Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Every vendor stretches the truth somewhere in your sales process, and most buyers respond to all of it the same way, forgiving everything or torching a good deal over nothing. In this Playbook, Max Clark sorts vendor lies into three categories, a harmless stretch, one rep's invented promise, and a lie the whole company stands behind, and gives a different response for each. Then he turns the mirror on buyers, the shopped quote, the invented deadline, the fake executive sponsorship, because buyers run the same three plays back. Keep guessing which lie you just caught, or put someone neutral in the room who ends the guessing entirely. That's the only fix that actually works.
Run this the next time a vendor claim doesn't sit right
Run this the next time a vendor claim doesn't sit right
- Creative embellishment. The provider is stretching into a category they do not quite fit, out in the open. Calling a router with a config page "SD WAN" is the pattern. Costs you nothing to see through. Note it, move on.
- One rep's invention. A specific promise nobody at the company authorized. "I text the CEO directly" is the tell. This is a person problem, not a company problem. Get a different rep, do not walk from the vendor over it.
- Institutional fiction. The whole sales org repeats the same claim with a straight face, and leadership blessed it. When the dishonesty is the official story, that is the provider you cut.
Now run your own last vendor call through the same three buckets, from the vendor's side of the table. Telling three competitors they're each the front runner, that's your version of Bucket 1. Inventing a deadline that doesn't exist to force urgency, that's Bucket 2. Claiming executive sponsorship that doesn't exist because your whole team has quietly agreed to say it, that's Bucket 3.
Keep guessing which lie you just caught, or put someone neutral in the room who ends the guessing entirely. That's the only fix that actually works.
The Playbook
Keep guessing which lie you just caught, or put someone neutral in the room who ends the guessing entirely. That's the only fix that actually works.
The Playbook
Resources mentioned
SD WAN, the capability category vendors most often mislabel
Public company 10-K filings, used to fact check inflated market share claims
AWS cloud spend, used as the scale comparison that exposes a fake top-customer claim
About the show
Signed is the podcast for buyers in a market built for sellers. Playbooks are the solo format, 10 to 15 minutes, one trigger, one specific play. New episodes weekly at itbroker.com/podcast. If the trigger in today's Playbook is one you're facing right now, book an intro call at itbroker.com. We help buyers make the right call the first time. Buy tech without regret. Follow: @itbrokerdotcom
Public company 10-K filings, used to fact check inflated market share claims
AWS cloud spend, used as the scale comparison that exposes a fake top-customer claim
About the show
Signed is the podcast for buyers in a market built for sellers. Playbooks are the solo format, 10 to 15 minutes, one trigger, one specific play. New episodes weekly at itbroker.com/podcast. If the trigger in today's Playbook is one you're facing right now, book an intro call at itbroker.com. We help buyers make the right call the first time. Buy tech without regret. Follow: @itbrokerdotcom
Full Transcript
Creators and Guests
What is Signed?
The IT market is built for sellers, not buyers.
That's why 80% of tech buyers regret their last major purchase. Deals take longer than they should. Teams get locked into platforms that don't fit, contracts they can't escape, and vendors they wouldn't choose again. The pitches, demos, and analyst reports are built to close deals, not help buyers make the right one.
Signed is the podcast for the buyers. Host Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, talks with CIOs, CFOs, operators, and founders who've lived inside real enterprise tech deals — the ones who can explain what actually determined whether the deal worked.
Plus weekly Playbooks breaking down the moments that matter most: renewals, M&A, compliance mandates, office moves, budget cuts, and the specific plays that separate buyers who get it right from those who regret it.
If you're responsible for choosing, negotiating, or living with the consequences of enterprise technology, this show is for you.
New episodes weekly. An ITBroker.com podcast.
Max Clark (00:00)
He said, Max, all customers are liars.
Max Clark (00:02)
He's right. Think about what the buyer does. You take a vendor's quote and you shop it around to three competitors. You tell every one of them they're in the front runner. You invent timeline pressure that doesn't exist to manufacture urgency. You inflate your executive sponsorship. the CEO is really excited about this. When the CEO has no idea the project exists, You dangle. If you just hit this number, we'll sign today, knowing full well you won't. Buyers do all of it. I've watched it happen. I've probably done a version of it myself.
Max Clark (00:31)
I've never once worked with a technology provider where somebody on the sales or marketing side didn't stretch the truth. Not once. And here's the uncomfortable part. I've made my peace with some of it. Some of it I'll forgive all day long. What you actually need to learn as a buyer is how to tell which kind of lie you're looking at, because they're not all the same. And what you do about each one is completely different. I'm Max Clark, CEO of itbroker.com, and this is a signed playbook. Let's get into it.
Max Clark (01:07)
Let me start with a thing nobody in this industry wants to say out loud. Embellishment is the default setting. It's not a bug in how tech gets sold. It's the water everybody's swimming in. A salesperson promises a feature, is on the roadmap, feels harmless in the moment, everybody nods. But if you're buying because you need that feature and and it never ships, you're the one who's screwed. And the funny thing is the rep who promised it is usually long gone by then. It's the customer success manager who inherits the mess.
Max Clark (01:35)
Some poured CSM doing the cleanup on a promise they never made. Marketing does its own version. Customer logos splashed across the homepage, big bold size claims. And you're sitting there as the buyer going, Are those real? Or is that somebody's overactive imagination that nobody's fact-checked? Let me give you the actual stuff. Things I've run into more than once. These aren't hypotheticals. Fantasy timelines with zero connection to physical reality.
Max Clark (02:02)
Somebody quoting fiber to an offnet building in under 30 days. That's not a thing. The trenching alone laughs at that timeline. Capability claims that are a stretch. It's not SD-WAN because you have a web configuration page. That's a router with a login screen. The flagship customer they're bragging about. You go look at, and that customer has a public case study with their competitor. Most of the customer logos turn out to be a five-person team somewhere in the org running a free trial.
Max Clark (02:32)
Not exactly an enterprise endorsement. Partner of the year, great. So are five other companies in the same year for the same award. The SLA on the marketing slide is not the SLA in the contract. And the contract is the only one that matters.
Max Clark (02:47)
We're the largest provider of X, except that gets debunked in a public company's own 10K filing. We're the third largest AWS customer. That's wild considering your entire annual revenue is smaller than that one public customer spends on cloud. And my personal favorite, yeah, I text one-on-one with the CEO of a Fortune 50 phone company. Sure you do, buddy. Whatever you say. Now here's where it gets useful for you, because if you just sit there cynically assuming everyone is lying, you can't buy anything.
Max Clark (03:16)
You'll never move. So I sorted it into three buckets and I respond to each but one completely differently. Bucket one, creative embellishment I can forgive. This is a provider trying to wedge themselves into a category they don't quite fit. Calling something SD WAN when it's close-ish, it's a stretch. But it's a stretch out in the open and it doesn't really cost me anything to see through it. I note it, I move on, everybody's marketing rounds up. I'm not going to torch a deal over rounding. Bucket two is a lie a specific salesperson invented on their own.
Max Clark (03:46)
The I text the CEO stuff, the promise that was never theirs to make. This one tells me something about the person, not necessarily the company. So I don't kill the provider, I kill the rep. I go to their leadership and I get a different person on my account. Because if this individual is freelancing fiction to win my business, I can't trust a word out of their mouth for the rest of the relationship. Bucket three is the dangerous one, the lie that's spread throughout the entire sales organization. Leadership lessed it, it's become canon.
Max Clark (04:14)
Because if the company itself can't tell the truth about who it is, there is no version of this relationship that ends well. Forgive the first, switch the rep on the second, cut the third. That's the whole framework. And the main point, if you're on the selling side and you're listening, don't lie.
Max Clark (04:31)
It always, always comes back to haunt you. The roadmap promise becomes a renewal fight. The fake timeline becomes a lawsuit. It's not even good business. It's a debt you take out against your own future. Okay, so far this sounds like a hit piece on vendors. Let me turn it around because it would be really easy to make the episode. Sellers are liars, buyers are victims, and that's not the truth. A friend of mine in sales said something to me once that I haven't been able to shake. He said, Max, all customers are liars. And here's the thing.
Max Clark (05:00)
He's right. Think about what the buyer does. You take a vendor's quote and you shop it around to three competitors. You tell every one of them they're in the front runner. You invent timeline pressure that doesn't exist to manufacture urgency. You won't say who else is in the deal. You inflate your executive sponsorship. the CEO is really excited about this. When the CEO has no idea the project exists, you sandbag the budget. You dangle. If you just hit this number, we'll sign today, knowing full well you won't. Buyers do all of it. I've watched it happen. I've probably done a version of it myself.
Max Clark (05:30)
So look at the actual situation. You've got a seller incentivized to embellish and a buyer incentivized to misdirect. Two sides both holding their cards to their chest, both stretching the truth, neither able to trust a single thing the other says. That's not a people problem. Nobody woke up evil. That's a structural problem. The IT market is built for sellers, not buyers. And when there's nobody neutral in the room, dishonesty isn't a character flaw. It's the rational move. Everyone lies because lying is the only way to protect yourself when you don't trust the other side.
Max Clark (06:00)
And neither side trusts the other because everyone's lying. It feeds itself. So how do you break the loop? You put someone in the middle that both sides can actually tell the truth to. This is a huge part of what we do, and I didn't fully appreciate it until I'd done it a few hundred times. When you work with us, you tell us the real story, the real budget, the real timeline, who's actually pushing this internally and who's lukewarm. What would genuinely close a deal? You can tell us the truth because we're on your side of the table. We're not going to use it against you.
Max Clark (06:29)
And we're not going to leak it to the providers. Then we go run the process. We create real competition between providers, but it's ethical competition. We tell the providers the truth too, the real requirements, the real timeline, the real decision criteria without exposing you and without exposing them to a buyer who's playing games. Here's what's wild. When everyone in the deal is finally telling the truth through one trusted neutral party, the whole thing just works better. Providers sharpen their pencils because they know the deal is real.
Max Clark (06:57)
You get honest answers because they're not guessing what you want to hear. Timelines get accurate, pricing gets sharp, the theater stops. That's the part people don't expect. They think a neutral advocate is about leverage, about beating the vendor up on price. And sure, you get better pricing, but the bigger win is that for maybe the first time, everyone in the transaction is operating on real information, and real information is what lets you buy without regret. So if you're doing this on your own, and most buyers are, here's what I'd leave you with.
Max Clark (07:26)
One, assume everyone is rounding up, not because they're evil, but because the system rewards it. Calibrate accordingly. Two, sort the lies. Forgive the harmless stretch. When a rep invents something, get a new rep. Burn the liar, not the provider. And when the whole company repeats the same fiction, walk away. The pattern tells you everything. Three, get the real story in writing. Roadmap promises live in emails, not in contracts, and that's on purpose. If it matters, it goes in the contract. The SLA on the slide is marketing.
Max Clark (07:56)
The SLA on the agreement is real. And four, the big one, recognize the whole game is rigged against trust. And the single highest leverage thing you can do is get someone neutral in the room. Somebody both sides can be honest with, because the problem was never that people lie. The problem is that nobody built a reason for them to tell the truth. That's the job. That's what someone in your corner actually does. I'm Max Clark. This was the playbook by Tech Without Regret.