By Troy Harrison – Sales Navigator
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.