Friday Rant – Truth in Sales

One of my colleagues recently got an email from a vendor who sent over a “report” of all the anonymous visitors to his corporate website.  Looks impressive – It includes some very big name companies who are searching for his company name, flagship product, and his product type.

So here’s the rant – It is IMPOSSIBLE to track the visitors to someone elses’ website because it requires some sort of tracking code to be placed on each page that is tracked.

So how can they justify sending over this nonsense to prospects?  2 reasons:

1.  Because it triggers the “Greed” gene in the sales people it targets. “IBM is looking at our website????”  Nevermind that it would be nearly impossible to determine which of IBM’s 40,000 US employees visited.

2.  Because people are generally optimists, in spite of the fact that the prospect generally knows that what they are being sold a bill of goods.

So what’s a good method to sell ethically, and restore prospects faith in the Sales process:

1.  Post your Pricing – although it cuts counter to your desire to keep your pricing a secret, it allows customers to go an look at the price at their leisure.

2.  Stand By Your Pricing- Once you’ve listed them, you need to stand by them.  Nothing screams “Used Car Salesman” like Making a Deal for your prospect.  If you’ll cut the prices to get the deal, why wouldn’t your eventual customer feel like they should haggle with you for a Better Deal?

At the end of the day, just be ethical in your dealings, because I hate dealing with customers that you’ve offended and are now jaded that I’m going to do them wrong…like some of you already have.