Having spent my entire career in practicing and teaching procurement, one of my guilty pleasures is reading sales literature and attending sales training. I attended a sales workshop last month and came across a related sales article today.

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There were a couple of interesting quotes in this article that I thought that I’d blog about. They capture an interesting perception of procurement people that salespeople have. Here are a couple of those quotes:

“You can lie to a salesperson and still go to heaven.”

and

“Sandler has come up with a concept he calls the ‘buyer seller dance,’ which is basically that the sales person follows a path like this: SEE IF THEY WANT TO BUY – TELL THEM THE SOLUTION – TRY AND CLOSE THE DEAL – CHASE THEM. Whereas the buyer follows the same process but does this: LIE – STEAL – LIE – HIDE. They lie to get you interested, steal all your information as the sales person has verbal diarrhoea, they then lie about wanting to buy and then hide as the sales person chases.”

What are your thoughts on this perception that salespeople have of you?