By How Much Are Buyers Liars?

I think every salesperson goes through this rite of passage.  You’re told that you are going to win a deal by the prospect.  You proudly, maybe even smugly, pass on the good news to your boss, your peers, your support staff, your spouse, your pet.  Then what?  Jupiter mis-aligns with Saturn, a butterfly flaps skywards in the Amazon, el Nino starts early, a pig sprouts wings as seen on youtube.  The order never materialises.

A wizened old sage quietly remarks, “buyers are liars”.  Lesson reluctantly learned, you realise that trust is foolish.  From then on, you never accept what a prospect says at face value ever again.  Ouch.

But by how much can you legitimately doubt what you are told?  Well, it turns out that you are likely to suffer by being misled in at least 92% of cases via email.  A study I just read over my morning cuppa, found that this is the amount of people that will fib on email.  Wow.

In a we-must-have-a-moral-at-the-end-of-the-show-because-we’re-american kind of way, when you need someone to tell you something important, make sure you can see the whites of their eyes.  And even then verify it through questioning everyone else you can think of.