So if an unexpected number of prospects say yes, when I’m using a technique that I picked up from a YouTube video by Jim Bandersnatch, then that’s why all those people, all of a sudden, said yes.  So now whenever I sell, I’m going to make sure I use the Bandersnatch technique, because that’s what made them say yes.

And of all the products and services that I sell, if the emotional charge, the emotional bookmark, the feeling was powerful enough when an unexpected person or persons said yes, then I become completely smitten with that particular product.  Because that product is the one that sells itself, a no-brainer.

And since I love the feeling of people saying yes, and I love the feeling associated of people buying from me, and I love the accolades that I get from people buying from me more than they buy from anyone else, then I’m going to chase that feeling constantly, even after conditions have changed.

Even after prospects (also known as people who are extraordinarily illogical) have changed their minds about the wonder product that I’m convinced will never stop selling, and they all stop buying it, even when I use the Bandersnatch technique.

So when things are working, whatever that means for us, and we happen to be using the Bandersnatch technique, and we keep our rabbit’s foot in our left pocket and a silver dollar in our right pocket, and we wear our shoes on the opposite feet, we don’t stop to inquire.

We’re like the gambler who thinks that they’re on a winning streak.

We worry about being attached to the outcome of a sale.  We’re not attached to the outcome of a sale. We’re attached to the feeling.  We’re attached to the thought that we found the magical combination of random factors that will produce the feeling that we’ve been seeking.

Casinos make billions of dollars off of that feeling, and normally intelligent, practical people, driven most of the time by common sense, will hand their money over to a casino as soon as they have had the feeling of getting lucky.

Now the professional poker player knows that the feeling of winning and the feeling of being lucky is the precursor to the apocalypse.

The professional poker player is a statistician.  Even when playing against people, they work in the field of mathematical probabilities, because they don’t give two craps about the feeling of winning.  They’re motivated by profit. Profit respects probabilities, and profit doesn’t care at all about feelings, and profit doesn’t care about beliefs.  Professional poker players laugh hysterically at beliefs. 

Most salespeople (at least the lower 99% according to our research and observation) run entirely on feelings, beliefs, hope and superstition.  The top 1% of salespeople operate on probabilities.  Real questions, definitive answers, real data, and they never ever operate on beliefs or hopium.

Jacques Werth dreamed of introducing High Probability Selling to a world full of super superstition.  He hoped that a straightforward, transparent sales process based on things like mutual respect and trust (like he observed and codified from three or four decades of observing top salespeople) would change the world.

It would somehow provide an alternative Way Of Being for salespeople (and those who find themselves having to do sales-like things in work, business and life).  This alternative way of being, way of interacting, way of communicating is based on probabilities.

It’s not exciting.  It doesn’t generate adrenaline.

When they made a sale or someone bought something from them, none of the top salespeople he studied did a happy dance.  They knew better than to establish for themselves an emotional bookmark, or even to consider that they would connect a specific technique or phrase and relate that directly to the fact that a client or prospect purchased their product. 

They knew intuitively that if they just showed up statistically at the right time and place, when their prospects and customers were ready to buy, that all that hope and all that attachment to the magic technique and the Holy Grail would actually stop and get in the way of business being done.

So what they really did was they figured out a way to reverse engineer the typical conventional assembly line sales process that everyone was taught, including them, and they removed all the parts of it that get in the way of doing business. 

All of the beliefs about making someone buy, the beliefs about manipulation, the beliefs about if I just use the right words, the beliefs about if I just used the Bandersnatch technique, all the beliefs, superstitions, where to put the rabbit’s foot, putting the silver dollar in the right pocket instead of the left pocket, wearing the right clothes, driving the right car, living in the right house, all the bullshit, all of the trappings of someone who is playing a sales game, instead of finding and doing business with people who want to do business.  

And unless you’re a professional poker player, stay the hell out of a casino if you have any propensity of thinking it’s about luck.  It’s actually High Probability Selling.  The casino is playing the probability game too, and the House never loses until someone comes in who’s playing the probability game against them.  And then they get nervous.

What Is High Probability Selling, According to AI

High Probability Selling:  Overview

High Probability Selling (HPS) is a sales methodology focused on identifying and working only with prospects who are highly likely to buy, rather than trying to persuade or convince uninterested leads.  The method was developed after observing top sales performers across industries and documenting what made them consistently successful.

Key Principles

  • Early Qualification or Disqualification:  Prospects are quickly assessed.  If they do not show genuine interest or intent to buy, the salesperson moves on without trying to convince them
  • No Persuasion or Pressure:  HPS avoids traditional sales tactics like persuasion, objection handling, or closing tricks.  There’s no pushing, arguing, or chasing prospects
  • Focus on Features:  Sales conversations center on the concrete features of the product or service, not on trying to sell benefits or create desire
  • Mutual Commitments:  The process is based on mutual respect and clear agreements.  If a prospect’s conditions are met, they commit to buying
  • Efficient Use of Time:  By not spending time on unlikely buyers, salespeople can focus on real opportunities, leading to higher closing rates and less frustration

Benefits

  • Reduces fear of rejection and call reluctance
  • Avoids sales resistance and mistrust
  • Simplifies the sales process and closing
  • Leads to more authentic, direct, and respectful interactions

Summary Table

AspectHigh Probability Selling (HPS)
ApproachDiscovery, not persuasion
Prospect HandlingEarly qualification/disqualification
Sales TacticsNo pressure, no convincing
FocusFeatures, not benefits
CommitmentMutual, clear agreements

HPS is especially valued by those who dislike manipulative sales tactics and prefer a straightforward, respectful approach to selling.

Sources:   1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10    11    12    13    14    15    16 

The above was created by Perplexity.ai, in response to my question, “What Is High Probability Selling.” You can read the original response here.

I believe that the response from Perplexity is close enough to publish here. However, I would have worded some things slightly differently. For instance, “genuine interest” is not that much more valuable than ordinary interest.

De-Militarizing the Language of Sales

We tend to speak in the language that we think.  The reverse is also true.  Yet, outside of scripting, we tend to pay very little attention to our words spoken and thought.

Words thought and spoken, before, during and after a sales interaction will affect your mindset, which will affect mutual trust and respect.  Whether these words, and their associated behaviors and perceptions increase or decrease trust and respect is up to you and your awareness.

War and Military Terms Used in Sales and Marketing
Killing it
Crushing it
Nailed it
Target marketing
Targeted businesses
Closing (with the enemy; in-range)
Tactics
Strategy
Campaign
Sales Force
Captive (agent)
Capture (Lead information)
Resources
Guerilla Marketing – asymmetrical warfare
Overcome
Lay-down sale (implies surrender and submission)
Hunter (type of salesperson)
A hunter eats what they kill (quote from a hunter)
Winning sales
Losing sales

These terms create an adversarial relationship with the prospect.  They also dehumanize the other person, which may help to justify mistreatment and violence.

You often hear warlike language in sales and business culture today.  You might even use some of it yourself.

If you want to change that:
Step One:  Acknowledge your current state
Step Two:  Understand your WHY for your current state
Step Three:  Understand your WHY for your desired state
Step Four:  Test and implement new words

Here are some thoughts from other writers:

Please add your own thoughts in the comments below.

What About Leads?

“Leads” are a many splendored thing, especially in sales organizations that haven’t yet figured out the shortcuts that are actually short.

Leads fall nicely into the category called “Selling the Dream.”  Many who buy this Dream, too often are delivered the Nightmare, and not the shortcut.

There are exclusive leads, warm leads, hot leads, cold leads, info leads, referred leads, interested leads, guaranteed to buy leads, old leads, phone book leads, email leads, very interested leads, cheap leads, expensive leads, shit leads and even Glengarry Glenross leads, direct from Alec Baldwin, in his NYC accent.

All leads are wonderful.  And all leads suck.  Leads make perfect sense.  Until humans get involved.  Although a lead seller will swear it’s all highly reliable data, leads are human.  Uh oh.

I have bought insurance leads, life, health, telemarketing, direct response, B2B, LinkedIn, etc etc, in multiple industries over decades. 

No matter who the lead provider, prospects are people, and people are prone to do unexpected things.  Illogical things.  For example, buying things they don’t need and ignoring things they just said they were sure to buy.

From one perspective, providing leads is a great business to go into.  If the leads don’t work out, you still get paid, and you can just blame the salesperson for not closing.

If the leads do work out, that’s because your leads are so much better because anyone with a pulse can close them.

Almost as foolproof as selling guns to both sides of a war.

Only one small problem is that the business also attracts a lot of shysters and make-money-quick at everyone else’s expense kind of people.  They will be your competitors.

I have endured over a dozen of these lead generation demos recently, and it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart because nearly all of them say the same stuff to differentiate themselves.

Our leads are the best because blah, blah, blah, blah.  And you can trust me because our leads are exclusive and blah, blah, blah.  Exclusive, my ass.  Like a prospect only filled out YOUR advertising and no one else’s?  Really?  Good thing I’m stupid.

So if you go into that business, you better be unique enough not to be dragged down by your peers to compete on price and have a long-range plan to outlast the posers.

If you pull it off and create something worthwhile and unique, I will sign up waving a credit card with no limit.

Of course, you could also sell guns to both sides.  But I digress