A couple of weeks ago, an entrepreneur set an appointment to talk to me using a dishonest approach. The approach is unfortunately common in the sales world – he pretended to be a potential coaching client for me, only to flip the script and drop into his sales pitch. I was livid, and if you’re interested in the full story, you can check out my LinkedIn post on this idiot.
I’ve talked a lot about dishonesty in this space. I find it to be an unconscionable stain on the sales profession that I’ve loved for 35 years, and it goes against everything I stand for. But – maybe I haven’t made my argument well enough, so this week, let’s talk about dishonesty from a practical perspective. Maybe you aren’t swayed by my arguments about ethics and morals. Fine. I’m talking today to the “I’ll do whatever it takes to get the appointment/order/contract and worry about what happens later” group. Hopefully you aren’t one of them, but this newsletter has thousands of readers. There are bound to be a few. So, let’s dive into the practical side of deceiving your customers. For those of us who are committed to honesty and transparency in sales, it should at least make for interesting reading.
Leaving aside the moral and ethical questions of lying to your customers, there are enough practical aspects to lying to convince all but the sleaziest salespeople that it’s not a good strategy. When a salesperson (let’s call him Bob) decides to deceive a customer (let’s call him Dave), he must accomplish six things:
- Misdirection: Bob has to keep Dave from seeing and believing any evidence or facts that contradict the lie.
- Confidence: Bob has to instill in Dave a high degree of confidence in Bob’s trustworthiness. Bob has to have credibility in Dave’s mind; i.e. Dave must believe what Bob says because Bob is the one who is saying it.
- Plausibility: Bob’s lie must be plausible and not immediately raise the “Hey, wait a minute” impulse.
- Affirmation: Bob has to make sure that the majority of voices that Dave is likely to listen to will back the lie. This is the old “One lies and the other swears to it” meme.
- Neutralization: Bob has to discredit any voices or sources of information that are outside his control and that are likely to contradict the lie.
- Memory: Bob has to remember the lie and how it was told. My grandmother used to say, “if you’re going to be a liar, you’d better have a great memory” – which is the inverse of the better saying, “If you always tell the truth, you never have to remember what you said.” I should point out that Grandmother was saying that to encourage honesty – not to enable dishonesty!
Whew. That’s a lot, isn’t it? Still – sales is a profession not renowned in the general public for its honesty; in fact, a HubSpot survey said that only 3% of people extend trust to salespeople. Unfortunately, that’s an earned reputation. Still – some salespeople lie. Probably – I hope – fewer than in decades before, but it still happens.
It’s never been a great strategy, but it’s worse now because there are so many more ways for customers to discover the truth. The Internet is a great equalizer. When salespeople lied in decades past, they could do so with relative confidence that the characteristics of Misdirection, Plausibility, Affirmation, and Neutralization could be covered. When you’re working to control your customer’s access to information, it’s helpful when the entire knowledge base of the world isn’t accessible with three taps of a smartphone.
Even so, salespeople try to lie and misdirect. What’s funny is that the last few times I’ve seen it happen, what trips them up is something that you would think would be in their own control, and that’s Affirmation above. Salespeople lie – but they don’t bother to inform other customer-facing personnel at their company of what the lie is. The customer talks to someone else within the salesperson’s own company, the other person doesn’t know what the lie is and tells the customer the truth, and BOOM.
It’s kind of like this scene from Glengarry Glen Ross.
So, what’s the impact of getting caught in a lie? It can vary. The immediate impact is that you’ll never have the customer’s Confidence again. When you’re caught in a lie by your customer, they’ll never believe what you say again. In the extreme examples, this can be a career-killer. Looking outside our profession, remember how the news careers of Dan Rather and Brian Williams ended.
The funny part is that, in the near term, Dave might continue to buy from Bob – But Bob will never have the power to persuade Dave again. Ever. About anything.
And here’s where the practical and the ethical intersect. Once upon a time, in pre-Internet days, salespeople could get away with lying to customers, because the opportunities for customers to communicate Bob’s dishonesty were limited. Now? I see the results in Google reviews all the time. The bottom line is that even if you’re good at lying, there are simply too many alternative sources of information. You’re probably not going to get away with it.
And let’s circle back to the dude who deceived me to get an appointment. His app was one that uses AI for prospect outreach. It’s literally a cold-calling robot. That’s something that salespeople have dreamed about for decades. How good is it? I have no idea. And I’ll never know, because to me, the person who promoted it is a liar and a charlatan, and I wouldn’t even believe a live in-person demonstration from him. I could have not only been a client, but a great advocate. And that door is closed to him forever. I suspect that I’m not the only one.
Now, more than ever, honesty and transparency are your friends in your sales career. To give your customers any less is to cheat them, you, your company, and your profession.
