...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 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.