Puppy Dog Close
Let the buyer take the product home or trial it, betting that possession makes returning it feel like a loss.
Take it for two weeks, no card, and just tell me at the end if it's not for you.
The puppy dog close gets its name from a pet shop letting a family take the puppy home for the weekend: almost nobody brings it back. In selling, you offer a low-friction trial, a loaner, a free two weeks, a no-card pilot, and let ownership do the work. Once the thing is in daily use, giving it up feels like losing something they already have.
To use it, make the trial genuinely easy to start and easy to end, then stay quiet during it. You say “Take it for two weeks, no card, and just tell me at the end if it’s not for you.” The endowment effect, documented by Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (1990), is the real mechanism: people value things more once they own them.
It works when the product proves itself in use and when reversing is truly painless. It fails if the trial is a hassle to set up, since then the buyer never gets far enough to feel ownership.