Personally it makes me want to figure out what a “lean practitioner” is so I can avoid them like the plague.
- chatbot sales: “see how it recovers here because I misunderstood the question and gave a different answer than expected?”. (Demo was a linear path with this ‘recovery’ hard coded) - Buy side: “yes absolutely we already integrate with X”. Queue 12 months of delays because they had never integrated with that platform before.
But, I think I get it. The deals are huge and you only sell a few a year. Once an enterprise commits, it is unlikely to switch vendors unless it goes really really bad. So, the salesperson that convincingly lies gets the deal, and surprisingly the downside is relatively limited.
OTOH, not massaging the truth might mean losing that deal. Huge downside, very limited upside. (Yes the buyer might be a bit more happy, but that likely doesn’t outweigh sometimes missing a multi million deal, unless buyer talk a lot with each other).