Why honesty is the most commercial move in sales

Honesty is the most commercial move in sales because buyers now expect to be misled, so the seller who tells them the plain truth stands out. Admitting what your product can't do, giving your board a forecast you can defend and saying "we're not the right fit" all bring in more revenue over time than the alternatives, and I'd make that case on commercial grounds alone.

I first wrote about this in January 2012, in a post called "The Importance of Being Earnest." I said then that lying was the worst sin in sales, and that anyone on my team who lied to a customer would be disciplined for it. Fourteen years and a lot of AI later, I haven't changed my mind. I gave the idea a whole chapter in my book, Curiosity.

Buyers expect to be misled

Gartner surveyed 645 B2B buyers in August and September 2025 and found that 51% think they're more likely to get misleading information from generative AI, while 49% think it's more likely to come from a sales rep. Buyers are split almost down the middle on whether the chatbot or the salesperson is the bigger risk.

The same survey found 69% of buyers prefer to check AI-generated insights with a sales rep. So buyers want a human to confirm what the machine told them, and about half of them suspect that human is the less reliable of the two. That's an awkward place for our profession to be. It's also an opening, because the rep who's consistently straight becomes the person the buyer checks everything else against.

Consistency counts as much as candor. In an earlier survey, Gartner found 69% of B2B buyers saw inconsistencies between a supplier's website and what its sellers told them, and warned that "it can create mistrust, potentially putting the transaction at risk." If your rep says one thing and your pricing page says another, the buyer doesn't care which one is wrong.

The small lies are the expensive ones

Everyone knows not to tell the big lie, the one where you promise the product does something it doesn't. You'll be found out within two weeks, so that lie punishes itself.

The lies that catch decent people are small. "It's with the courier now," when it hasn't left the warehouse. "That's the biggest discount I've ever given anyone," when it's nowhere close. I used both examples in 2012 and I still use them when I coach, because they're so ordinary. In the moment, they feel like smoothing things over.

The trouble is what they're about. The big lie is about the product. The small lie is about you, and when it unravels, the customer learns something about your character. If you'll fib about whether a box has shipped, what will you do when the stakes are high? You've remortgaged your credibility to dodge a two-minute conversation about a delay.

Think of trust as an account. Every straight answer is a small deposit, and the balance builds over months. One lie, caught, and the balance goes to zero, then negative, because now they're rereading everything you've ever told them.

AI raises the stakes twice. Buyers can check your claims against an AI model and a couple of review sites before you've reached the parking lot. And AI is a fluent, confident liar. Let it draft a proposal unchecked and sooner or later it'll include a feature you don't have or a number that's wrong. The customer won't care that a machine wrote it. It's your lie now, so read everything before it goes out under your name.

Honest moves that win deals

These are the habits I'd want from every seller on a team I run:

• Say "I don't know. Let me find out." Bluffing gains you nothing when you guess right and costs you a lot when you guess wrong. Admitting you don't know makes your other answers more believable. Then go and find out.
• Name what you're bad at. Every product has gaps. I've said to more than one operations lead, the person who has to live with the software after everyone else moves on, "that workflow, we're not brilliant at yet, here's the clunky bit you'll hit." You can watch their posture change. They believe the good bits because you told them the bad ones.
• Respect the competition out loud. Knocking a rival reads as fear. Say what they do well, then widen the frame to what this buyer needs.
• Flag bad news early. Call before the deadline slips, with the reason and the plan. Customers know things go wrong. They're watching what you do when it does.

"We're not the right fit" is a revenue decision

The pushy approach wins deals you should never have taken. Customers who were talked into something that doesn't fit churn, complain and warn their friends off you. It trains buyers to distrust you, so every negotiation turns into a fight, and it leans on discounting because it has nothing else.

The honest approach gets you customers who needed the thing, so they stay. Negotiations are shorter and the price holds. And you get referrals, because people send their friends to the person who told them the truth, even when the truth was "we're not the right fit."

For a company between seed and Series C, a bad-fit customer is expensive. They tend to take more than their share of support time, their feature requests pull the product sideways, and they show up as churn a year later, right when you're explaining retention to your board.

Honesty sometimes costs you the deal on the day. I once told a late-stage prospect that the rival they were leaning toward was strong at exactly the thing they'd fixated on, then laid out the wider picture and left it with them. They went with the other lot. Several months later they came back, because the wider picture turned out to be what counted, and they remembered who hadn't badmouthed anyone.

One of those approaches is a strategy for a good quarter. The other is a strategy for a good decade.

Honest forecasting is the same habit

The forecast is where founders and sales leaders tell small lies to their board, and often to themselves first. "That one's closing this month," when nobody on the buyer's side has said so, is the courier line with a bigger audience. It buys you a comfortable board meeting now and a much less comfortable one next quarter, where the questions are about you.

An honest forecast has a few simple rules:

• A deal counts as commit only when the buyer has done something: booked the security review, brought in procurement, agreed a start date.
• Slips get called the week you see them, with the reason.
• Deals waiting on the status quo get their own line, because "no decision" is a different problem from losing to a competitor (more on that in what to do when they're happy with their current supplier).
• The number you give the board is one you'd bet your own money on.

That usually means a smaller pipeline at first, and one you can trust. How the forecast gets made is one of the first things I look at as a fractional CRO, because a forecast the board believes buys you room for everything else.

And if the parcel isn't with the courier yet, say so. The customer will forgive the delay. They won't forgive finding out you're the kind of person who fibs when it's convenient.