Have you ever heard the term, selling with spin? It means to try and spin the deal better than it really is. I don’t like sales spin. I like to know the good and the bad about what I am buying and I suspect that most are like me. 25 years an ago I was selling a Holiday Inn and we had created a great looking book with pretty pictures of the hotel in it best light. I was meeting with a buyer and he scanned over the book and looked at me and said, “You must be really pushing a dog to spend this much time on a book.” I had to laugh because this Holiday Inn wasn’t a complete dog, but it did have an old long sad face. Ha

I used to know this gentlemen who thought of himself as a salesman’s salesman. The perfect example of what a salesman should be. The funny thing is people didn’t trust him and didn’t believe what he was saying. He thought the basic criteria to selling was to inflate the advantages of what he was selling.  Every time I was around him, I felt like I needed a shower.

A year or so ago I was showing a hotel with the owner to some buyers. The owner was telling the buyers things that anyone could see was an exaggeration of the facts. To the owner it was perfect and didn’t need a single dollar in upgrades. As soon as the showing was over and I was alone with the buyers I told them what a disaster I thought the hotel was. They smiled and agreed because they knew they could now trust me. We ended up selling the hotel to those same buyers but if I had tried to snow them on the condition, they would have walked away.

Years ago I started doing this thing where I would tell buyers all the bad things first before I would tell them the good things. I found that if you get the bad things out of the way, you don’t have surprises down the road and people seem to trust you more.

Real selling is not about slick sales pitches and smooth talking. It is about being real, straightforward, honest and transparent. If you are in sales, you will sell far more by being honest about what you are selling than trying to talk someone into it. KT