How To Stop Your Buyer Get Duped Like a Billionaire
Billionaire investor Nick Candy recently told London's High Court he felt "stupid". Not a first-time buyer. Not a naive punter chasing a hot tip. Thirty years of deals yet, in his own words, "a scammer cost my business more than £10 million".
What struck me reading the sorry saga, was how often down the years I've been confronted with the same seller tactics. Specifically when competition on a bid use them with our prospect.
Three recognisable moves did the work.
The halo effect. The borrowed authority, in this case of citing Apple and luxury goods giant LVMH as on board. Coupled with the pernicious spectre of relationship-washing; name-dropping along the lines of knowing Tim Cook and Bernard Arnault personally. Neither claim has to be true to do its job, it only has to be unfalsifiable in the room. The name does the selling so the product never has to show up. Such proxy trust must be open to checking by the buyer. "Corroborate these connections", as Mr Candy spurs. Any insistence that doing so would jeopardise the deal is always the showstopper.
Manufactured inevitability. Fait accompli as a sales tactic. 'Foregone conclusion', short-notice deadlines or 'exploding offers' are the siren. Language built so that checking feels rude, or worse still slow, when everyone else has apparently already bought in. Artificial urgency bypassing scrutiny ought be called out. For as we can remind our potential client faced with such, true Enterprise selling respects governance. Any compelling business event cited that's not aligned from the buyer viewpoint is, at the very least, an amber flag.
Thin under pressure. But due diligence remains a buyer's baseline. Ask how the number was reached. Again, as the above reported experience lays out, "a classic scammer’s tactic: make the victim believe that verifying the facts would destroy the opportunity". Get the prospect to go into the mechanism behind the competition's proposed deal. Gauge how they then soften. Or even bigger warning, start moving goalposts.
None of this needs the opposing seller to be a criminal. The nefarious rump of Enterprise Sales runs their version of all three without ever crossing into fraud. Optimism with better tailoring. Whilst some may excuse the line between an aspirational pitch and a blatant lie as thinner than either side admits, one of my fundamentals persist; cheating isn't winning.
We're duty bound to help safeguard our buyer's decision. Ignoring a flattering story and supposedly loudly ticking clock. Getting them asking the second questions. Going from the 'will it...' to 'how it...'.
The names might not be quite as big in our domain. But the habit we must catch doesn't change. Forewarn our prospect and forearm. Take the higher ground.