Buyers Are Liars????
For decades, sales teams have repeated a familiar warning: “Buyers are liars.”
It sounds seasoned and street-wise, the voice of experience. But it’s one of the most damaging phrases still circulating in B2B sales.
Yes, buyers sometimes hold back. They soften objections, hide budgets, or avoid naming decision-makers. But most of the time, they’re not being deceptive. They’re being careful.
They’ve been burned before by sellers who treated transparency as weakness. By discovery calls that felt like cross-examinations. By “helpful” follow-ups that turned into pressure.
The phrase “buyers are liars” creates a false division between two sides that need to be aligned. It sets up a zero-sum relationship inside the complex sales process, buyers versus sellers, when success actually depends on both working from the same system of truth.
That mindset builds walls instead of relationships. It turns conversations into contests. And in the complex sale, where multiple stakeholders and long-term decisions are at play, that’s fatal.
Because while the buyer needs to trust you, you also need to trust them.
Why Trusting the Buyer Matters
In a complex sale, your “buyer” isn’t one person; it’s a network of people involved in the purchase: executives, end-users, procurement, IT, finance, and sometimes even customers of your customer. It’s a living system of competing priorities and internal politics.
Inside that system, your internal coach or champion becomes your translator. The one person who connects you to the truth about what’s happening behind the scenes.
If you don’t trust that person:
- You’ll second-guess everything they tell you.
- You’ll miss subtle signals or assume the worst.
- You’ll be unable to act confidently on their information.
And more importantly, they’ll become an ineffective coach. Without trust, you have no way to know if what you’re hearing is the full story or just a version of it. You end up flying blind, operating on half-truths and guesswork while the deal moves without you.
When sellers operate from distrust, they build a sales system optimized for defense, not discovery. And a defensive sales system can’t adapt fast enough to keep pace with a complex sales cycle that’s dynamic, political, and deeply human.
Trust isn’t about being naive. It’s about creating a relationship stable enough for truth to move freely.
The Costs of Distrusting Your Buyer
If you can’t bring yourself to trust your buyer, here’s what happens inside your sales motion:
- You lose your coach. They may keep communicating, but their coaching drowns in uncertainty. You can’t tell truth from posturing.
- You slow the deal. Each update becomes an investigation rather than a conversation.
- You break alignment. Your version of the problem diverges from what they’re actually trying to solve.
- You misread intent. Every “not yet” sounds like a lie. Every “checking internally” feels like a stall.
- You sell in the dark. Without predictable input from the buyer, your forecast becomes a hope, not a projection.
Complex selling already demands patience. A longer sales cycle and multiple decision layers make information your most valuable resource. If you don’t trust your buyer enough to act on their insights, you’re stripping your own ability to accelerate sales when it matters most.
What It Means to Trust a Buyer
You don’t need blind faith in your buyer. You need calibrated belief.
Trust doesn’t mean you have to agree. Trust is simply predictability.
- You can trust someone to tell the truth, or not.
- To help a grandmother cross the street, or not.
What matters is that they’re consistent.
In a complex sales process, predictability is gold. You need to know how your buyer operates. How they make decisions, how they communicate risk, how they handle internal pressure.
When those patterns are consistent, even if imperfect, you can build a reliable system around them.
When they aren’t, every next step becomes a guess.
That’s why trust isn’t a feeling; it’s a data-driven pattern recognition exercise.
You’re observing how they behave, tracking consistency over time, and adjusting your approach based on reliability. In that sense, trust is both emotional and operational. It’s the mechanism that lets you sell confidently in real time inside an unpredictable system.
How to Build and Validate Trust (Seller Actions)
If you’re serious about mastering complex selling, you have to treat trust as something you can test and refine. Here’s how to do it.
1. Normalize the Limits of Disclosure
Say directly: “If there’s something you can’t tell me, that’s fine; just say so.”
That one line sets a baseline for honesty. You’re signaling that you value truth over information. It’s how you build a customer relationship where truth becomes safe again.
2. Test for Consistency
Ask the same question in different ways, at different times.
If their answer evolves, explore why. Context shifts are normal, contradictions without cause are not.
Consistency isn’t about memorized talking points; it’s about observing the integrity of their reasoning.
3. Watch for Pattern Reliability
Look for repeatable follow-through:
- Do they do what they say they’ll do?
- Do they keep meetings, provide updates, or share resources when promised?
- Small, predictable behaviors build real confidence. In complex sales cycles, those micro-commitments are your leading indicators of truth.
4. Observe Motive–Action Alignment
Does what they do make sense given what they’ve said?
If they claim urgency but delay every next step, that’s a signal to re-understand their incentives, not an excuse to lose faith.
In a complex sale, alignment is rarely perfect; your job is to see the pattern underneath the noise.
5. Probe Gently for What’s Unsaid
You’ll never get full transparency in enterprise sales…but you can map the edges of what’s hidden.
Ask questions that surface constraints indirectly:
- “What could make this hard to move forward?”
- “What does a ‘no’ look like internally?”
- You’re not forcing disclosure; you’re creating a shared space where partial truth is enough to navigate the system.
6. Build a Rhythm of Truth Checks
Complex sales involve multiple stakeholders, shifting budgets, and internal politics. That means your truth is never static.
Create a rhythm of short check-ins, every week or two, where the goal isn’t to push the deal, but to re-calibrate understanding.
Predictability comes from pattern, not from one big moment of honesty.
7. Note Their Tolerance for Tension
How do they behave when things get uncomfortable: budget pressure, legal delays, or executive scrutiny?
People who stay steady and candid under stress are your most reliable truth-tellers.
Those who deflect or disappear under tension tell you something, too, just not in words.
What Trusted Buyers Do for You
When you genuinely trust your buyer, the entire sales process changes shape. Your internal champion becomes more than a contact. They become a conduit.
Trusted buyers:
- Warn you about internal politics before they derail momentum.
- Share the real blockers slowing things down.
- Provide unfiltered feedback on your proposal or pricing.
- Help shape the internal narrative for your product or service.
- Keep truth moving when you’re not in the room.
This is what sales enablement really means in the context of the complex sale. Not just equipping sales teams with collateral, but enabling clarity across the system.
The payoff is simple: when you start trusting your buyer, they often become more trustworthy in return. Trust is a feedback loop. Each consistent action you validate reinforces your willingness to believe the next one.
How Trust Accelerates Sales
Trust doesn’t replace structure; it amplifies it.
A complex sale always has more moving parts than a transactional sale:
- Longer sales cycle
- Multiple stakeholders
- Higher stakes and broader impact
- Greater risk for everyone involved
That means you can’t accelerate sales by brute force or urgency. You accelerate sales by reducing friction. And nothing removes friction faster than trust.
When you trust your buyer:
- You make faster, more confident decisions.
- You respond in real time instead of waiting for verification.
- You shorten your internal debate cycles because you believe your information.
In enterprise sales, this can shave weeks or months off the process. You still navigate the same number of steps, but with less redundancy, fewer re-explanations, and stronger alignment between internal teams and external champions.
It’s not about speed; it’s about velocity: direction plus trust.
What Makes the Complex Sale Different
If you’re wondering whether all this effort is worth it, compare it to transactional sales, where the buyer’s risk is low and the exchange is simple. There’s little need for deep trust because the stakes are small.
But complex sales involve far more uncertainty: financial, technical, political, and personal. Everyone involved in the purchase has something on the line. Trust is what keeps the system coherent when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.
That’s why building relationships and sustaining trust through a longer sales cycle is the foundation of success in complex selling.
You’re not just closing a deal; you’re aligning two systems (theirs and yours) to move together over the long term.
Build Trust in Your Buyer
Distrust is easy. It feels like protection. But in a complex sale, protection built on skepticism only isolates you from the information you need most.
Trust, by contrast, is the mechanism that makes truth possible. It’s how you stabilize uncertainty in a multi-stakeholder environment.
Trust your buyer. Not blindly, but deliberately.
Because in complex sales, once you stop trusting them, they stop telling you the truth. And without truth, it’s difficult to accelerate sales.
