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A couple of nights ago, my wife and I went out to celebrate our anniversary at one of the nicer restaurants here in Los Cabo.
The dinner was... fine. Good food, good wine, a fun night out. But if I'm being honest, not really worth what we paid for it.
Our server wasn’t perfect, but he was a nice kid. He was friendly, responsive, and, as they say, tried his best.
At the end of the meal, he came over with a QR code, set it down, and said: "If you'd be kind enough to help me out and write a review, I'd really appreciate it."
A minute later, I'd filled it out and given him the great review he’d asked for.
Didn't think twice about it.
It wasn't until my bike ride the next morning that it hit me: He said help me out. Not help us out.
If he’d asked to help out the restaurant, I’m almost positive I wouldn't have done it. Not out of anger. I wasn’t upset about dinner. Just underwhelmed. So, I wouldn't have felt compelled to leave a review. I would've smiled, nodded, and never opened the link.
Same request. Same QR code. One word different. Completely different outcome.
I was curious: Is there a real difference in asking to help me out vs. us out, or am I inventing a nice theory here?
So I dug into the research.
Turns out, there's something real here.
Two Operating Systems
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely covers this in Predictably Irrational. We run two completely different rule books for our interactions — what he calls social norms and market norms.
Social norms govern how we deal with people. Favors, kindness, helping someone because you like them. No ledger. No scorekeeping.
Market norms govern transactions. Prices, wages, value for value. Everything goes on the ledger.
Ariely's example: Thanksgiving dinner at your mother-in-law's house. Incredible meal, wonderful evening. Now picture standing up at the end, pulling out your wallet, and asking what you owe her for the meal.
You'd wreck the entire evening. Because you just dragged a transaction into a relationship.
The two systems don't mix particularly well. And people sort every interaction into one or the other within seconds — without consciously deciding anything.
"Help me out" landed in the social system. A person I'd spent a couple hours giving it his best effort, human to human, for a small favor. Of course I helped.
"Help us out" would've landed in the market system. A restaurant asking for free marketing. And in that system, the honest internal answer is: the dinner wasn’t good enough for me to give them a recommendation.
No resentment. No decision, even. The impulse to help just never fires.
Then Art Confirmed It
What made this click into place: two days before that dinner, I recorded a podcast with Art Sobczak.
If you don't know Art, he's the godfather of phone sales. 40+ years, 1,500+ in-person workshops, author of Smart Calling. I flew him in to train my inside sales team at the U.S. Chamber 20 years ago, and he's one of the few voices in this space I've never stopped reading.
Art and I talked about a popular piece of advice in cold calling right now: announce the call. "Hey, just so you know, this is a cold call. If you want to hang up, you can." The logic sounds reasonable — transparency, pattern interrupt, hand the prospect control.
Several SDRs in our fractional sales management program are using it.
Art's take? Bad advice.
He has a rule he calls the salesperson's oath: "First, create no resistance." When the first words out of your mouth are "this is a cold call," you trigger every negative association the prospect has with cold calls. Consciously, they're immediately scanning for the transaction. Subconsciously they’re thinking, “How do I get rid of this guy?”
When he said it on the podcast, I agreed. That tracks to me.
After that dinner, I understood why he's right.
Announcing "this is a cold call" is the phone version of "help the company out." You've stamped the conversation as a transaction before they even know your name. You've sorted yourself into the market system — where you're a line item to be evaluated and dismissed.
Art's approach proves the same principle from the other side.
His openers lead with something relevant to the prospect's world — a trigger event, a problem you know they're facing, intel from an actual conversation with their assistant. In his words, the best pattern interrupt is knowing something relevant about their world and letting them know it.
Relevance gives you a much better shot at becoming a person instead of a pitch. Which is how to you appeal to the social norm instead of the market norm.
This Goes Way Beyond Cold Calls
If you sell IT services — or any service really — think about how your meetings open.
"Let me tell you a little about us. Our stack, our certifications, our SOC, our response times..."
That's the same as "help us out.” You've framed yourself as a vendor. And vendors get evaluated exclusively in the market system, where the only differentiator left is service delivery and price.
If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you've probably heard me say: all roads lead to discovery. This is part of the reason why.
Genuine curiosity about their world — their problems, their symptoms, what's driving the timing — keeps you on the human side of the line. That price objection that shows up at the end of the deal? That's usually the market frame reasserting itself, because you never got out of it.
A few ways to put this to work:
Audit your opener for resistance. Read your first 20 seconds word by word and ask Art's question: is there anything here someone could react negatively to? If so, why is it in there?
Lead with their world, not yours. One relevant observation about their business beats five paragraphs about yours.
Ask for help person to person — where you've earned it. Art doesn't say "gatekeeper." He calls them assistants, talks to them like humans, and asks: "You could probably help me with some information..." It works for the same reason the server's ask worked on me.
One Thing Before You Rewrite Your Scripts
This isn't about tricking people — into reviews or into meetings. Nobody got played at that dinner, least of all me.
The server's ask worked because there was a real person behind it. A guy who'd been kind and helpful for two hours.
Would an ask for help improve a cold call? Probably. "Help me out" beats a purely transactional statement most days.
But without personalization, relevance, or some other currency behind it, it doesn't land the same way. And it can backfire — especially once it turns into another technique making the rounds and prospects start hearing it everywhere.
So the takeaway isn't a line to steal. It's a reason to be less transactional across your entire process — because the moment you sound like a transaction, you get treated like one.
The server had hours to become a real person to me. On a cold call, you've got about ten seconds. Relevance is the only currency that buys it that fast.
People decide very quickly whether you're a human or a transaction, and they play by completely different rules depending on the answer.
Stay human as long as you possibly can.
Adios,
Ray
P.S. — The full conversation with Art drops on the podcast next week. We get into what he calls "the wussification of sales" — too many salespeople apologizing for showing up with something valuable to offer. If you do any prospecting at all, you'll want to hear it.