Hard Sales and Hard Sells

Hard Sales and Hard Sells â€Å"Hard Sales† and â€Å"Hard Sells† â€Å"Hard Sales† and â€Å"Hard Sells† By Maeve Maddox Lilach Alkony wonders about the difference between â€Å"hard sales† and â€Å"hard sells.† The noun phrase hard sell is a U.S. coinage dating from the 1950s. It means â€Å"aggressive salesmanship or advertising.† An example is the late night â€Å"infomercial† that keeps pounding the viewer with â€Å"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 â€Å"hard sales,† on the other hand, can have various interpretations. It can mean simply â€Å"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 â€Å"aggressive selling,† then the established, unambiguous term is to be preferred. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Misused Words category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:30 Synonyms for â€Å"Meeting†25 Russian Words Used in English (and 25 More That Should Be)10 Types of Hyphenation Errors

Introduction to Outdoor Leadership Self-reflection Assignment Article

Introduction to Outdoor Leadership Self-reflection Assignment - Article Example Part of being a leader is explaining things in a clear and concise manner so that the people who I am leading can carry out the instructions that I give them. A negative part of this experience was that I was not always able to lead people as I would have liked. My communication skills, or lack of them, made it difficult for me to get my point across on occasion. This is something that I have learned from this experience. I need to work on my communication skills because this makes a leader either ordinary or great. I feel that am someone who can show what I want others to do, but I have a very hard time explaining it in words. I would like to improve my skills in this area so that I can become a better leader. 2. My father was someone who has influenced me the most about the outdoors. He would always take me out camping because he said that it was good to get away from all the noise and everyday living in the city. I look back on these times as good memories because I always enjoyed exploring new things, and the outdoors is a great place to do that. Exploring in the city is not very fun because everything is the same and it is also manmade. Nature holds a special place in my heart because I find it so captivating. My father also felt this way, so this is maybe why I am the same. He would take me out into the wild for days at a time and we would have to rely on our survival skills to survive. With very little access to food and water, not to mention a place to sleep, I learned very early on in life how to fend for myself. I think this is the reason why I am an independent person today. I am grateful to my father that he gave me these experiences because they have helped to contribute towards the person who I am today. I don’t know what I would have done without my father. 3. Outdoor leadership is important to me personally because the outdoors has played an important part in my life and I also like the challenges that leadership brings. This is the perfe ct subject for me because it brings my strengths and desires together. While I already know a great deal about the outdoors, I am willing to learn how to become a better leader because it will improve every aspect of my life. Taking on a leadership role can be quite challenging because it takes a lot of responsibility, but I already consider myself to be a responsible person, so I feel that my personality is well-suited towards becoming a leader of some sort. I have not yet decided upon the right profession for me, but I am definitely sure that the outdoors will be involved some how. Also, even if I am not a leader in the future, the skills that I gain in this course will help me to become a better person, both personally and professionally. 4. The earliest leadership experience that I had would have to be when I was made my class president back in my freshman year of high school. I was very inexperienced as a leader at that time, but many people in my class believed that I had the attributes to make a good leader. One thing that I enjoyed from this experience was that I was suddenly the most important person in my class. Everyone looked up to me and my social standing rose considerably. For the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed going to school because I felt like I had a purpose for being there. The one thing that I disliked about this experience was that I suddenly had a whole heap of responsibility placed upon my shoulders. Looking back now, I was probably not fully prepared for this