Every Trick Has a Price. It’s Paid in Trust.
Every ERP vendor has a version of the same script. The upsell that arrives once you’re committed. The contract clause that makes leaving harder than staying. The auto-renewal nobody points to until it’s already renewed. The salesperson who mirrors your language back to you, module by module, until you feel understood rather than sold to. None of it is illegal. Most of it is taught. And all of it works, which is exactly why it keeps getting used.
Tricks look amazing at face value, because they move you toward the goal quickly. Upsell, cross-sell, lock in the customer, lock in the contract, build in the auto-subscription. Say things the way that forces a yes rather than invites one. Manage people through leverage instead of levelling with them. Mirror the other side’s body language and jargon back at them until they lower their guard. Every one of these is a real technique, and every one of them produces a result. That’s not in question. What’s in question is what the result is actually made of.
They have a place in business. But they come at a cost the moment the whole objective becomes maximising your own interest. The trick stops being an occasional tool and becomes the operating model. That’s the line. On one side of it, a technique. On the other, a pattern the room eventually names, whether or not you’re in the room to hear it named.
We are losing trust with every trick we deploy, whether we notice it or not. The customer upsold into something they didn’t need remembers what happened after the signature, not what was said before it. The employee managed instead of levelled with stops bringing you the truth, because they’ve learned what happens to it. The mirrored jargon buys thirty seconds of “they get me” and costs the moment they work out they were being handled rather than heard. None of this shows up on the scoreboard that day. It shows up later, in what people stop telling you.
Know this cost. If you don’t, you lose two things at once — the effort spent getting good at self-centred tricks, and the trust of everyone who eventually noticed. Customers, suppliers, employees. They don’t all leave loudly. Most of them just stop extending the benefit of the doubt, and you find out how much of your business was running on that doubt only after it’s gone.
Shortcuts come at a cost. Sometimes a hefty one. There are trade-offs in everything you do, and your efforts, over time, become a fairly accurate record of who you actually are — regardless of what your pitch deck says on the subject. A shortcut is tempting precisely because the cost isn’t due the day you take it.
So the question isn’t whether the trick works. It clearly does, or it wouldn’t still be in the training manual. The question is what you’re quietly spending to make it work — and whether you’d still take the trade if the bill arrived today instead of later.
