I’ve previously pointed out that political campaigns are like sales campaigns, with each candidate trying to make the case that his or her “product” is best. And, like sales teams, political teams start doing weird things when it’s pretty clear they might lose the sale.
In the case of Hillary Clinton, for example, she’s started telling whoppers in order to make her “product” look good in response to a major competitive threat. Clinton’s ridiculous story about dodging snipers at an airport reminds me of the time when a software sales guy that I was working with claimed we had customers using our new software — even though it had been released for beta testing. The lie helped close the deal but could easily have backfired had the customer asked for references.
Of course, lying is pretty much par for the course for politicians, although usually they limit the duplicity to campaign promises, rather than easily disprovable anecdotes. In software sales, the equivalent of a campaign promise saying “yeah, we’ve got that feature, too” when a prospect was convinced that a competitive product was superior. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but when it did, the end result was either an irritated customer (because the feature didn’t exist) or a frustrated programming staff (who were often expected to interrupt what they were doing an code the required feature.)
The overriding concept, of course, is that it’s justifiable to lie as long as you don’t get caught and as long as you close the deal. So I’m curious what you folk think of this kind of behavior. Needless to say, we’re all committed to the concept of having strong customer relationships, based upon mutual respect and trust and all. But when it comes down to actually closing the deal…
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