Many years ago, a woman called Brenda came to see me. She was there to sell me life insurance.
I sat with her for the best part of 2 hours. She asked me questions. Lots of questions. All very relevant to me. They were not the kind of questions designed to steer me towards buying a particular product. Rather they were the kind designed to help her better understand my situation. Questions like these:
What would my family actually need if something happened to me?
What was I worried about the most?
What mattered to me, the most?
She listened to every answer carefully and properly – like it was the only thing she had to do that day.
By the end of it, I bought the policy best suited to my family. But that’s not the part I remember.
What I remember is standing up to shake her hand goodbye, and without really deciding to, I put my other hand against hers and held it with both of mine. It was a small thing. I felt a flash of embarrassment doing it, because it wasn’t a normal handshake and I knew it. But it was genuine.
I just wanted her to know how much I appreciated what she’d just done for me. She had listened to me properly, and it showed in every question she asked.
I still think about Brenda, decades later, whenever the subject of being sold to comes up.
What that taught me about ‘selling’
There’s a phrase that gets repeated a lot: nobody likes being sold to. I don’t think that’s true, and Brenda is the proof. I didn’t just tolerate what she did that day. I loved it.
In reality, I don’t think we dislike being sold to. We only dislike it when it’s not done properly.
What we actually dislike is something narrower than that. We dislike being sold to when it isn’t in our interests. When someone else’s need to close the sale is driving the conversation instead of our need to make a good decision. When we can feel that the questions being asked of us are designed to move us toward saying yes, rather than designed to find out what’s actually true for us.
That feeling has a name, and it isn’t “being sold to.” It’s being “not listened to”. It’s being “not understood”. It’s being “not heard”.
Selling is just the form it takes.
If you’ve ever sat with anyone and felt like you were being sold to, just reflect on that for a moment. What you’re actually picking up on isn’t the presence of the sales pitch. It’s the absence of being asked real, honest, relevant questions.
Questions that relate to you, your lifestyle, your goals, your hopes and dreams. This is true of anyone you are in a consultation with, including landscape designers and landscape architects.
It happens because someone skips the part where they are supposed to find out what you actually need, and goes straight to the part where they tell you all about what they’ve got to offer you.
Why listening actually removes selling
Here’s the thing I’ve noticed after decades of talking with clients about their landscaping and garden needs. When you genuinely listen to someone, there is almost nothing left to sell.
At Whyte Gardens we don’t walk into our first meeting with a potential client thinking about how to sell a garden. We think about how do we better understand the person standing in front of us. Those two things sound similar. But they are not. Selling starts from what we have and tries to work out how to get you to buy it. Understanding starts from what you, the client, really needs and then works out how to build it.
For us, we try to run a simple cycle on every project that we go back to constantly: ask, listen, present. Not just once, at the start, and then never again. But all the way through the job.
For example, if you were our client and you told us the budget was starting to feel tight for your project, we would not defend the number or try to talk you into staying the course. We would say, fine, let’s find another way to get you as close to what you originally wanted as possible. Then we go and find it.
If you tell us, after a project has started, that you’ve gone cold on the flower colours we chose for one section, we don’t start explaining why the palette was right. We say, no problem, let’s find something you’ll actually love looking at every day, and we do.
None of this is generosity for its own sake. It’s just what happens when the question in the room is most about “what do you actually need” instead of “how do we get you to a yes.” Our need for a sale to go a certain way is irrelevant to our answer. It always has been.
How to tell whether you’re being sold or being heard
In reality, you don’t need us to tell you the difference. You will feel it, if you pay attention to it.
The simplest way to tell is if the questions come before the pitch or after it. Someone who is really listening will tend to be more interested in what you need before they tell you what they do. Someone who is selling always tells you what they do and waits to see if it fits.
Also notice what happens when you push back. Notice how a potential landscape designer responds if you say their budget is too high, or you don’t like a colour or material they recommend, or you want to just “think about it”. If the answer you get is a reason why you shouldn’t feel that way, you’re being sold to. If the answer is “ok, let’s find another way,” you’re being listened to.
Notice whether you feel steered or supported. Being pushed toward a decision that serves someone else’s goals feels different to being supported toward a decision that serves yours.
And if you do feel like you’re being sold, that isn’t necessarily a verdict on the person in front of you. Sometimes it just means they haven’t understood you yet, and the fix is simple: just tell them. Say what’s actually bothering you and see what happens next. A good designer or landscaper will welcome that.
Why I still think about Brenda to this day
I’ve spent thirty-five years sitting across from clients. I still think about Brenda more than I think about any pitch anyone has ever given me. Not because she was clever. But because she listened, properly, to a man she’d never met, about something that genuinely mattered to him. Everything that followed, including the sale, was just the natural result of that.
That’s the standard I hold our own conversations to. Not “did we sell the job well,” but “did we actually understand what this family needs from their garden.” When that part is done properly, the rest tends to take care of itself.
Andrew Whyte has spent 35 years designing and building gardens across Melbourne’s bayside and south-east. Whyte Gardens works from one cycle on every project: ask, listen, present, and keep going, because a client who feels heard rarely feels sold to.
