I have been a professional salesperson for nearly 25 years and I have met more than my share of operations executives that will flat-out tell you “salespeople lie!" Let me explain why.
It all comes down to human behavior and how people are wired. Follow me for a minute here: If you are a salesperson, you are typically very outgoing, like to talk to tons of people and say whatever comes to your mind to get the prospect talking. If you are an operations executive, you only talk with people that need to talk with you; you are very calculating about what you say and you remember everything. That is where the problem starts.
An operations person that remembers everything assumes that everyone else remembers everything also, but that is not true at all. Many people I have met believe the majority of people see the world the same way they do. Nothing can be further from the truth. In reality, only about 3-4 percent of the population sees the world the way you do; more than 95 percent of people see it very differently. Hence, “salespeople lie!"
Let’s explore this scenario further: A salesperson visits 10 potential clients in a week and talks with all of them about numerous topics discussing lots of different products and services. The client hears what they want to hear and the salesperson is just trying to hit a nerve that will let him or her start the sales process — at least that’s what good salespeople do. When the salesperson leaves the office of one prospect they go on to the next with a clean slate in their mind. And, the process starts again.
A sale in our industry might take a few months to complete and then another month or so before it gets scheduled for implementation and eventually cut over. So, it could be four to six months between the first prospecting call (where the salesperson talked about everything under the sun) and the time the operations manager is interacting with the customer. When the operations manager interacts with the client they get a different story from the one the salesperson told. Since the operations manager believes “the client is always right," he believes the client.
When the operations manager finds out that the salesperson “promised" a few features that were not in the job package, he goes back to the salesperson to find out what happened. Here is where the fun begins. As stated earlier, most operations people are very detail-oriented and remember everything they ever said. People like this also tend to believe that everyone should behave as they do, which means that everyone should remember everything they say and not forget the details.
