Stop Trying to Prove a Point

There’s a better way to winning others over

Last week I joined a sales call ten minutes late. It was one of those strategy sessions where both sides are exploring whether there’s a fit, and if there is, you map out what a journey together could look like. Low pressure, collaborative, no hard selling. I typically enjoy these calls.

I wasn’t leading this one. Two colleagues of mine were running it, both relatively new to the campaign. When I got on, the conversation was already strained. They were pressing the prospect for a detail the prospect had already said they didn’t have. The tone had crossed from curious into interrogative, and the prospect had gone from open to guarded.

I didn’t introduce myself. I just listened.

The Frankenstein principle

The prospect pushed back. They were firm. At times, abrupt. It would have been easy to write them off as difficult.

But the prospect wasn’t the problem. We were. We created the friction, and then we struggled against it. I call this the Frankenstein principle: you build the monster, and then you complain about the monster. Every salesperson has done it. I’ve done it. You push on the wrong thing, or you fail to hear what the other person is telling you, and the conversation turns adversarial. And then you tell your manager the prospect was hostile.

No. The prospect was reacting to what you did.

Three errors on one call

On this call, three distinct errors turned what should have been a relaxed strategy conversation into a near-confrontation. I’ll share as much as I can without making things uncomfortable for any person involved.

First, the number.

My team asked for a financial figure to scope whether the partnership model would apply. The prospect said plainly: We’ve requested it from our finance team, but we don’t have it yet. Then a second person on their side reinforced it: We’re not comfortable sharing figures at this stage.

They could not have been clearer about their position on this. But my team came back to it. And then again. And again. Over the course of the entire call, this question got raised four or five times.

The right move was simple. Acknowledge the answer, take the pressure off, and earn the right to that number by showing why it matters: “No problem at all. Let’s walk you through what we’re proposing, and if it resonates, the numbers will follow naturally.” That kind of response acknowledges what the prospect said, removes the friction, and puts the burden where it belongs: on the strength of your own proposition.

Instead, every repeat of the question sent the same message: I hear you, but I don’t care what you just said.

I wrote in Stop Begging Your Prospects about the 80:20 ratio, where the prospect should do 80% of the talking. That ratio only works if the prospect feels heard. A prospect who has answered the same question five times doesn’t feel heard. They feel interrogated.

Second, the cross-examination.

At one point, one of my colleagues acknowledged what the prospect said, and then followed it with: “I hear you. But earlier you said…”

He wasn’t trying to build understanding. He was cross-questioning. The implication was clear: What you just told us contradicts what you said before. You’re wrong about your own business.

This is a prospect describing their own operations, their own world. And rather than recognising that the apparent inconsistency was an invitation to understand something we were clearly missing, my colleague treated it as evidence to be challenged. Like a lawyer poking holes in testimony.

In Don’t Try to Win the Argument, I wrote about the reflex to prove, to correct, to find the gap in what the other person says. This was that reflex, live and in action.

Third, the moment that slipped away.

Towards the end of the call, the prospect did something generous. After everything that had happened, they still told us what actually mattered to them. Something strategic, something real.

The heart of Power Listening at the transactional level is this: you search through the customer’s world for the point where your value proposition connects to a challenge that genuinely keeps them up at night. And when you find that point, you latch onto it with a value statement that cannot help but resonate. The prospect walks away thinking: This is exactly what I need.

What gets in the way

Before you get to technique, before you get to strategy, something happens inside you that determines whether you’re going to hear the person in front of you or not.

Suspicion gets in the way. When my team decided, within the first few minutes, that the prospect’s answers weren’t good enough, they stopped hearing what was actually being said. They’d decided the prospect couldn’t be trusted. From that point on, even valid, straightforward answers got treated as evasions.

Ego gets in the way, because it makes the conversation about you instead of them. The need to be right gets in the way, because it turns every exchange into a contest. Impatience gets in the way, because real understanding takes time, and most people want to skip to the close.

Any one of these can prevent you from hearing what the person in front of you is actually saying.

I wrote in Selling Without the Slime about “Step Zero,” the internal recalibration that has to happen before any engagement. Get your intention right. You’re not there to prove anything. You’re there to serve. And you can’t serve someone whose reality you’ve decided to reject.

Receiving is not believing

When someone tells you something, you have two jobs. The first is to receive it. The second is to evaluate it. Most people mash these together into a single step. They hear the words and simultaneously judge whether they’re true. If the verdict is negative, their tone, body language, and follow-up questions show this. The other person feels it. The conversation dies.

There is a better way.

You receive first. Fully. Without filtering. You let the information in. Your acknowledgment is not a declaration of agreement. It’s a signal that you received their communication. Whether you agree is a separate matter entirely, and it doesn’t need to show on your face. What matters is that the other person knows they were heard.

You don’t have to believe them. You just have to receive their communication.

Finding truth, not finding fault

You should try your utmost to agree with your prospect. Not because you should become spineless. Not because you should nod along to close a deal. And not because you should fake alignment you don’t feel. Prospects sniff out disingenuous undertones faster than you realise.

What I mean is more precise: override the impulse to be disagreeable.

Some people are disagreeable by reflex. They hear a statement and scan it for weakness, for something to correct, for a gap they can expose. Like life is a trivia show where you score points for proving the other person wrong.

I try to do the opposite. When someone speaks, I look for what is true in what they’ve said. Not what’s wrong with it. Not where they’ve slipped up. If I can only find 5% that I genuinely connect with, I focus on that and let the rest go.

I’ve found, in sales and in life, that this changes everything. It breaks down the self-righteousness that keeps you from hearing where someone else is coming from. It stops you from deciding they’re talking nonsense before they’ve even finished. It lets you connect with people you’d otherwise have written off.

This is what Power Listening is about, amongst many other important things.

When you do need to push back (because sometimes you must), how you do it matters. Acknowledge the point sincerely. Reinforce what you do agree with. Only then, gently, introduce what you see differently. But never fake it. If you can’t find even 5% of common ground, it’s better to walk away. Your integrity matters more than a deal.

Two kinds of challenge

There is a difference between disagreeing to prove someone wrong and calling out something that’s keeping them from where they want to go.

When I prove my prospect wrong, I’m usually serving myself. I’m showing how clever I am. I’m besting them in a contest nobody asked for. The prospect feels it, even when it’s subtle.

But when I call out a legitimate blocker to my prospect’s success, something they’re doing or believing that works against the outcomes they told me they care about, that’s not adversarial. That’s being on the same team. There’s no ego in it, no vested interest. I’m pointing at the obstacle because I want to help them get past it.

I wrote in How My Gran Beat the System about speaking in your customer’s language, on their terms. That starts with being on their team. When you’ve genuinely set yourself aside, when the only goals that matter are theirs, you earn the latitude to say hard things. You can challenge them, call them out, even push back firmly, because they know you’re not doing it for yourself.

But that latitude only exists when they feel heard first. Without that, you’re just another salesperson telling the client they’re wrong.

This call taught me something I already knew but needed to see again. The reflexes that kill deals are not exotic. They’re ordinary: press instead of pause, correct instead of receive, prioritise your agenda over the prospect’s reality.

The people who master this don’t just close more deals. They learn things other people never learn, because they have access to conversations other people kill.

Receive first. Find the truth in what they’re saying, even if it’s only 5%. And when the prospect tells you what they actually care about, listen.

Make it rAIn,

KG