Less Cringe More Sales - 4 Mindset Shifts
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Drewbie Wilson on the Call the Damn Leads Podcast to talk about something most sales advice glosses over: the relationship between sales tactics and brand integrity. You can, and dare I say, ‘should,’ watch the full episode here.
But instead of just reposting the transcript, I want to use it as a springboard.
The conversation surfaced something I've noticed across every high-integrity founder I work with—sales often triggers "cringe."
In my experience, high-integrity founders place a lot of weight on how they feel while doing business. The presence of cringe in relationship to sales can easily become, sales is bad, avoid sales.
This is problematic, because sales is critical for a business to succeed.
So what's a high-integrity founder to do? Ignore the cringe? No, of course not.
Rather, get curious about the nuance of the cringe.
Here's what cringe actually looks like, in my often less-than-humble opinion, and what to do about it.
1. Strategy Misalignment
The cringe: Pressure to deploy tactics that don't reinforce your brand.
The result: You attract the wrong leads.
For example: You run an email sequence because the agency you hired promises you "it works" and urged you "trust them." But now your prospects enter into a relationship with misaligned expectations. You and your team squirm to fulfill their expectations, or they end up resenting you for misleading them. Either way, the relationship sours.
The fix: Filter every tactic, even the "proven" ones, through your actual brand identity lens. If a strategy doesn't reinforce your identity, it's the wrong strategy for your business.
2. Personal Desperation
The cringe: Pressure to make the sale by dropping the price.
The result: You are underpaid, which directly translates to you feeling undervalued.
For example: A prospective customer can't pay what you charge. But you need the money, don't want to have no sale, so you drop the price. But bargain shoppers are often desperate too, anxious about seeing a return and hoping this purchase will be a magic bullet. Best case they micromanage and you tolerate it, but you've also primed them to send you more of the wrong business down the line. Worst case they have unrealistic expectations about how your product or service will improve their life and soon become vocal haters who threaten your reputation.
The fix: Reframe discounting. Scope is negotiable; price is not. They get exactly what they pay for, and you gently name that reality. Set clear expectations about what this amount of money can get them and understand what your minimum viable sale actually looks like.
3. Customer Exploitation
The cringe: Pressure to take the customer for everything they're worth because you can.
The result: The client relationship only lasts as long as the customer's desperation.
For example: A customer is desperate and willing to pay. You know it. You sell them what they need at an inflated price, along with everything else you can justify. At best they have become dependent on your business to keep their problems at bay. At worst, when their desperation fades, they realize you took advantage of them in a vulnerable moment. Trust is broken and they don't return next time they need help; regardless of how desperate, they try their luck with a different business.
The fix: Understand your most fundamental brand promise. Maybe it's a sense of satisfaction or maybe it's forging social connection. Anchor all service development in that most fundamental promise. Think about how you can be of service to your ideal customers over time, how one problem solved changes their circumstances and primes them for a new type of service. Double down on treating people well and look for the evidence that this drives return business and increased customer lifetime value.
4. Customer Manipulation
The cringe: Pressure to sell when people aren't ready to buy.
The result: Buyer's remorse drives demands for refunds, customer churn, and bad reviews.
For example: A prospect is interested but not committed. They're still exploring, still comparing, still uncertain. But you feel pressure to close, so you push, maybe creating artificial urgency. They say yes. Two weeks in, they realize they weren't ready. They didn't actually need what you sold. At best, they want a refund and you lost the revenue anyway. At worst, they become a vocal hater and bad-mouth you to others.
The fix: Remember that everyone with money is not your ideal customer. Speak to a specific audience in your marketing. Ask better qualifying questions upfront. Help them digest value instead of convincing them to tolerate price.
The Common Thread
All four cringe factors create the same dysfunction: expectation meets reality and they don't match.
The prospect expects one thing. They get another. Someone squirms. The relationship sours.
Cringe around sales is a signal to look more closely at your mindset, what narratives are running, and how you can rework these narratives to work better in the context of your brand instead of merely exposing your comfort zone/s?!
To do this exercise effectively, you must understand where your own identity stops and your brand identity starts. If you are clear here, then get to work. If you aren't sure you can tease the two apart, I highly recommend checking out the Brand IdQ App. It will help you tease your identity apart from the brand's identity, outline what high-integrity looks like for your brand, surface unique cringe that might emerge if you stop paying attention to your brand's impact on others, and grant you access to a brand-savvy sounding board you can use to unpack cringe in real time.
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