Buyers are liars... sometimes

I used to work in sales. I’d get frustrated getting the runaround, or getting ghosted by a prospect. An old boss used to say “buyers are liars.” He said it a lot, usually about enterprise deals where the contact didn’t realize they couldn’t actually make the purchase they were talking to you about. He didn’t mean it as an insult. He meant that people often don’t realize they lack the power to buy something, whether that’s new software or anything else. When I got frustrated, that little rhyme would help reframe the issue for me.

It’s a simple way to describe something layered and complicated: the art of closing a deal. Or, sometimes harder, figuring out why you lost it.

I’ve worked a handful of sales jobs. Freight brokering, software sales, retail leasing in NYC, investment sales in NYC, and now founder of my own startup, which means I’m selling more than I ever have. “Buyers are liars” has held up in every one of them. It doesn’t mean people are lying in the traditional sense, being dishonest to hurt you or help themselves. It’s usually more ambiguous than that. A prospect might not realize they can’t actually close the deal. They might not know their boss is eyeing a competitor. They might not know their own IT team is quietly building the same thing in-house for less. They might like the idea of helping a founder but can’t actually use the product. They might love the concept and not realize they don’t need it. There are a hundred versions of this, and “buyers are liars” covers most of them.

Here’s a story about one, and how the phrase helped once I reached the end of the line, and was completely frustrated and feeling foolish.

While I was still in the customer discovery phase of building Fora, back at NYU, I emailed an event planner who’d been enthusiastic about the concept from the first conversation. Once we got on a call, that enthusiasm went up tenfold. “This is genius!” “How has this not been built yet?” And a personal favorite: “When I left my old firm I needed something like this. I had to rebuild my contact list from scratch. I’d pay for it right now.”

One buyer, lined up before I’d even built anything. Time to build.

Over the next few months, I checked in regularly, showing the platform, walking through what we were adding. Every time I got a variation of: “Love that.” and “Can’t wait to use it.” I thought I had it made. A paying customer for a product that was an idea that came from a class project a few months ago.

I started to grow my confidence and asked if they wanted to be a beta tester. They said yes!

By February, I was ready for them to create an account. I sent something like, “We’re ready for you, when’s good for a call?” We connected and walked through Fora. They were excited to get started. After the call I sent the login link. Things were really moving.

They even wrote: “I’m really excited about this and where it’s heading. I have a couple other event coordinator friends who I think would benefit, let me talk to them and see what their interest level is.”

Referrals already. I’d made it. I couldn’t believe it. They say momentum is everything, and I had it before the product was even done. Silicon Valley here I come.

A week later and the account still wasn’t created. Hmmmm. I followed up. No answer.

Spring is busy in the events business, so I gave it a few days and tried again. Still nothing. Then a reply: “Sorry, been busy. How’s Monday?” Less warm than before, but a meeting nonetheless.

Monday came. I was on the call, Fora pulled up on one screen and the video chat on the other. I was ready to go. Ten minutes in, no sign of them. I checked in. “So sorry, something came up, can we reschedule?” I begrudgingly agreed. What choice did I have? I needed the deal!

This went on for months, excuses ranging from genuine to flimsy, including a family emergency I couldn’t exactly push back on.

I told myself I was going to let it go. It was a dead lead. Move on.

By then I had other users, other momentum, an actual pipeline. An old boss used to say the goal is to build a pipeline so big that one win or one loss doesn’t move the needle. I’d more or less gotten there. But I couldn’t actually let it go. I wanted this one specifically. Maybe because I’d already counted it as a win before it closed, which is one of the oldest mistakes in sales.

So instead of another vague check-in, I asked directly why they kept disappearing and never activated the account: was it timing, was it the product, or was it just never going to be a priority?

Three weeks later, they answered. Honestly, this time.

The issue wasn’t buying power, and it wasn’t that they’d lost interest. It was friction. Their contacts lived scattered across their phone and email, not in a spreadsheet, and moving them into Fora took time and motivation they didn’t have during their busiest months. Then they said something that confirmed what I’d already started doing elsewhere: I should be talking to the business, not the individual, since a company keeps its contacts even after the people using them move on.

They weren’t lying to me. They didn’t know, until I made them say it out loud, that the real blocker was never enthusiasm. It was the ten minutes of data entry standing between them and using the thing they genuinely wanted to use.

I got closure on something I’d spent way too much time caring about, and a real product idea on how to cut down the data entry burden.

That’s the real version of “buyers are liars.” It’s rarely a lie in the way the phrase implies. It’s someone discovering the actual reason alongside you, usually only once you ask directly instead of assuming the worst and moving on.

Back to building the pipeline.