Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Yesterday in a blog about the trials and tribulations of buying a mattress I recounted my frustration with a sales person who starting negging us. Folks who've been on the dating scene (or have read about it) anytime in the past 10 years know what negging is. But what about people who work in sales? In sales there is a useful technique called negative selling. It's very different from negging, though.

Negging, defined

Just a quick definition to make sure we're not talking past each other. Negging is a term coined by pickup artists (usually men) for using backhanded compliments as a form of emotional manipulation. A classic negging line would be, "Wow, you're way more interesting than I expected when I first saw you." There's clearly an insult here: they look like a dull person. The negger is combining an insult with a flirtatious remark to undermine the other person's confidence and lure them into seeking his approval.

Negative Selling, or "Unselling"

Most of the time selling techniques are what you'd call positive, or constructive. As a salesperson you're asking questions to understand your prospective customer's needs and you're explaining capabilities in your product and how they help solve those needs. Sometimes, though, the positive-constructive approach just isn't working. Your prospect isn't giving up much in the way of realistic needs and they're shooting down every value you're presenting. They may also be carping (repeatedly) about things like, "I don't get why it's so expensive." At that point you might try negative selling, or unselling.

With the technique of negative selling you agree with the customer's negative remarks. An example I might use in enterprise software sales is, "A lot of organizations buy this product for its security features, to prevent software supply chain intrusions. If security's not that important to your organization, this product might not be the right fit."

Unlike with negging, the purpose here isn't emotional manipulation. The purpose here is to qualify in or qualify out the prospect. I.e., figure out whether or not this prospect is worth continuing with. Many prospects are not! As a sales professional it's critical to understand where (and with whom) to spend your time and effort.

Where the mattress seller messed up

The mattress salesguy messed up in two ways. First, he made his negatives personalized to us, not the situation. That's a key difference between negging, in the slimy pickup artist sense, and negative selling in business. Second, his attempt at negative selling was mis-timed. We weren't dismissing his value-selling or carping about things beyond his control; we were still asking questions. When your sales prospect is still asking legit questions you are totally in positive-constructive selling still. Switching to negative selling prematurely is a power move that shuts down the prospect's questions and runs a big risk of pissing them off.

We were pissed off and left.

This month I'm writing a series of blogs on how we split responsibilities and finances in our household. The prompts for this topic are advice articles about family/couples finance I've read in my newsfeed. On the whole I'm unimpressed with the advice peddled by supposed professionals. Some of the suggestions are weak, some are ridiculous, and some are like, "Is this still news? I thought this was news 30 years ago." So I'm sharing what's worked for me/us and what I/we have learned.

This blog addresses the question, "What's a good way for people in a relationship to split expenses?" As you'll see in a moment we've handled that three different ways as our relationship has progressed.

 ❖ When we were dating we kept our money and expenses separate. That made sense because we were living separately. Rent, utilities, groceries, etc. were separate bills for each of us. (Or were things that we split equitably with our respective housemates.) When it came to dates we took turns paying. That was somewhat avant garde at the time, in the mid 1990s, though our expectation was that it was becoming normal. Surprisingly nearly 30 years later it's not widespread.

Our choice to take turns paying for dates was partly a matter of finances. We were both students on slim budgets, so it made sense to alternate who pays instead of the guy (traditionally) always paying. But it was also key for how our relationship worked. It was important to me in choosing a partner to find a career-minded woman capable of being financially independent. And for Hawk it was important to find a parter who didn't try to take away her independence.

 ❖ While living together we kept our money separate but shared common expenses. We continued keeping our finances separate while living together. There was no reason to merge them. Rent, utilities, and grocery shopping were common expenses we split. One or the other of us would pay each bill, and we'd even up at the end of the month. I contributed slightly more than half of the rent because my salary was higher. The other common expenses we split 50/50. Things we kept personal were car costs (purchase, maintenance, insurance) and individual meals dining out. When we dined out together we charged those meals to a different credit card we split 50/50 each month.

 ❖ After we married we merged our finances and began paying ourselves "allowances". Once we got married we turned around the question from "How do we split expenses?" to "How do we split our the money that's left?" It's an idea I got from an older friend who'd been married several years where both partners were professionals with full time jobs. We merged our finances and treat all of our income as joint income. Paychecks go into a shared account. All regular bills get paid out of it. That includes obvious things like mortgage, insurance, and grocery shopping; but also car payments, gas, dining out, travel, and entertainment. Whatever's not spent is transferred to joint savings. The rule is that every expense paid from the joint account has to be mutually agreed upon.

One of those mutual agreements is that we each get an "allowance" of a few hundred dollars per paycheck. We transfer that money to our personal accounts where we each have total individual discretion over how to spend it. This gives us the advantage of managing one set of primary finances, for household expenses and household savings, while having small personal accounts over which each us of has sole discretion.

A few weeks ago I posted about how we still have a few dozen tea lights from a sack of 200 we bought 25 years ago. You might wonder what one uses to light candles that have been around that long and have survived multiple house moves. Well, the answer is... matches that are even older and have followed me through even more house moves!



Last night I tore the last match out of this packet and used it to light one of the candles. Today I went into my drawer for a box of matches and thought about how they date back to 1995. I remember the occasion for which I bought them; it was a camping trip. Then I thought about how the Mick's matchbook is even older. I've had it since September 1994. I know that because I remember picking up this matchbook from the restaurant Hawk and I visited on our first date together. That's over 27 years ago now!