Apparently multiple choice questionnaires disadvantage highly intelligent people, because they can see multiple truths in the answers that the writer of the test didn’t account for. In a similar vein, I believe intelligent people suffer in sales.
They over pitch, over explain, overthink and ruminate. They come up with too many solutions, assume a level of understanding that isn’t there, and make things complex, dry and boring. They learn all the features and list them out, and they sell at a level that is beyond the prospect. You assume they have the same level of understanding you do.
Why intelligence sucks in sales
When Stephen Hawking was planning A Brief History of Time, his editor at Cambridge University Press told him something blunt. Every equation he included would halve his sales. Hawking resolved to include none, compromised on exactly one, E = mc². The smartest man in the room could have published another long boring textbook full of maths equations that around a hundred peeps bought. But by dumbing down his messaging he was able to sell 25 million copies.
Many intelligent people overthink, when you are getting a hundred knockbacks a day thus easily slips into rumination and confirmation bias that you are not good at sales, which reinforces the negative echo and forms anxiety loops.
The founder problem
In his book The E Myth, Michael Gerber describes the typical founders journey, they spend years building genuine expertise in their craft, start a business around it, and finds the craft is no longer the job, they have moved into revenue making. The business grows and suddenly you’re the one who has to sell it. Nobody warns you that the expertise you spent a decade building is now working against you in the one conversation that actually grows the business. You know too much. You explain too much. You know the answer so you tell instead of ask, because telling is what expertise feels like from the inside. Yes, there are times this will build trust, but on the whole you are better off shutting your mouth.
It means recognising that the instinct to demonstrate depth, the same instinct that made you good at the actual work and the very thing they need to buy, is precisely the instinct that needs to be switched off. Hawking didn’t become a worse physicist by cutting the equations and dumbing down his book. He became a better communicator of physics, because it is not your level of telling that counts, it is the prospect’s level of listening.
The consultant problem
Consultants are usually awful at sales for many failures but primarily ego. In an effort to fuel their own ego they often give up the answer to the problem the prospect is buying. Yes, have presales, or some expert available for a small part of the sale. But a clear advantage a “dumb sales person” may have in a consultancy over an expert is when they’re asked a flat technical question, the salesperson may answer “I dunno”, they didin’t know the answer so couldn’t give it away as free advice, which is actually a better sales outcome.
When I got my first job in tech sales I was asked how I would respond if asked a technical question and I answered ‘I would admit that I didn’t know, but I would find out and get back to them. It also gives them a reason to call back once they’ve found out.
So while 1. giving up the answer in the pitch meeting will mean the prospect no longer needs to buy 2. If you give the wrong information you not only lose the sale you shred your brand image and trust.
Not knowing is the safest answer.
The cognitive load problem
We are in the age of AI and drowning in information. The more intelligent a social post, the fewer views it gets. People falling off a ladder gets way more views, likes and shares than a complex dissertation on some niche expertise. The same thing happens in a sales meeting. The more cognitive load we dump on a prospect, the more inertia, and the less sales. Sales is about removing barriers, not creating more. Unchecked pride and hubris in sales is like sour milk.
It’s like sitting through a boring lecture. When the effort needed to follow something looks high and the payoff looks low, motivation drops. Ask even elite sales operators why they can sell and they may THINK they know the answer, but realistically they can’t break it down.
So think about your long explanatory pitch. Telling, telling, telling, and giving too much intelligent, complex choice, we create resistance and inertia in our prospect. To fuel our own ego we data dump on the prospect and literally bore them out of the sale. Let me explain that again. If you are too intelligent and long winded in your explanation, you plant resistance to the thing you are trying to sell. You induce the prospect to NOT want to buy it.
The harder you explain, the harder they resist. Just shut up. Tellin’ ain’t sellin’.
What to do instead
- Ask more than you tell. Open with a question and let them talk first.
- One idea per meeting. Pick the single thing most likely to matter to this buyer and leave the other five for later.
- Say “I dunno, I’ll find out.” It buys trust and a reason to follow up.
- Bring in the expert when the buyer asks for depth, not before.
- Be careful with AI. It will write a 40 page proposal in a minute, and the instinct to add one more section has never been cheaper.
If you’re a smart founder who finds sales painful, you might be caught in this trap, and it could be a side effect of the exact thing that made your business good. That is a kinder explanation than being bad at sales, and a more useful one, because it points at a fix. Hand the conversation to someone whose whole job is to ask questions, keep it simple and say “I dunno, I’ll find out”, and keep your expertise for the work it was built for. That’s the job we do at Outsold.
Hawking kept one equation. Your next sales meeting only gets one idea.
The research behind this
Smart, and socially skilled. A 2008 Journal of Marketing study by Willem Verbeke and colleagues looked at two samples of salespeople. High general mental ability combined with high social competence produced the best sales performance, and high mental ability combined with low social competence produced the worst. The wider evidence is mixed. A 1998 meta-analysis by Vinchur and colleagues found general cognitive ability correlated .40 with supervisor ratings of salespeople but only .04 with objective sales, and a later meta-analysis by Verbeke, Dietz and Verwaal found a modest positive link between cognitive aptitude and sales performance. Intelligence helped when it came with social skill and hurt when it didn’t.
The curse of knowledge. Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber, 1989. Once you know something, you genuinely cannot reconstruct what it felt like not to know it. A study in Management Science on a founder raising money from an outside investor found that when the founder suffers the curse of knowledge about the content of what they’re communicating, less information gets provided and both sides tend to end up worse off. The effect can reverse when the bias is about the context of the message rather than its content.
The illusion of explanatory depth. Rozenblit and Keil, 2002. People rated how well they understood everyday things like zips and flush toilets, then tried to explain them step by step, and their confidence dropped. Rebecca Lawson’s 2006 bicycle study found many people made basic errors when drawing or choosing the correct frame, pedals and chain. That gap between felt understanding and demonstrable understanding is exactly where a sales conversation goes sideways. The expert believes the explanation was clear because it felt clear to them.
The paradox of choice. Barry Schwartz, 2004. The idea that more options can produce paralysis and second guessing. The evidence is mixed. A 2010 meta-analysis of 50 experiments found a mean effect of virtually zero with large differences between studies, and found that more choice tended to be better when people already knew what they wanted.
Polanyi’s paradox. Michael Polanyi’s 1966 book The Tacit Dimension starts from the idea that we can know more than we can tell. Economist David Autor gave it the name Polanyi’s paradox in 2014. You can ride a bike, recognise a face or make a snap judgement on a prospect without being able to produce the rules your brain just ran. This is why I’ve always believed tacit knowledge transfer, watching, doing and being corrected in the moment, is the best way to learn sales, not a manual. A textbook can teach someone the curse of knowledge and the illusion of explanatory depth as concepts. It can’t give them what a good mentor passes on by letting them watch a deal close and then try it themselves straight after.
Effort discounting. The value we place on a reward drops as the effort needed to get it rises. Wouter Kool and colleagues found in 2010 that people lean toward the less mentally demanding option when given a free choice.
Learned helplessness. Martin Seligman’s term for a state where repeated experiences of low success or lack of control teach someone that trying is useless, leading to passive resignation and a drop in motivation.
One counterpoint. A study in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice found investors were more inclined to fund founders who used cognitively complex language, reading it as a sign of competence. Investors are judging whether you sound competent, which is a different job from a buyer deciding whether to move.
Hawking. Michael White’s biography Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science attributes the “every equation will halve your sales” line to Hawking’s Cambridge University Press editor. Hawking’s own preface says only that someone told him. The book was published by Bantam.
More of this kind of thinking lives at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
