Is there room for dishonesty in sales?

Image via WayneHastings.com

In this post, I want to delve more deeply into Mattson’s 2nd and 5th Core Concepts–“Don’t Spill Your Candy in the Lobby” and “Never Answer an Unasked Questions”.

These chapters confused me a lot at first. In a way, they seemed dishonest. I understood how talking too much could be inconsiderate and suggest to the customer that you don’t really care. I also understood how it was important to focus on what the customer wanted to talk about in pursuit of discovering more. But the idea that you should hold back true information about your product because it might give the prospect reasons not to buy didn’t sit right with me. It sounded like Mattson was saying, “Careful not to let them know everything about the product, or else they may realize it’s not what they need.” And that is counter to what we learn in Sales class–we learn that our main goal is making sure the product is what the prospect needs, not to selectively show and tell for the sake of the sale.

So, I thought about it a fair amount, and I had a lot of questions. If you think a piece of product information could stop someone from wanting to buy it, isn’t it your responsibility to talk to them about it? If you’re never supposed to answer an unasked question, how do you bring something important up with the customer that they may not know to ask about? Do you just let it pass by?

After thinking about it, I believe the answers to these questions are: (1) Yes, (2) strategically, and (3) no.

I think as salespeople we do have a responsibility to make sure a prospect is fully informed before they make a purchase. It’s the right thing to do and we also want to avoid someone having buyer’s regret as much as we can. But we have to make sure we’re fulfilling this responsibility strategically–that means thinking intelligently about what the customer actually needs to know about the product to be “fully informed” and bringing it up to them in a way that engages them and shows you are listening.

This might be accomplished by relating the information by way of questions, prefacing statements with why you think they are important according to what the prospect as told you before, and making sure you are only bringing up what is necessary.

I haven’t tried these ideas out, so currently they are just hypotheses. I hope to apply them to future sales situations and see if they make sense in context. They certainly helped me better understand what I think Mattson was getting at in his Core Concepts.