Who is Asking You to Sell Your Reputation for a Quick Win?

We believe sales is the most noble act you can perform in business. We have one job. Empower others to make the right decision. We facilitate buying. Our role is not to sell.

For transparency, at the end of this post is a link to learn how to sell ethically, always empowering, never deceptively, without pressure and with results that are implausibly good and consistent with your current perspective.

Suzanne C. , Dan Pfister and I promise to shatter your perception of what is possible and within your control if you choose to commit to being an ethical seller.

Back to lying and selling ...

Sales, Manipulation, and Lying

David Sandler said there are four professions where manipulation is OK—medicine, law, sports, and sales. I now vehemently disagree. Mark Twain said, "Always tell the truth that way you never have to remember anything." The triggers you fire off in your buyer's brain when they suspect you are lying or applying pressure to buy at your preferred time of choosing really do bear thinking about if you don't want to work stupid hard for diminishing returns.

"Tell the truth—it confounds your enemies and surprises your friends."

The problem with lying isn't that the lie can't be forgiven. It can't be forgotten. Trading your word, your reputation, and trust for a short-term gain is a very bad decision. That makes every word that comes out of your mouth open to doubt and positions you as a risk in the buyer's mind and gut.

Here's an example:

Message Received:

Hey Marcus, Curious—is your service personalized, or more from generic templates like courses, or pre-recorded videos? Looking for a serious coach (not for myself, though)

My Response:

Hi Warren. Thanks for connecting. Delighted to chat. All personalised for now. Will be putting stuff online along with a Personal Digital Caddy, but the online is to augment the ThoughtLabs, ConceptLabs, PracticeLabs, community, and buddy system. Here's my calendar link. If your friend wants to take my selling aptitude test (it compares your responses to the top 4% of performers so NO ONE looks great!!). If they take that, they can book 30 minutes debriefing with me for free and audition me as their coach for free and get something really powerful.

The Bait and Switch:

"Thanks for the generous answer, let me explain what I meant. Came across your profile and loved your philosophy when it comes to sales & how to scale it, especially your article on doubling sales. Great stuff. Decided to send you a DM, because currently, we opened a few spots and are looking for long-term partners. In a nutshell, we help you build a pipeline of customers, nurture them, and maximize the closing rate, while you could focus fully on content and delivery (and to scale your brand even faster). We guarantee to add $15k to your revenue in 90 days. Have a few ideas on how you could achieve this goal. Are you up for a quick chat?"

My Takeaway:

This kind of bait-and-switch is a classic example of manipulation in sales. The initial approach seemed genuine, but it quickly turned into a pitch. This erodes trust and positions the seller as a risk. Additionally, using my language back at me, attempting to bond by mirroring my words, is disingenuous and manipulative.

When trust is broken out of the gate, I feel no need to reciprocate. Their attempt at bonding now feels manipulative, and what's going on in my brain? My trust circuits are firing warnings. The attempt to weaponise trust-building by matching and mirroring feels abusive.

Any transactional leaders or managers asking their salespeople to pressure their buyers are acting without conscience or moral backbone. How dare they? They are in positions of power, authority, and responsibility, and they ask their people, whom they are meant to serve, to sacrifice their reputations and hurt hard-earned relationships to meet a meaningless activity or valuation target that is out of date by supper time.

Relationship before revenue. Lifetime before transaction. Empower and Elevate.

We as professional sellers have ONLY ONE job: Empower others to make good decisions well. They want to make the right decision, not the wrong decision and not the right decision badly.

Empowering others to make good decisions with limited information, under pressure, leading to decisions that all sides can live with for a very long time—given identical conditions, all parties would sign up to identical conditions 10x in a row.

Always tell the truth. Build trust. Deliver value. This is the foundation of sustainable success.

#Sales #Integrity #Trust #BusinessEthics #AlwaysTellTheTruth #TheAllyMethod

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