Authenticity beats deception
A Seller on a discovery call gets asked whether the product does something it does not do. There is a half-second pause. Then he says yes, absolutely, there are customers doing exactly that. The call goes well. The deal moves to stage three. Four months later the customer is in the pilot, finds out, and the Champion who put her name on it stops answering emails.
The lie bought four months. It cost the deal, the Champion, and the account for the next five years.
Deception works in the short term, which is exactly why it is dangerous. If it never worked, nobody would do it. Deception wins the call. Authenticity wins the customer. That is the entire argument, and it took me longer than I would like to admit to believe it.
Why deception loses
Sales is a repeated game. The buyer who sat across from you in 2016 is running procurement somewhere else in 2024. The Champion you let down talks to the Champion at the company you are pitching next quarter. In twenty years I have sold to the same people over and over, at different companies, with different titles. They remember.
Robert Axelrod ran computer tournaments in the early 1980s to find the best strategy in a repeated game. The strategies that won were the ones that never cheated first. The clever, deceptive strategies won early rounds and lost the tournament. Nothing about enterprise sales has changed that.
There is also the maintenance cost. A true thing costs you once, when you say it. A false thing has to be defended on every subsequent call, in every proposal, in the pilot, and in the reference call you now have to coach. The deceptive Seller carries a growing stack of positions to protect. The authentic Seller carries nothing.
And the first person a Seller deceives is themselves. Happy ears. The Economic Buyer who is “basically on board” because she smiled. The “not a no, just a not right now.” Forecast accuracy is where self-deception goes to be measured, and every leader reading this knows the rep whose 90% commit lands at 40%.
What authentic selling looks like
Authenticity in a deal is a set of things you are prepared to say out loud.
You say what the product does not do before the customer finds out. Their trust goes up, because now they can believe the things you say it does do.
You say “I don’t know, I will find out” and then you find out. The same day.
You tell the Champion where the deal is weak. If you cannot be honest with your Champion, you do not have one.
You put the real number in the forecast. Not the number that makes Monday’s call comfortable. The one you would bet your own money on.
You stop pretending to be a consultant, a partner, an advisor. You are a Seller. Customers know, and they respect the ones who know it too.
More than 35,000 people have been through the MEDDICC Masterclass, and the hardest shift for most of them is this one. Qualification is honesty applied to a pipeline. Every letter of MEDDICC is a question you can answer truthfully or fudge. The ones who fudge it get a clean-looking CRM and a terrible year.
The test
Before your next customer call, write down the one thing you are currently letting that customer believe that you know is not quite true. The feature that is on the roadmap rather than in the product. The reference who was coached. The “fully committed” sponsor you have never met.
Then decide whether you say it on the call or let it find them.
Deception always gets found. The only variable is who tells the customer. Authenticity beats deception because the customer finds out either way, and the only choice you ever had was whether they heard it from you.
What are you letting a customer believe right now that you would not want them to discover on their own?
