Legal Writing

?Hard Sales? and ?Hard Sells?

By Maeve Maddox

Lilach Alkony wonders about the difference between ?hard sales? and ?hard sells.?

The noun phrase hard sell is a U.S. coinage dating from the 1950s. It means ?aggressive salesmanship or advertising.? An example is the late night ?infomercial? that keeps pounding the viewer with ?…and wait, there?s more!?

Hard sell can be used as an adjective and a verb, as well as a noun. The OED hyphenates the word as hard-sell and offers these examples:

1959 Times Lit. Suppl. 13 Nov. 662/3 One does not see any examples..of what is called ?hard-sell? advertising.

1961 Economist 14 Jan. 114/2 The need for the ?hard sell? is evident.

1963 Guardian 16 Nov. 14/7 It is difficult to hard-sell the honest song the way they do the contemporary counterfeit.

The phrase ?hard sales,? on the other hand, can have various interpretations.

It can mean simply ?sales transactions that are difficult to achieve,? as in this headline:

Making the Hard Sales, Your Career Depends on It

Some headline writers, however, confuse “hard sales” with “hard sell”:

Sales Training Tip – 10 Reasons Why Hard Sales Tactics Never Work

The wording of the first reason suggests that the headline was probably not written by the author:

People hate being sold to: hard sell will bring out the worst in people. When aggressive sales techniques are used this will prompt the prospective buyer to be aggressive as well and act negatively to the sales person. Pretty soon they are ready to argue with you and you know the sale is completely lost.

A web search does turn up many examples of “hard sales” used with the meaning of “hard sell.” It seems to me that if the intended meaning is ?aggressive selling,? then the established, unambiguous term is to be preferred.

Full post as published by Daily Writing Tips on March 18, 2010 (boomark / email).