Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?

paraschopra.com

7 pointsparaschopra33 comments

Nothing busts my trust faster than lies. Indeed, the company mentioned as an example (Microsoft) lost my trust by overpromising and underdelivering with some releases of Windows back in the day.

Jon Huntsman says the same thing in his book "Winners Never Cheat". Incidentally the company he started is a multi-billion dollar company, so I would not say it is essential to tell "soft lies" in order to succeed. He gives some good examples of how being honest helped him get ahead in the long run. My personal gut answer to these type of moral questions is that if you have to ask the question you (most likely) shouldn't do it.

I think this community is special in that regard. I feel the exact same way, and I'm sure a lot of other people here do as well. But the thing is that it works and it works well. Microsoft are doing incredibly well.

Apparently there are a lot of people out there who are easily convinced by lies, or marketing as some might want to call it.

But I'd suggest that the disappointment people felt with MS products was at least part of what spurred open office & ubuntu (for example) - and open source software certainly threatens MS's revenue stream.

... 20+ years later. Personally I couldn't live with doing business dishonestly, but you can't really say that it didn't work out well for Microsoft.

I agree - the point I was making was about damage to the long term franchise, which I guess an individual salesperson wouldn't care about.

In enterprise software, there is another angle to this problem. If you know that the deployment process is going to take 3 years, should you tell your customers that there are features in your product that are right now sitting on your immedidate roadmap? what about medium term roadmap? How do you determine where the line is?

Also, if you know the base feature is there; but you know there are customizations and configurations that will need to be done on top for the deployment, do you say its there out of the box? or do you say it can be done? (Note that nothing really works out of the box in the enterprise; and if you keep saying 'can be done' to everything, you are going to lose the sale to a guy who says out of the box.)

As a guy who works at an enterprise vendor that works very, very hard to never lie in the sales cycle . . . in the long run, having a reputation as a vendor that delivers on their promises is a huge asset. Most enterprise software vendors have terrible reputations, and 100% customer referencability is an asset that's much, much harder to copy (or fake) than your product is. Protect it at all costs. That might cost you sales in the short run, and it means you have to walk away from deals if the customer isn't a fit, but your reputation is probably the single most valuable asset that you have in that space.

It depends entirely on what your goal is. If you want to create a billion dollar company it's probably essential. If you want to sleep well at night it's a mistake.

This is a very cynical way to view the world. I reject it completely. Being dishonest might benefit you in the short term, but building a reputation for honesty is a huge long term advantage.

You're right, it is very cynical. Unfortunately it's also true. I have seen people rise to fame and fortune, and very few of them have done so by building a reputation for honesty. It appears to me that 80% of the people that "make it" financially have done so by lying or cheating at some point in the game. The remaining 20% have made it by having an impeccable reputation that they build on. It's not the norm though. There seems to be differences in these numbers depending on what industry you're in. Construction appears at one end of the spectrum to be thoroughly corrupt, Software appears at the other end to be very trust and reputation based. That said, I know people in the software industry that have lied and gamed their way to their fortune. I don't particularly like it, I just observe the world I live in, and not the world I would like to live in.

You can effectively live in the world you want, by choosing how you do business and who you do business with.

As I understand it, "Ask HN" posts are supposed to be local, not on another site. But perhaps that was a white lie in your perspective?

"Ask HN" posts are supposed to be local

Why? What if you want to include a chart or a picture in your 'Ask HN' post?

I guess it's a convention that comes with the fact that people (in many cases) look more kindly on "Ask HN" types of posts and upvote them more generously than external articles.

Looks like you taking your opinion and extrapolating it into "... the fact that people ...", then implying that hence it is immoral ("But perhaps that was a white lie") to ask a non-local 'Ask HN'! Or may be you are just being witty. If anything, local 'Ask HN' is discouraged here by displaying it as gray on gray text.

You may well be right. I didn't mean to be offensive, nor did I mean to be witty. It was just an observation.

Oh okay. Sorry if that sounded argumentative. :-)

And this one, where the OP posed a vague question but made no attempt at providing a solution or even a tough example case, has little excuse, IMO.

If you make a sale, you've committed yourself to making the lie come true (or at least hiding it's lack of truth). Say goodbye to your development schedule and/or your tech support budget.

Of course, hardcore sales people who don't mind lying will cheerfully say 'all's fair in love and war, and no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy!'. Lots of business people love war metaphors because competition justifies all sorts of things, and when someone asks whether customers are the bombed out civilians in this scenario they can say 'it's only a metaphor, don't take it so seriously!'.

If it's a question about your product, don't, although it's OK to say 'were looking at it - and that's all I can tell you'. If it's a question about your company the answer is don't, but nor should be afraid to assert your privacy. If it's output rather than response to a question (eg a whiff of bullshit in your sales literature, I'd say avoid anything more specific than 'our product is the most awesome' that can't be justified.

tl;dr it's ok to lie to competitors, but not to your customers.

Run your question through the argument in "Be Good": http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html Quite apart from your self-respect (value: priceless), telling soft lies is not going to help you be good, and there's a reasonable argument it may harm your company.

I happened to write an article about this a few weeks back. My answer is a concessional yes. But in my limited sales experience I don't do it myself. Thus making me a poor salesperson. See excerpt:

"These tactics are part of all sales. To large degree, it’s accepted and understood to be part of the game. It usually works out in the end since many if not most companies provide valuable services to their customers. At times customers just need a little encouragement to get over their hesitation to commit to buying. For better or worse, these little lies and half truths keep the economy churning."

http://stephenegibson.com/2009/05/25/when-is-wrong-wrong/

Depends on the definition of "soft".

Sometimes you have to be very optimistic (better term: aggressive) regard product features and schedule. This will drive you further and faster towards your goals.

You can't always make all deadlines and keep all promises. And in business (at least in the technology business) nobody expects you to.

If, on the other hand, you make this into a habit -- you will loose trust and customers will be looking elsewhere.

However, I do not necessarily agree with others regarding "long-term" loss of trust. Companies exist to make money and when/if you have a good product that will save them money, you will be able to regain that lost trust.

If you have to ask if its okay, it isn't for you.

I don't think that this sort of blanket statement is universal in the way that your tone implies.

If you question the ethics of something, you have an ethical problem with it, after that it is all justification of why you can allow yourself to do something you find at the very least, morally ambiguous.

purely personal; there was no universal 'you' intended.

I think this is only reliable if you have a perfect conscience or one so little consulted that you only notice your misgivings when you try to do something really rotten.

Never. Trust lost is trust lost forever.

Reminds me of the parable of a man who sometimes stretched the truth in business. He went to a guru for help with his "problem".

The guru's advice: "Take these 10 feather pillows, slash them open, and release the feathers to the wind. Then come back tomorrow."

The next day the man returned for more advice, "Now go get the feathers."

I don't get the story at all. Could you explain?

The feathers are a metaphor for words you wish you never said. It's pretty hard to take them back.

d'oh. Thanks.

No. (fullstop)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com