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
Another said that some of her colleagues felt the need to "hard sell" private work and make NHS treatment look substandard.
From BBC ● Mar. 24, 2026
I convinced my wife to go to synagogue, which is a hard sell.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 17, 2025
A month ago, it would’ve been a hard sell.
From "Dread Nation" by Justina Ireland
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
A temperate climate has been more than a selling point for Southern California; it’s been practically a dogma, tediously pleasant weather marketed with a snake-oil hard-sell.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 5, 2022
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
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
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
They would have to gen up on their products beforehand, and there would be no staring down the camera, hard-selling – the high-pressure tactics of the infomercials were out.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 9, 2010
He has made tactical errors in hard-selling his views, but the Administration won the Senate vote on the antiballistic-missile program, an issue on which he staked his personal prestige.
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.
