By Mark Stuyt

A senior software exec vows to tell the truth in every business meeting for one year. It doesn’t work out.

What words cross your mind when you think of a salesman? Do integrity, honesty and trust race to the forefront? I suspect not. More likely your eyes narrow, hackles rise and suspicions awake as visions of used cars, vacuum cleaners and Herb Tarlick overwhelm you. Rest assured you’re not alone.

For years I wondered to what extent telling the absolute truth would impact my sales results. So, partly as a creative strategy to make the mundane task of flogging Enterprise Resource Planning software more interesting, and partly as a self-imposed social experiment, I committed to telling the complete truth to customers for an entire year. You read correctly. The absolute truth. Not the watered-down, it’s not a lie if you really believe it in your heart, acts of omission don’t really qualify kind of truth either. I committed to being completely honest and forthright in each interaction I had with my customers and prospects for the entire year, and I was prepared to risk my income to satisfy my curiosity. Little did I know at the time that my self-indulgent experiment would ultimately lead me to resign from PeopleSoft and move my family to Mexico.

When asked to participate in dysfunctional Request for Proposal (RFP) processes, I declined. When asked to share my opinion on product quality and stability, my responses were not filtered through a corporate agenda. When I discovered customers making undisciplined and/or naive decisions that would result in expensive long-term ramifications, I gave them clear guidance. When asked a direct question during a sales cycle, I told the truth. That being said, I didn’t wield the truth like a club. I was professional, appropriate and sensitive to the position and objectives of the individual I was speaking to; but I told the truth. At the end of 2003, a year in which I worked harder, longer and provided more strategic value to my customers than at any other period in my career, I found myself far short of my revenue target for the first time in many, many years.

To put this into proper context, it’s important to understand that my employer, PeopleSoft, is an empowering and supportive organization with a strong management team, sound products and ethical business practices that are largely in alignment with my own, and customers that are, for the most part, content. So why bolt?

SLAPPED IN THE FACE
Shortly after embarking on my “honesty will enhance my results” lab experiment, I assumed responsibility for one of PeopleSoft’s larger Canadian public-sector customers. During one of my initial meetings I was reprimanded by a senior executive, who declared that he was tired of dealing with salesmen intent on selling him software.

(Huh?) He strongly suggested that instead of trolling for purchase orders, I should instead work with his organization to extract more value from its existing investment. With that direction, I convinced PeopleSoft to invest more than $80,000 in billable resources to remedy some immediate problems (related to process and implementation challenges rather than product issues), then embarked on a nine-month project that culminated in a compelling business case promising a $50 million payback. This initiative required minimal upfront investment, leveraged the organization’s existing solution and focused primarily on internal compliance, rather than software acquisition. During this process I facilitated strategy workshops with a broad cross-section of the customer community, interviewed dozens of functional and technical stakeholders, analyzed the customer’s existing business data and validated our conclusions with the functional business owners. After nine months of work and countless flights (I qualified for Air Canada Elite status on visits to this account alone), I requested a meeting with the aforementioned executive to present our findings.

Not only had my team successfully mapped significant measurable cost savings back to dysfunctional business processes, our research also uncovered a disturbing fact: only a fraction of the customer’s employees were actually using the finance software that had been implemented. To be blunt, our customer was operating one of the country’s most expensive general ledgers.

The meeting did not bear the fruit we anticipated. Instead of appreciating our investment and commitment to addressing what was clearly a shared challenge, we were branded as biased, the data dismissed as invalid and our intentions judged as self-serving. In this executive’s opinion his staff already ran a world-class purchasing organization despite the damning nature of the data. I had spent countless nights working on the project, skipped my sons’ sports activities, bypassed school plays and declined social and family events in order to research and craft this report, all to produce an analysis that was undeniably compelling, yet soundly discounted.

Ironically, to this day this organization continues to complain about the value it receives from its software investment and the single-minded, self-serving motivations of our sales organization.

Had this been an isolated experience I might have simply chalked it up to traditional bureaucratic impotence, but events were simultaneously unfolding on the private sector front as well. While in process with the aforementioned customer, I inherited responsibility for one of Vancouver’s most respected and successful companies, which, at the time, was refusing to pay its annual software maintenance bill due to a perceived bug in our software. While we empathized with their situation, our software was operating as designed and as documented, and PeopleSoft carried no legal obligation to provide this customer with anything other than its condolences. Yet in spite of this customer’s lose/win negotiation position, I persuaded PeopleSoft to commit to developing a custom solution that addressed this unique business process problem. Ethically, it was simply the right thing to do. Unfortunately, while we were securing internal development resources to resolve their issues (at our cost), they were negotiating with one of our competitors prior to the completion of a lengthy product selection process we were involved in.

PeopleSoft invested more than $50,000 in pursuit of this opportunity only to discover near the completion of the process that it was not being afforded the same degree of disclosure and guidance as the competitors. We were essentially used as cannon fodder to ensure a leveraged negotiation position with the eventual winner. Losing a legitimate competition is inevitable when you sign up for sales school, but being manipulated and deceived (especially when it results in lost nights and weekends with my family) is maddening. This experience not only negated the respect I previously held for this company, it resulted in it losing me, on a personal level, as a profitable customer.

BOTTOM-LINE DOLLARS
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to measure the financial impact of poor purchasing decisions that result from mistrust. Project management disciplines don’t measure the time, money and resources that would have been saved and/or spared had the right product been selected. That said, in my public sector example, $50 million of taxpayer’s money will be unnecessarily spent over the next five years to purchase commodity supplies. In my second example, the organization will potentially forego incremental business value and/or cost savings as a result of running a dishonest selection process. If we play the above examples out across the millions of sales campaigns run each year on business application software alone, the aggregated impact on the economy is staggering, ultimately resulting in inflated project costs, lost business opportunities and unrealized shareholder value.

These prices come as a result of the imbalance of power that exists between buyers and sellers during the procurement process, with buyers wielding absolute control over bidding vendors. This counterproductive imbalance has been in place since Eve sold Adam on the idea of a fruit salad, and I suspect it won’t change anytime soon. What amazes me, however, is how account executives involved in selling strategic business solutions — solutions that ultimately drive business flexibility and operational efficiency — are often treated no better than the average retail appliance salesman. I’ve worked in technology sales for more than 15 years, with some of the largest and most respected companies in the industry, and continue to find myself astounded at how little trust is placed in relationships with vendor representatives — regardless of their tenure, experience and content. For a business executive to accept that a salesman is a peer is to accept that the imbalance of power between buyer and seller is inappropriate.

And as I’ve seen on countless occasions, most executives would rather retain control, or prove themselves superior, than be successful. Fortunately there are notable exceptions that make the negative situations easier to digest. When I worked with Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), its business executives were deeply engaged in project definition, selection and implementation with success criteria predicated on functional requirements that mapped to measurable business objectives. My sales and implementation team members were treated as peers and respected as professionals throughout the project, which was, not surprisingly, completed on time, under budget and deployed with more capabilities than were originally scoped. And while there were issues and challenges along the way, the lack of finger pointing and vendor bashing, coupled with a mutual commitment to success, saw us through the inevitable issues that accompany large projects.

At no point during the engagement did any member of my team feel like anything less than an equal, which resulted in CPR receiving an enhanced level of personal performance and an unwavering commitment to shared success.

POWER PLAY
Despite the CPR experience, the conclusion I reached at the end of my limited social experiment was that while executives desire stronger strategic value from the account executives who service their organizations, in reality they’re unwilling to create an environment that allows a true peer relationship to develop, especially if it entails relinquishing their position of control. Unfortunately, trust-based relationships take time to develop, whereas the bulk of us operate in a business cycle driven by the financial quarter. And producing quarterly results often comes at the expense of doing the right thing. So as much as the buying community has trained us to act as high-priced seals, the selling community has given customers ample reason to be wary and distrustful, resulting in a classic chicken-and-egg scenario that plays itself out quarter after quarter.

There’s no easy answer to this age-old problem, but at the micro-level there is room for optimism. As I discovered, for every two customers mired in “being right” or driving a dishonest process, there is a Canadian Pacific Railway out there that values integrity and partnership, and is open to hearing other “truths” and evaluating their merit. If organizations are going to move from today’s pride-based procurement model to one grounded in value and relationships, they need to appoint open-minded business sponsors to make strategic technology decisions, then provide account executives with unfettered access to them during the selection process. The resulting dialogues and exchange of ideas will manifest in creative new solutions and expanded perspectives. Clarity always leads to better decisions. Conversely, when account executives cultivate a trusted relationship with a customer they should hang on to it like their career depends on it — not only because it will ultimately return enhanced financial dividends, but also because it introduces an element of meaning and fulfillment into their day-to-day experiences that makes the balance of their relationships easier to bear.

Not surprisingly, the reactions to all this from my colleagues have been mixed. They unanimously agree with my analysis of the unbalanced relationships that exist between buyers and sellers, and the subsequent price buyers pay to retain their illusion of control, but few are prepared to adopt my radical approach (especially after reviewing my T4). The general consensus is customers don’t want to hear the absolute truth, and telling them so will negatively impact a salesman’s income. It’s far easier and more financially rewarding to answer RFP questions than to challenge them. As one of my co-workers stated simply, “We’ve been trained by the buying community to appeal to their egos rather than their business needs and to do otherwise is too costly.”

Ultimately, my experiment forced me to question the value I derive from the 50 to 60 hours I exchange each week for an income, and convinced me that continuing at this income level could only be achieved if I wanted to act the role of the salesman: positioning and spinning my value propositions such that they “coincidentally” match the perceived needs extracted from my prospects during the discovery process. While financially rewarding, this approach is uninteresting at best; there are far too many career possibilities to explore in life that don’t require compromising my dignity for an income. I’ll concede that it’s possible I’m letting a handful of parallel incidents set an entire chain of events in motion unnecessarily, or that I’m simply overreacting to an uncomfortable pair of negative business results. But I doubt it. I’ve been dealing with variants of the above scenarios for years, be it with Computer Associates, 3Com, Pivotal Software or PeopleSoft, though playing a far more complicit role in the process than I realized at the time.

And if I am wrong, 12 months on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta evaluating my next step in life isn’t necessarily an unbearable consequence.