I can generally do this, so I will try to say something about it :-)
My hunch for how I got the power is that I had numerous “terrible jobs” that helped me pay for college, and which I look back on as having sometimes been more educational than many of my “more forgettable” classes. One of these jobs involved door-to-door non-profit donation solicitation. I was selling almost literally nothing except “getting to feel good about the environment”, which is quite a thing to try to sell.
In practice I listened to lots of people explain why they weren’t donating, and my manager didn’t like that I propagated many of the questions back to him, rather than propagating lots of no-strings-money back to him, and eventually it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to swiftly hit “the higher quotas (in excess of guaranteed daily pay) expected from experienced donation solicitors” and was let go. The experience gives me a foundation of empathy for the people doing the sales.
Granting that I allow the break in my time and even opened the door...
...usually the sales pitch is from a normal person with high sales skill, and generally I’m friendly and explain that I did door-to-door stuff myself, and I admire something about their technique, and I make it clear that I will almost certainly not buy.
Really, the only way I would buy from a normal person is if they taught me so much about the overall market and product that I’d feel guilty not compensating them for the educational value of the sales effort (which is the same moral principle which caused me to buy things from Amazon for many years, for products I couldn’t have discovered any other way but which were cheaper on other websites with worse metadata), but this feeling of reciprocal exchange almost certainly can’t be the case for whatever will be said by a random door-to-door seller who doesn’t bring a multi-media presentation with a bibliography (or something).
My commensurate skill and “seeing of them as an OK person with a sometimes icky job” comes through pretty quickly, and then it becomes very clear to them that they shouldn’t hang out too long for economic reasons… but then like 50% of the time they seem full of relief to be treated like a human, by a human, who has escaped “object-object relational sadness” and I actually kind of like these moments, and they seem to as well, and then the moment ends and we get go back to our respective ways of being busy :-)
A couple times I’ve offered them some lemonade or whatever, and once (this was a whole family thing though, with my parents as the instigators) it got as far as inviting some Mormon boys back for dinner and theology, but we didn’t crack them as far as I’m aware. All of their pitches were designed to switch people away from being babptists or catholics or 7th day adventists or whatever. Our pitch that there’s a positive absence of archaeological evidence for Jospeh Smight’s claims of a lost tribe of Israel in north america seemed to roll off of them like water from a duck’s back.
The only exception to “a generally positive experience” with sales folk is when like… like… a developmentally disabled people shows up on my door, which is just… uughhh(!)… so complicated.. but then… in those cases often I just donate money to them directly as an act of interpersonal charity? And if they have enough pride/ego/whatever to refuse such a donation then sometimes I fall back buying something I don’t need so that developmentally disabled people can have jobs they are proud of? It’s like a choice between two kinds of guilt, and I don’t have a good way of resolving it right now.
I think I’m not alone in having a “pity gap” and I think girlscout cookie sales seem to have successfully weaponized this gap in many people’s defenses (modulo by asking for a slightly different kind of unique moral toleration for a different kind of “objectively charity-worthy” person) and there are some interesting conversational gambits possible here <3
One thing is that the company sales system seems to know that people like me might try to just donate directly to the girl scouts, and sometimes they manage to inject “rules against just taking donation money” and I think the cookie manufacturers (understandably(?) in the valid(?) pursuit of money) want this rule...
...but I feel like the girlscout troops themselves “abstractly should not want this rule”?? But some of them have it. Which is weird.
One time a mom of a girlscout gave me an explanation about how the educational value to the cookie selling project included inculcating a coherent and pragmatically viable work ethic in the kids via baby steps that could launch higher level things that are less fake… which… was a good point? Maybe?
Certainly my ~4 weeks in a door-to-door sales program was retrospectively-positively-formative for me.
I think maybe it might still be a “rationalist thing” to try CFAR-style COmfort Zone Expansions (COZ-Es)? I’m not sure about the details there, but I DO think that some important “mental powers” might be available some limited experience in professional sales in a way that is good for normal adults in a normal modern society to have.
Roughly: sales isn’t illegal, so defense is necessary, so learning the basics of attacking is valid and potentially even wholesome (EG as with the girlscouts) <3
...usually the sales pitch is from a normal person with high sales skill, and generally I’m friendly and explain that I did door-to-door stuff myself, and I admire something about their technique, and I make it clear that I will almost certainly not buy.
I worked as a canvasser for a year and a half and I can say that this is definitely one of the best deflections. When you’re working as a canvasser you’re basically running off a choose your own adventure script where all the outcomes are “they buy the thing” and the choices are all the possible objections and your responses to those objections. As long as you’re still interacting with the script, you’re not really talking to them as humans at all, you’re just getting them to regurgitate memorized lines. This also happens with a lot of IT support centers, you have to get them off script if you want to do more than interact with the script. If you’re just trying to get out of things as quickly as possible, the fastest way to break the script is to just outright deny or express distaste for the thing they’re trying to push on you. I didn’t want to waste my time and emotional energy arguing with people who actively disliked the thing I was selling, and it was constantly reinforced by the management teams that we should focus on targeting people who already liked what we did but just weren’t contributing financially to it. That let us hit them with a vague sense of guilt and responsibility. And if that didn’t work, you could always be like “look I just need to make quota” which was very manipulative and really requires you to be willing to feel like an asshole to back down.
Usually I don’t want to be that mean in order to force them off, and in that case, you can just break the script by talking about what they’re doing for what it is: a job. When I interact with canvassers I pretty much immediately go into the sort of “shop talk” mode that we’d use to talk to each other. It also helps if you’re the one questioning them, they’ll try and get back to the script, but the further afield you take them, the more skill it takes on their part to do this and most canvassers only do it for a few months. “Oh who’s the company you’re working for? What sort of campaigns have you been on? How are you liking the work? Are you having an easy time meeting your quotas? Yeah it can be hard sometimes. It’s nice to get some fresh air and meet lots of people though isn’t it? I met the mayor of Charleston when she was visiting once.” etc etc etc. If they see you as a person in the right way, then usually they understand how kinda bullshit everything is enough that they’ll start feeling bad about being too pushy or aggressive. Results may vary, just some stream of consciousness thoughts.
I can generally do this, so I will try to say something about it :-)
My hunch for how I got the power is that I had numerous “terrible jobs” that helped me pay for college, and which I look back on as having sometimes been more educational than many of my “more forgettable” classes. One of these jobs involved door-to-door non-profit donation solicitation. I was selling almost literally nothing except “getting to feel good about the environment”, which is quite a thing to try to sell.
In practice I listened to lots of people explain why they weren’t donating, and my manager didn’t like that I propagated many of the questions back to him, rather than propagating lots of no-strings-money back to him, and eventually it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to swiftly hit “the higher quotas (in excess of guaranteed daily pay) expected from experienced donation solicitors” and was let go. The experience gives me a foundation of empathy for the people doing the sales.
Personally I mostly don’t even mind if people knock on my door and try to sell me something, unless they do it at weird hours in ways that breaks my time into smaller parts when I was using a long stretch to do a non-trivial piece of thinking.
Granting that I allow the break in my time and even opened the door...
...usually the sales pitch is from a normal person with high sales skill, and generally I’m friendly and explain that I did door-to-door stuff myself, and I admire something about their technique, and I make it clear that I will almost certainly not buy.
Really, the only way I would buy from a normal person is if they taught me so much about the overall market and product that I’d feel guilty not compensating them for the educational value of the sales effort (which is the same moral principle which caused me to buy things from Amazon for many years, for products I couldn’t have discovered any other way but which were cheaper on other websites with worse metadata), but this feeling of reciprocal exchange almost certainly can’t be the case for whatever will be said by a random door-to-door seller who doesn’t bring a multi-media presentation with a bibliography (or something).
My commensurate skill and “seeing of them as an OK person with a sometimes icky job” comes through pretty quickly, and then it becomes very clear to them that they shouldn’t hang out too long for economic reasons… but then like 50% of the time they seem full of relief to be treated like a human, by a human, who has escaped “object-object relational sadness” and I actually kind of like these moments, and they seem to as well, and then the moment ends and we get go back to our respective ways of being busy :-)
A couple times I’ve offered them some lemonade or whatever, and once (this was a whole family thing though, with my parents as the instigators) it got as far as inviting some Mormon boys back for dinner and theology, but we didn’t crack them as far as I’m aware. All of their pitches were designed to switch people away from being babptists or catholics or 7th day adventists or whatever. Our pitch that there’s a positive absence of archaeological evidence for Jospeh Smight’s claims of a lost tribe of Israel in north america seemed to roll off of them like water from a duck’s back.
The only exception to “a generally positive experience” with sales folk is when like… like… a developmentally disabled people shows up on my door, which is just… uughhh(!)… so complicated.. but then… in those cases often I just donate money to them directly as an act of interpersonal charity? And if they have enough pride/ego/whatever to refuse such a donation then sometimes I fall back buying something I don’t need so that developmentally disabled people can have jobs they are proud of? It’s like a choice between two kinds of guilt, and I don’t have a good way of resolving it right now.
I think I’m not alone in having a “pity gap” and I think girlscout cookie sales seem to have successfully weaponized this gap in many people’s defenses (modulo by asking for a slightly different kind of unique moral toleration for a different kind of “objectively charity-worthy” person) and there are some interesting conversational gambits possible here <3
One thing is that the company sales system seems to know that people like me might try to just donate directly to the girl scouts, and sometimes they manage to inject “rules against just taking donation money” and I think the cookie manufacturers (understandably(?) in the valid(?) pursuit of money) want this rule...
...but I feel like the girlscout troops themselves “abstractly should not want this rule”?? But some of them have it. Which is weird.
One time a mom of a girlscout gave me an explanation about how the educational value to the cookie selling project included inculcating a coherent and pragmatically viable work ethic in the kids via baby steps that could launch higher level things that are less fake… which… was a good point? Maybe?
Certainly my ~4 weeks in a door-to-door sales program was retrospectively-positively-formative for me.
I think maybe it might still be a “rationalist thing” to try CFAR-style COmfort Zone Expansions (COZ-Es)? I’m not sure about the details there, but I DO think that some important “mental powers” might be available some limited experience in professional sales in a way that is good for normal adults in a normal modern society to have.
Roughly: sales isn’t illegal, so defense is necessary, so learning the basics of attacking is valid and potentially even wholesome (EG as with the girlscouts) <3
I worked as a canvasser for a year and a half and I can say that this is definitely one of the best deflections. When you’re working as a canvasser you’re basically running off a choose your own adventure script where all the outcomes are “they buy the thing” and the choices are all the possible objections and your responses to those objections. As long as you’re still interacting with the script, you’re not really talking to them as humans at all, you’re just getting them to regurgitate memorized lines. This also happens with a lot of IT support centers, you have to get them off script if you want to do more than interact with the script. If you’re just trying to get out of things as quickly as possible, the fastest way to break the script is to just outright deny or express distaste for the thing they’re trying to push on you. I didn’t want to waste my time and emotional energy arguing with people who actively disliked the thing I was selling, and it was constantly reinforced by the management teams that we should focus on targeting people who already liked what we did but just weren’t contributing financially to it. That let us hit them with a vague sense of guilt and responsibility. And if that didn’t work, you could always be like “look I just need to make quota” which was very manipulative and really requires you to be willing to feel like an asshole to back down.
Usually I don’t want to be that mean in order to force them off, and in that case, you can just break the script by talking about what they’re doing for what it is: a job. When I interact with canvassers I pretty much immediately go into the sort of “shop talk” mode that we’d use to talk to each other. It also helps if you’re the one questioning them, they’ll try and get back to the script, but the further afield you take them, the more skill it takes on their part to do this and most canvassers only do it for a few months. “Oh who’s the company you’re working for? What sort of campaigns have you been on? How are you liking the work? Are you having an easy time meeting your quotas? Yeah it can be hard sometimes. It’s nice to get some fresh air and meet lots of people though isn’t it? I met the mayor of Charleston when she was visiting once.” etc etc etc. If they see you as a person in the right way, then usually they understand how kinda bullshit everything is enough that they’ll start feeling bad about being too pushy or aggressive. Results may vary, just some stream of consciousness thoughts.