Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
paraschopra.com
Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#2It 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.
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#3Nothing 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.
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#4If you have to ask if its okay, it isn't for you.
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#5Nothing 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.
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#6Run 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.
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#7Nothing 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#8In 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.)
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#9Nothing 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay?
#10As 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?