I’ve been thinking about magnets again.
Two weeks ago I wrote about my 3 AM theory – that sales might work like magnets with the same polarity. The harder you push, the harder the other side pushes back.
Since then I’ve been watching deals. Watching reps. Watching buyers. And the pattern keeps showing up.
But here’s the thing: I’m a sales guy, not a scientist. I know what I’m seeing, but I don’t know why it’s happening.
So I started digging.
The Question I Can’t Stop Asking
Why do humans resist when they feel pushed?
Think about it. Someone tells you that you have to do something – what’s your first instinct? Even if it’s something you wanted to do anyway, that “have to” creates friction.
Your teenager was going to clean their room. Then you told them to clean their room. Now they’re not cleaning their room.
Your prospect was leaning toward buying. Then you pushed for a close. Now they need to “think about it.”
Same pattern. Different context.
There has to be a name for this. Someone smarter than me has to have studied why humans push back when they feel pushed.
What I Found When I Started Looking
I spent this weekend down a rabbit hole. Psychology papers. Behavioral economics. Decision science.
Turns out, this isn’t just a pattern I noticed. It’s a well-documented phenomenon. Psychologists have been studying it for decades.
There’s something called “reactance theory” – the idea that when people feel their freedom is being threatened, they push back to restore it. Even if pushing back hurts them.
There’s research on “autonomy” and how critical it is to human motivation. People don’t just want to make decisions – they need to feel like the decision is theirs.
And there’s a whole field called behavioral economics that studies how people actually make decisions – which turns out to be very different from how we assume they make decisions.
I’m just scratching the surface here. But I’m starting to think that everything we do in sales might be fighting against how humans are actually wired.
Why This Matters for B2B Sales
If resistance is a predictable human response to feeling pushed, then every “best practice” in sales needs to be re-examined.
Creating urgency? That’s pressure.
Overcoming objections? That’s pressure.
Following up relentlessly? Pressure.
Asking for the close? Pressure.
What if every one of these tactics is triggering the exact psychological response we’re trying to avoid?
What if the buyer who “went dark” didn’t lose interest – they escaped?
Where I’m Going Next
I need to learn more. A lot more.
I’ve got a stack of papers to read. Names I keep seeing over and over – Kahneman, Tversky, Cialdini, Brehm. These are the people who figured out how humans actually make decisions.
I’m going to work through this research and try to translate it into something useful for sales. Not in a gimmicky “use this one weird trick” way. I want to understand the underlying mechanics.
Because if I’m right – if we’ve been accidentally triggering resistance for decades – then the fix isn’t a new technique.
It’s a completely different approach.
More soon.
Stop Selling. Start Diagnosing.
Persuasion is dead. The new skill is something else entirely.
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