Guide To Buying Software For Your Business and Spotting Dishonest Sales Tactics

Buying or changing software for your business is a big step, and unfortunately there are too many sleezy salesmen and rogue software companies that use deplorable tactics to obtain sales, and when they do, it is always to your detriment. I am in the software industry, and can tell you that in my sector, well over half of the software companies use sleazy, dishonest and misleading sales tactics.

Whenever you are dealing with a software salesman, you must always remember, they want the sale to get their commission, they are not your friend, they are not to be trusted, they want you to pay as much as possible, and many will go to any lengths to get that sale, even lie through their teeth. It sounds obvious, but a good salesman will gain your trust and tell you what you want to hear, so instinctively, you will trust them. If they told you the truth, you probably wouldn't buy their software.

Large companies have intensive assessment and procurement procedures to make sure the product is up to standard when buying software, they have people to compare in depth the different products and they have the resources to properly soak test (test in a real life environment) the products, to establish what suits them the best. Medium and smaller companies don't have this luxury, and are far more prone to be conned by salesman.

There are signs that you can take as a big red flag:

• The software company does not publish prices. This is one of the most unscrupulous tactics, as the salesman will assess how much you can afford to pay, so that they can charge you as much as they can. They will tell you that their standard price is X but will give you the software at a discount for Y, which is a lie. If their price was X, they would publish it, but they will give you numerous fake excuses why they don't.
• They will get you to pay for work upfront. The idea of this is to get you locked in to using them and stop you leaving. They will charge you for doing a customisation or to create a document, etc, take the money upfront, then take ages, sometimes years, if at all, to do it. They will also use that money to hold you to ransom, being that if you leave them, they will keep the money even though they never did the work. In essence, they are saying you can trust them, but making you pay upfront is either them not trusting you (which is unlikely) or they are ripping you off. A nominal deposit is understandable, but full payment upfront for work not done is not.
• They lock you into a contract. To take monthly subscription payments is easy and simple today, yet unscrupulous software companies will make you pay for a far longer term upfront. Remember, if their product was good, they would let you pay monthly on a flexible lice, as they would know that even with a flexible monthly contract, you will still use them. If their software is no good, they can only retain customers by dishonestly locking them into a contract. Some companies even threaten to withhold your data if you don't pay demanded fees as a way of stopping you from leaving. If they say that their software is too advanced to take monthly payments or some other feeble excuse, that is just an outright lie, especially if some of their competitors do it.
• Installation or onboarding fees. They say this is the cost to setup and install the software as specialists need to do this, which is complete rubbish and just a way to extort more money out of you. Any installation can be done automatically, as far more complex software than what they are selling installs itself automatically. If the company can't even write an automatic installation, then they are either terrible programmers (in which case you should keep clear) or they are just looking for an excuse to take more money from you.
• There are no free test versions. It costs a software company nothing to let you have a free version of their software for testing. If software has no free version for testing, then that is another big red flag. The reason is that the salesman wants to control what you see and what you experience, hide shortfalls and prevent you seeing things you won't like in their software. If they say the reason is due to installation or onboarding fees, then just see the previous point.
• They discredit other products you are reviewing. Any experienced salesman would never do this, only the sleazy ones will do this once they have your trust. The reason they are doing this is that they know in an even playing field you would choose the other product over theirs. It's understandable for a salesman to say things about a product you are already using and looking to move away from, as you would tell them the issues you are having, so they could tell you about other similar customer experiences. A salesman does not know the inner workings of your company, and does not know about how compatible another software product would be for you. Sometime a far inferior software product could be better suited for you. As an example, we had a car rental company look at our software and another product. The other product was very basic and specialised in car rental, whereas ours is far more advanced, with many more features than they needed. We told them that it would probably be better for them to go with the other product as it was very simplistic and did everything they needed.
• They have bad or very few online reviews. This is obvious, but surprisingly people don't check Google or other software review sites, and don't read the comments. If there are just a few very positive reviews, we all know they are probably fake, more so if there is one terrible review amongst just a few 100% positive ones. However dishonest companies have ways of avoiding bad reviews, like agreeing to give a partial refund if the disgruntled user agrees to sign a NDA to not say anything bad about them.
• They give sales people fancy names. The word "salesman" can instantly put up a barrier, so they use fancy names like "Enterprise Analyst", "Success Team Member", "Customer Liaison", "Integration analyst", etc. A new fancy title still means that they are salesmen. The biggest tell tell sign of this is when they have Sales Managers, but no salesmen!
• Mislead about integrations and features. Another thing dishonest companies do is try and copy features from their competitors and say that their product does what the others do. This is a huge problem for companies that don't soak test software as they can't really test the claimed functionality until it's too late. In reality the software probably partially does the things they claim, but very badly, as the company put in minimal effort just to tick a box to say that they have that feature. As an example, they would say they integrate with QuickBooks, however once you start using the software, you see that the integration is minimal at best and doesn't work as you were led to believe. To help you with this, many third party software products now have app stores, like Google, Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, etc. and they evaluate the software before allowing it to be listed. If the software company say they integrate with a product and they are not listed, that is a big red flag.

You must always remember, that while you are struggling with your software and the software provider, your company is not being productive, losing money and losing business. Even if you have been mislead into buying bad software, just remember, far bigger and better people have fallen for the same dishonest tactics before, so don't feel ashamed or embarressed. It would be far better, and more economical for you to just to bite the bullet, accept the losses, and switch to a more reputable company so that your company can thrive like it should.

Remember, if anybody needs to lie and deceive you to convince you to buy their product, then that is not the product for you, after all, good software should sell itself and not need a salesman.