Stop Manipulating Buyers: Human-Centered Selling in the Age of AI with Sue Barrett
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Is Sue Barrett successful today because she is sophisticated, or because she is a little bit scrappy? In this episode of Scrappy But Successful, host Jack Tompkins sits down with the founder and CEO of Barrett Consulting Group and the Selling Better movement, one of Australia's most distinctive voices on ethical, human-centered sales. Sue has trained over 50,000 professionals across five continents, and she is where business, democracy, and systems all meet. In this conversation they cover growing up in her father's timber business, why listening beats manipulation, and how she landed a $10,000 first sale in her first week in business.
Growing Up in the Timber Business
Sue grew up around her father's timber business, in a household of three girls and a boy where gender did not matter. As she tells it, everyone was simply human, and everyone needed to learn how to be respectful and how to be business savvy. At about 12 she was allowed to work there during the school holidays.
The customers were builders, and Sue's approach was simple: tell me exactly what you are after and I will find the person who can help you. Over the years she learned the business well enough to become that person. It was also a real test of not being intimidated by builders who might have doubted that a girl could do the job, and she learned how to handle those situations.
Selling With Humanity, Not Manipulation
For Sue, the foundation of selling is listening. If you are not a good listener, or you do not know how to ask good questions and calibrate where someone is coming from, you cannot sell. She has spent her career going against the traditional idea that selling means getting everyone to say yes, which she calls manipulation. Her alternative is to find common ground together as humans first.
That matters even more with larger clients, where multiple stakeholders are involved in the decision and each one is researching online. A CFO and an operations manager look for different things, so you need to understand where each person is coming from before you position what you have. Sue's advice is to create a space where both sides feel psychologically safe to ask difficult questions, and to understand where a client is coming from instead of waiting for your turn to speak and throwing information at them.
The Double Gap: Real Conversations and a Real Online Presence
Sue points to a double gap that businesses face today. If the information you put out there is not valuable to a buyer, you may not even make the short list. And if your people cannot have meaningful, value-based conversations in person, and you cannot convey that value online either, you will have trouble winning business or even getting a seat at the table. Jack recalled a stat from their pre-show chat, that roughly 75% of businesses fail to produce content that convinces a buyer to choose them.
She sees this internationally, too. One client had only a single page about its business on a parent company's website and nothing on LinkedIn, so Sue's team had to stage an intervention. Jack's takeaways: stay consistent across your website, LinkedIn, and conversations, which means knowing who you are as a person and as a brand. Know your ideal client profile, and be comfortable saying no when it is not the right fit instead of trying to manipulate someone into a yes.
Scrappy Beginnings, Sophisticated Systems
Jack asked Sue to take him back to January 9, 1995, when she started out on her own. Her path included working in recruitment, which she calls her unofficial PhD in what good selling actually is. There she learned how to run a desk in a performance-oriented, closely scrutinized environment, and she describes her working style as rigid flexibility: you need structure, but you have to be able to move within it.
Her first sale came in her first week in business. She asked the client to pay upfront so she could pull resources together, and he wrote her a check for $10,000. Her lesson: if you never ask, the answer is always no. When Jack wondered whether she had ever put on a conference before, Sue explained that she had plenty of experience running workshops and building programs, so she was not making it up. She also talked about being a highly sensitive person, about stage fright, and about the idea that what is learned can be unlearned.
Today her team helps businesses with go-to-market sales and marketing strategies, including mapping selling and buying processes, the human systems of tasks, activities, and behaviors, and they now integrate AI and CRM into that work. Sue even used AI to teach her statistical analysis while stress testing her own system, and her reminder for anyone with a big idea is to do your homework first, because without traction and the ability to sell, it is just an expensive hobby.
Connect with Sue Barrett
Sue's pointer for listeners is Selling Better, which offers ethical frameworks, principles, and practices for selling.
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