to sell or advertise (something) in a forceful and insistent way.
to hard-sell new car models to reluctant buyers.
to convince (someone) in a forceful and insistent way.
to hard-sell customers on a new product.
An aggressive, high-pressure sales practice or promotion, as in Used-car salesmen tend to give you a hard sell . This expression gave rise to the antonym soft sell , a low-key sales approach that relies on gentle persuasion. [ Colloquial ; c. 1950]
A difficult sales prospect, one who resists sales pressure. For example, Those brokers who call us at dinnertime find me a hard sell—I usually just hang up on them . [Late 1900s]
An Americanism dating back to 1950–55
An Americanism dating back to 1955–60
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In a world where investors are increasingly only interested in artificial intelligence and little else, even retail winners can be a hard sell: Better prospects still often translate into worse stock performance.
From Barron's ● Jun. 4, 2026
You should be skeptical of companies making a hard sell.
From MarketWatch ● Apr. 30, 2026
But she cautioned that parts of the budget might be a hard sell for Canadians struggling immediately with the cost of living.
From BBC ● Nov. 4, 2025
I convinced my wife to go to synagogue, which is a hard sell.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 17, 2025
“I have my fingers crossed. But I got to tell you, landscape is a hard sell with the vuvv. They think we paint still lifes. Fruit in a bowl and stuff.”
From "Landscape with Invisible Hand" by M.T. Anderson
This is a far cry from the hard-sell approach beloved of many corporate players and not everyone is happy.
From BBC ● Apr. 17, 2023
Only 10.7 percent of its headline revenue number came from real money donated by those responding to its hard-sell television advertisement.
From Slate ● May 10, 2018
My audience couldn’t have been more tickled by these hard-sell tactics, which hew closely to Gower Champion’s original staging.
From New York Times ● Apr. 20, 2017
Medea was a hard-sell protagonist in ancient, male-dominated Athens, in a play with clear feminist overtones.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 25, 2016
The long-suffering public went along with billboards and singing commercials; they tolerated half a dozen sales pitches in a half-hour radio or TV show; they suffered stoically through the "hard-sell" and the "soft-sell."
From Get Out of Our Skies! by Jarvis, E. K.
Purplebricks said it entirely rejects any portrayal of its service as pressure-selling, adding that it does not promote hard-selling and that it focuses on the benefits, not price, when recommending services.
From BBC ● Jul. 14, 2025
There’s a giant con at the heart of exercise – that is, a lot of effort goes into hard-selling it as “FUN!”
From The Guardian ● Mar. 23, 2019
They also hang out with stars of the day such as Burt Lancaster and George Raft amid plenty of hard-selling commercial interludes for Ajax and Palmolive soap.
From Washington Times ● Feb. 17, 2018
Yet when it comes to 700 asylum seekers detained on the remote Pacific Island nation of Nauru, Australia is hard-selling Cambodia as something unexpected: their new promised land of opportunity.
From US News ● Apr. 23, 2015
Steel, and William J. Stephens, 57, Jones & Laughlin's gregarious, hard-selling president.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
