Your Job is to Create a Loss

Building the Future in Your Customer's Mind

Your job as a salesperson isn't to describe what you're selling. It's to make your customer feel what it would be like to already have it, and then feel what it would be like to lose it.

That's the whole game.

The Puppy Dog Sale

There's a classic sales concept called the puppy dog sale, and it's the best mental model I've found for this.

You're at the park with your kids. The Humane Society has puppies out for adoption. Your kids immediately run over, they're holding them, they're in love. "Can we get one?!" And you say exactly what every parent says: "Absolutely not. No way. We're not doing that."

You're not imagining life with a puppy. You're imagining the disruption to your current life. So the answer is no.

But here's the move: the shelter worker says, "Hey, she really loves that one. How about you just take him home for one night? Bring him back tomorrow. Let the kids have their fun."

You say yes. Fluffy goes home. He snuggles on the couch. The kids are obsessed. And the next morning, you wake up and you cannot imagine returning that dog.

That's the puppy dog sale. You didn't buy a dog. You built a life that included one, and then the thought of going back became unbearable.

What This Actually Means for Your Sales Process

Here's where most reps go wrong: they lead with the product.

"My filter is 6% better than the competitor's." You know what the customer hears? "Change is being asked of me, and the upside is 6%." Change feels worse than 6% better feels good. So they pass.

The question isn't what is your product. The question is what world does your customer want to live in, and how do you get them to feel it before they've bought anything?

If your customer is a sustainability-focused company with carbon reduction targets locked into their corporate strategy, your filter conversation shouldn't be about filtration at all. It should sound more like:

"We have a recycling program that's live in your area right now. You could be sending back used filters, tubing sets, maybe even some of your other plastics. That's a real contribution toward your 2030 goals. What's your current plan for hitting those targets without something like this?"

And then, and this is the important part, you back off. "Look, I don't want to push you somewhere that doesn't fit. But I think it could be really interesting. What do you think?"

What you just did was paint a picture of a world where they're hitting their sustainability goals, their boss is happy, they're on track for their bonus, and life is good. You gave them Fluffy. Then you let them sit with it.

What Netflix Got Backwards

The Netflix story is one of the best cautionary tales in recent memory. Not because they did everything wrong, but because they accidentally proved exactly how powerful loss aversion is.

For years, Netflix shipped DVDs by mail. Then they added streaming as a free bonus: a thousand movies available instantly, no limit, included with your existing plan. The service wasn't perfect, but it felt like a gift.

Then they realized streaming was the future and DVDs were dying. So they split the plans and announced that streaming would now cost an extra $4 a month.

The backlash was catastrophic. Subscriptions dropped overnight. They tried spinning off a whole separate company (Qwikster) to manage the fallout. Nothing worked.

Here's the thing: $4 is nothing. Most people spend more than that on a coffee they don't finish. The anger wasn't about the money. It was that something had been given to them, they'd built it into their life, and then it was taken back. They'd already been living in the world with the puppy. And Netflix reached in and grabbed it.

The lesson: once you've genuinely improved someone's world, you can't undo it. You can't return to life without a smartphone. Nobody's looking for dial-up. Once the expectation is set, that's the floor.

Go Find the Suck

A mentor of mine put it simply: your job is to find the suck. Figure out what sucks in somebody's life. They will pay money to get rid of it.

The hard part is that people rarely tell you what actually sucks. You ask how they're doing, they say "good." Good doesn't mean good. Good means I don't want to talk right now. They're buried in CAPA documentation from a batch deviation. They can't get aseptic connectors and their manufacturing deadline is four weeks out.

Your job is to listen past "good" and figure out what's actually going on. That's where the real conversation starts, and where real value gets created.

You're not selling a filter. You're helping someone hit their goals, protect their bonus, make their boss happy, and sleep at night.

Figure out which one matters most, build that world, and let them imagine living in it.

Build the Vision, Not the Feature List

Once you've found the pain, the next move is to make it disappear in their mind before you've sold them anything.

Wouldn't it be nice if you never had to think about this again? What if there was always a backup plan, a guaranteed back stock, no more scrambling because a connector didn't arrive in time? What if you switched to welding and supply chain anxiety stopped being part of your job entirely?

That's the world you're describing. Not "if only." Not "if my boss would let me." In this world, with all the real constraints that exist, isn't there something we could do that would be really, really interesting?

If you can get somebody to stand in that possible world with you, one that is both aspirational and genuinely attainable, that's where you hold your answer and wait to see what they say.

You won't win every sale. Nobody does. But if you build that world well enough and they can't say yes today, they won't forget it. Two years from now, when the procedure is off the commercial freeze and the timing is finally right, they're going to call you. Because that vision didn't go away. It just waited.

Nobody Buys Features

I'm sure your product is great. I'm sure your specific protein resin has some special ligand chemistry that makes it slightly more hydrophobic than the competition. Those things are real and they matter. But they are not why people buy.

Nobody buys features. People buy feelings.

There is not a lab in this country that doesn't have at least one product in it solely because a scientist used it in grad school and still likes the red box. Is it objectively better than the alternatives? Probably not. But it's comfortable, and comfortable is a feeling.

Your job as a salesperson is not to convince someone they're wrong. Your job is to agree that they're right and figure out how to join the journey.

That journey has to be visceral. The brain is genuinely bad at memorizing long strings of data, but it is spectacular at storing pictures, feelings, and emotions. That's why a good story lands harder than a spec sheet every time. The more senses you can hit, the more it sticks.

This is why you can't just make someone think about a better world. You have to make them feel it. It's not enough to say "imagine you never have to worry about supply disruptions again." They need to feel the relief of that. The Monday morning where there's no fire. The conversation with their boss where everything is under control.

What People Are Really Afraid Of

There are a few motivators worth knowing about, and they're not all equal.

Newness is the weakest. "Come try my new filter, it clogs 10% less." Change is hard, and new data means your old data is now a question mark. It moves people, but just barely.

Cost is tricky. "Mine is 20% cheaper" sounds good until the customer hears "mine is 20% less good." Nobody wants a cheaper seat belt. Once you go down the price road, you've already lost a little ground.

Better outcomes are more interesting. If your product can do something that wasn't possible before, that creates real pull. But even then, especially in chromatography, people would often rather stick with a sub-optimal system they trust than risk disrupting whatever magic is currently working.

The most powerful lever, the one I keep coming back to, is fear of failure.

Most people in a lab or a manufacturing environment are not trying to do something brilliant. They're trying not to get fired. They're trying not to be the person who made the call that caused the batch deviation. The old line that nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM is still completely true.

So ask them: what's your current failure rate? What does it look like when things go wrong? Because very rarely are people trying to move somewhere better. They're trying to avoid somewhere worse.

And frequently, people don't accurately see the risk of standing still. There's a piano hanging by a fraying rope directly above them, and nobody's looked up in a while. Your job is to point up. Help them see it. And then show them somewhere safer to stand.

Don't Be Netflix

Free samples have value. Use them. But use them right.

The problem with sending a box of product and saying "let us know what you think" is that it becomes one more thing on a shelf that might get used, probably won't get used correctly, and almost certainly won't convert into a sale. Worse, it signals that the product is worth nothing, because you're giving it away for nothing.

What Netflix should have done was charge a small amount from the beginning and gradually increase it. Start at a dollar. Build the perceived value before you need to collect on it. Instead, they gave it away completely and then asked for money, and it felt like theft.

The better approach is to charge differently. Not in cash, but in access. If someone wants to try your product for free, make the price their time and their process. "I don't need you to pay for this, but it's not free. Open your facility to me. Walk me through your process. Let me bring an expert. Let's actually do this together."

When you show up and hand-deliver something and stay to make sure it works, you're not just running a sample trial. You're demonstrating that this product is important enough that you're here in person. That changes the dynamic entirely.

The goal isn't to hand off a box. The goal is to fill in the map of what their process looks like, understand where you fit, and start building a relationship that actually means something.

The Real Test

Here's an example that stays with me. I was selling a piece of software designed to ensure process quality throughout manufacturing. The default strategy was to give it away for free. I hated that strategy, because every saved batch this software caught was worth about $3 million in final product. That's not a thing you give away.

So I changed the pitch. Instead of "here's some free software," the offer became: "We'll give you the product, and we'll also guarantee process control for your first year. Every batch, we're running process analysis alongside you. While you're figuring out the equipment and managing the tech transfer from your sister site, you'll be able to show your clients documented statistical proof that everything is in control. Wouldn't that be a nice world to live in?"

I built a world where they were sophisticated, safe, and protected. And when you compared that to the alternative of just measuring protein concentration at the end and hoping for the best, the alternative suddenly felt completely inadequate.

What happened on the back end is where it got interesting. I gave away about $300,000 in services. But the perceived value of the total package went up by $500,000 to $1,000,000. I never once talked about the multivariate algorithms inside the software. I sold security. And the thought of going back to not having that level of control became something the customer genuinely couldn't consider.

That's the goal. Build the future so vividly that it starts to feel like the present. Then walk it back slowly, and watch what happens.

The true test is when you get up to leave and they say, "Wait. Don't go. I can't live without that."

That's when you know you did it right.