I Don't Care About Your Feelings

…so let’s close the deal

These People Don't Care About You

The hour mark on a zoom sales call passed quietly. While impressed with the likable guy’s tenacity, his service was legitimate, if a bit rich for my taste, but I needed to get moving. I inferred as much, and that’s when he said it. Some version of which  sentence has been haunting sales scripts since the early 1990s, and now — thanks to AI regurgitating bad ideas at the speed of light — will haunt them forever: “My goal here isn’t to make a sale. It’s to help you elevate your business.”

Just like that, the mental door shut.I knew he was there to sell me something. I was fine with that, even respected it. The problem with an obvious lie isn’t moral, its strategic: I now know that you lie. This guy didn’t care about me or about my business. Why would he? It may be a generational thing: GenX, raised on hose-water and neglect as we were, has a reputation for being callous and maybe we are. Yet one advantage is not having to pretend to care about things you don’t, in fact, care about. Or expecting anyone else to pretend, either. It cuts down on the noise: Sales people need to be likable, but there is no good reason to get into the emotional weeds with them.

Humans are deeply social animals, so we tolerate—and even rely on—white lies among family and close friends, because the wide-context does most of the moral heavy lifting. There’s shared history, trust, and mutual benefit so an untruth told in pursuit of a greater good can be absorbed without damage.

Strangers, however, have no such buffer. In low-context relationships a lie isn’t softened by intent. It’s just a lie. Even a pleasant one. He’d had been better off saying, “I think this could be useful for you, and I’d like to do business.” Instead, he chose emotional theater.

Salespeople have always tried to manufacture emotion on demand. Fear, jealousy, hate, envy even nostalgia are narrow-context emotions and they do fill the sales funnel pretty well. Trust, or lack of, is a wide-context pattern created through subconscious pattern recognition. That makes it slippery as hell with the effect being usually the opposite of what’s intended. This is why “trust me” is one of the least trustworthy phrases in business.

For sales managers, the lesson here isn’t “be colder.” It’s “be cleaner.” Business works best when it isn’t pretending to be something else. Strip emotional cosplay out of your scripts. Train your teams to respect the intelligence of the buyer. Replace unbelievable claims of altruism with clarity. Replace “I just want to help” with “Here’s what this does, here’s what it costs, and here’s why it is worth it.”

The best way to hack trust is honesty. Ironically, that means it’s not a hack.

Business works best when it isn’t pretending to be something else. When both sides quietly agree, “I don’t care about your feelings, and you don’t care about mine—so let’s do business”, everyone relaxes.

And deals get done.