Fake News

Anyone who really knows the world of sales knows that information in general, and information about the competition in particular, carries a lot of weight in your chances of success.

That's why salespeople "keep their cards close to their chest".

When a competition opens up for an important project, everyone gets more sensitive, all the "antennas" go up, and an opportunity arises to feed the competitor false information to throw him off. Over the years this becomes a kind of "way of life", whenever reality invites it.

Let me take you back to a tough, brutal contest between me and Uri, my toughest competitor back in my alarm systems days.

We were both trying to sell a big, complex, expensive alarm system to a large industrial laundry located (as far as I remember, after all it's been 40 years...) in Karmiel.

Every few days I'd drive out there to move things along and try to close.

It turned out Uri was doing the same. Sometimes we'd bump into each other on site, and sometimes on the road...

Each of us was trying to get the customer and the people around him to reveal what the other guy had offered, so we could prepare our counterarguments.

One of the cleverer ways to get that information was (and still is) to state something wrong and get corrected... (For example: "I know my competitors don't have ______!" Most customers jump in to correct you: "Actually they do, and one of them is even throwing in ______.")

After a few weeks, as I grew more and more worried about the fate of the project, I set up a "chance meeting" with Uri, with the aim of getting him off the project...

After a bit of small talk and asking after each other's health, I "confided" in Uri:

"Don't ask what that guy from the laundry did to me... He really squeezed me dry.

"He demanded I give him auto-diallers, hook him up to the monitoring center for free and who knows what else... He sucked the life out of me before he finally signed the order..."

"It's true he's a terrible squeezer and not a nice guy," Uri answered, "but I closed with him yesterday."

And it was true. Uri had beaten me to it.

Using information has been with me throughout my professional life, and it served me well in huge, multi-million-dollar projects too.

A very well-known plant connected to Israel Aerospace Industries put out a tender for the development and production of several prototypes, with an option for future mass production, of a military subsystem.

The RFQ went out to three Israeli companies at the same time, and we were one of them.

The first goal was to find out who the competitors were.

In a meeting with the buyer responsible for the project, I threw out something like: "You always send these things out NATO-wide. The whole world and his brother will be stirring the pot on this one"...

"No, no," he hurried to correct me. "This project is classified, and it's being made entirely in Israel."

"Sure, but in the ______ field, only we have the technology"... I went on.

"Not true, ______ would have no problem competing for this either," was his answer...

And the ping-pong went on until I knew exactly who the two competitors were. To be on the safe side, I then visited a few engineers as well and used the same technique to cross-check the information.

The next question was which of them posed a real technological and financial challenge for me, and which less so.

It didn't take long or any complicated research to identify the problematic competitor, the one I had to beat.

I went to the engineering departments at my plant and asked for the inputs (development hours, technician hours, raw materials, schedule and so on), and wrote a detailed draft proposal (a booklet of about 30 pages), including initial comments on the specs, reservations about some of the contractual requirements and more. Except that the prices I wrote in it were about 40% higher than the prices I actually intended to charge...

At the time, I was in regular working contact and correspondence with a different professional group at the company that was our main competitor on this important project.

I tore just two pages out of the draft proposal, the ones containing the inflated financial offer. I called in my secretary and told her to slip them into the routine correspondence she was handling with that unrelated group at the competing plant...

About an hour after she'd sent the documents, I called her in again and told her to phone the representative of the group that had received the letter and mention that some unrelated pages had slipped in by mistake.

About two months later we won the huge project.

To this day, nobody has heard about the move I made.

So how do I know it worked?

Because right after all the competitors had submitted their bids, I sat down to lunch with the purchasing manager of the plant that issued the tender, and he told me (and I quote): "There's one plant here that got scared out of its wits and jacked its prices up like crazy"...

It wasn't hard to guess who.

By the way, here's what I tell my students: if vital information about the competition lands in your lap by chance, and easily, watch out. It may very well be fake news!