This is a very HN sort of sentiment. How can I be persuasive without being gross?
I had a bit of a moment when I first became a PM. (I've done a bunch of things, engineering / sales / founding, but PM only sort of recently.) I realized that my job was to wake up in the morning and pick fights. Or more diplomatically: to tell people they were doing the wrong thing, and they should be doing a different thing, in a way that made them want to listen to me more in the future, not less.
That's the job. In fact, in almost every job, that's the job.
Impact happens when you reach people and they behave differently because of you. That's nothing to be ashamed of. If you do it authentically and with good intent, it's one of the best things you can do with your time.
Think of what you are doing as revealing information as to why you think your new approach is more aligned with business and business goals. Give them room to do the same.
There might be systemic issues getting in the way. You and them having competing OKRs for example. Good to surface that and deal with it too.
Right -- the stereotypes of "selling" or "telling" or "persuading" are unhelpful in a lot of contexts.
Even in direct selling, many people don't want to feel they're being sold to! At a minimum, they don't want to feel out of control on decision they care about. But they're frequently open to learning, even if the constraints of how much time / credit they'll give you are extremely different.