This advice may sound ridiculous and counter to what every sales person attempts to accomplish when engaged with prospective clients.   Strong sales people are supposed to “close” the deal; make the buyer see things their way, pressure the buyer to make the purchase now ( found somewhere in many proposals…”this offer expires in x days” or “offer good for x days…) and follow up to get the purchase order.

There is a better way to influence your prospective clients to act positively on your proposals.  Compliance-without pressure techniques have been studied and proven to be powerful influencers that move people to comply with requests.  Among these techniques, the “but you are free” (BYAF) is a verbal compliance procedure that solicits someone to comply with a request by simply telling a person that he or she is free to accept or refuse the request.

The “but you are free” technique (BYAF) studied by Guéguen and Pascual (2000) is one of the most recent compliance-without-pressure paradigms.  Its concept is simple: By enhancing a request made to another person with the proposal “you are free to. . .” one can significantly increase the possibility of acceptance.

In their study, Guéguen and Pascual, asked passersby in a street to give them money.  In the experimental situation, their request ended with the phrase “but you are free to accept or refuse” while this phrase was not used in the control situation. They found that 10% of the solicited participants complied with the request in the control situation, while 47.5% accepted in the experimental situation.

The study concluded that this technique not only leads to increasing compliance with a request, but also to increasing involvement by those being asked to donate.  They also found in their experiment that the average amount of donations granted by the participants was higher in the experimental (BYAF) situation than in the control situation. The simple introduction of a feeling of freedom can therefore move individual compliance to various types of requests (aka your proposal).

So the next time you are tempted to limit or compel your prospective client to accept your proposal, remember Guéguen and Pascual and let your prospective client know that they are “free to accept or refuse.”