When I ran my lawn company as a kid, the grown-up competition had a process. You’d call, they’d schedule a visit, a guy would come squint at your yard, and days later you’d get a number. Professional. Thorough. Slow.
I had Google Earth. You called me, I pulled up your address while we talked, traced the perimeter, and gave you a price before you hung up. First call, one conversation, done. I won a pile of clients from companies with better equipment and more experience for one reason: saying yes to me took ninety seconds, and saying yes to them took a week.
That’s the entire answer to how to make it easy for customers to buy, and it has almost nothing to do with persuasion. People don’t buy the best option. They buy the clearest option with the fewest steps and the least risk, and then they tell themselves it was the best. Your job isn’t convincing anyone. It’s clearing the path.
The Google Earth quote
Understand what my satellite trick actually removed. Not effort for me; I still had to mow the thing. It removed effort for them: the waiting, the scheduling, the being home for a stranger, the days of limbo before a decision could even be made. Every hour between "I want this" and "I have a price" is an hour for the want to cool off, for a spouse to object, for a competitor to answer faster.
Speed of yes is a feature. Most businesses never price it, because it doesn’t show up on the product spec sheet. It shows up in the win rate, where nobody thinks to look.
Friction is a silent tax
Friction never gets a complaint. That’s what makes it lethal. The customer who abandons a confusing checkout doesn’t email you about it. The one who couldn’t find your price just closes the tab. You’ll never meet the people friction cost you, so the product keeps getting blamed for what the path did.
I’ve written before that your product is probably fine and nobody knows you exist. This is that essay’s twin: sometimes they know you exist and the buying is just annoying. Hidden prices ("DM for pricing" is a moat around your own revenue). Forms with eleven fields. Quotes that take a week. Choices stacked so deep the customer needs a nap before checkout. Each one feels small from the inside. From the outside they add up to a simple message: this will be work, and people are busy.
My rule of thumb: every step you remove gives you back buyers you didn’t know you were losing. You can rarely measure which step was the killer. Remove them anyway.
Give them more than one yes
My first product line taught me this at recess. Elementary school, spring-loaded pencils, and the model with the cool eraser cost extra fruit snacks. I didn’t know the word "tiers." I just noticed that some kids wanted the cheap yes and some kids wanted the best one, and having both meant almost nobody said no.
One price is a test the customer can fail. Two or three prices is a menu where every answer is yes at a different size. The premium tier does double duty even when nobody picks it, because it makes the middle look reasonable. (I’ve gone deeper on this in how to price a product.) Just don’t hand them twelve choices; a menu clarifies, a catalog paralyzes. Cheap yes, standard yes, premium yes. Done.
Move the risk to your side of the table
The last wall between a customer and yes is almost never price. It’s fear of feeling stupid later. What if it’s junk, what if it doesn’t fit, what if I’m the sucker. And most businesses answer that fear with adjectives about their own quality, which is exactly the testimony a nervous buyer discounts to zero.
The answer that works is structural: take the risk onto your side of the table. Returns without interrogation. Try before you commit. Pay when it works, redo it free if it’s wrong. Proof beats promises, and the strongest proof is a company visibly betting its own money on its own product. Yes, a few people will abuse it. Price that in as the cost of every fence-sitter who now has no reason left to wait. In my experience the trade isn’t close.
Audit your own path to yes
Tonight, do the thing almost nobody selling anything has done: buy from yourself. Phone in hand, front door to paid, counting every tap, every field, every wait, every moment of "wait, which one do I pick?" Time it. Feel where your own attention sags. That sag is where your customers live.
Then go watch one real person try it cold and keep your mouth shut while they struggle. It’s brutal. It’s also the highest-paid hour of the quarter.
The kid with the satellite map wasn’t smarter than the companies he beat. Their product was probably better than mine, to be fair. But I answered now with a number, and now-with-a-number beats better-eventually almost every time it’s tried. Make the yes easy. The market has been telling you this forever, quietly, in every tab it closes.
Tyk Sullivan
Serial entrepreneur in Tampa, Florida. Founder of Plutus Capital and NUMEN. More about Tyk →