I’ve become something of a point person for a lot of my clients when they’re pitched by various software vendors, point-of-sale systems, customer relationship management companies, and various companies that primarily sell to small businesses. It’s something I’m happy to do, especially since a lot of my clients tend to be very busy and appreciate having someone on hand to talk to these sorts of companies with a more tech-oriented background.
During my time doing this, I’ve noticed a peculiar trend that I only recently came up with a name for. We’re going to call this the Phony Rapport sales tactic.
The Phony Rapport sales tactic is something you may have picked up on if you’re on a position to be pitched by people in sales or business development on a regular basis. It’s essentially misleading if not outright lying about some kind of shared connection as a way to build trust with the prospective client. Yelp, for example, operates on a fairly basic playbook where their representatives will often tell you that they “grew up in (city)” and as a result, they “know the business environment.” (Whatever that means)
It’s a very old trick in unethical sales playbooks but it’s also deceptively clever. Saying that you “grew up in” or “at one point lived in” the same city as you is the sort of lie that creates just enough plausible deniability because it’s not easy to explicitly debunk unless you dig into it deeply. If I said right now that a major tech CEO showed up at my doorstep and begged me to take over their role as CEO of the company, citing my unparalleled genius and business acumen, you’d probably laugh, but there’s no explicit evidence proving that I’m lying, right?
The Phony Rapport trick is essentially a scaled down and less ludicrous version of this example; a little white lie that manufactures a relationship rather than building it through authenticity. It’s not even the fault of sales representatives themselves, who are often coached if not outright instructed to do this by larger companies who often institute quotas that put account managers under a lot of pressure. It’s also worth remembering that a lot of people in sales often live off commissions which further incentivize this sort of shady tactic on top of it being encouraged or even mandated by companies themselves.
I first really became familiar with the Phony Rapport trick by the time I was a few years into running this company. At the time I was fielding inquiries on behalf of multiple clients from Yelp. At the time I had spoken to three different Yelp representatives on behalf of clients in the same city, who all – conveniently – had the exact same line when I told them where I was calling from:
“Oh, that’s cool! I worked/went to school in (city).”
The first time I thought to myself that it was a neat little coincidence and that it wasn’t too hard to imagine, especially if Yelp account representatives were working in an area in some proximity to where they grew up. On subsequent times the red flags started going up and I started wondering how coincidental it was that Yelp would be hiring this aggressively from the same city.
When I found myself talking to a fourth Yelp sales representative on behalf of a different client, like clockwork, I told them where I was calling from, and they reported on what a cool coincidence it was that we lived in the same city. That’s when I casually mentioned that if they were from this area, they must have attended the annual Crawfish Festival. Without missing a beat, the reply was “Oh, yeah, that’s a great time!”
There’s just one problem: I made that up. No such annual event exists in my city.
I didn’t even address it beyond nonchalantly agreeing before the sales representative said their piece; I certainly wasn’t interested in going after anyone on the ground floor. It did serve as a validation of my suspicions, and since then I’ve grown quite accustomed to the Phony Rapport trick.
A more recent example of this happened just this past year with a POS company that reached out to a restaurant client, who in turn referred them to me. When I received their call I was perplexed to find that it came from an area code corresponding to a small town here with less than 10,000 residents and no major commercial presence. After the account manager introduced herself, I inquired if this was her smartphone and if she grew up in the area.
Somewhat to my surprise, this account manager admitted that she and the company itself were actually based in San Francisco. When I noted that her area code corresponded to an area near the client’s business address, she explained it as “That’s just our internal system, stuff like that.”
I didn’t press the issue, but this strongly suggests that her company was using spoofed phone numbers to generate the appearance of being local. Otherwise it would be a remarkable coincidence that the spoofed number just happened to be within thirty minutes of the city where the restaurant is based out of. While this wasn’t actively malicious, it reeked of deceptive marketing and started out by immediately putting me on guard before the pitch had even started.
This kind of “rapport theater” isn’t just a bad habit. It’s unfortunately symptomatic of how shallow a lot of sales and marketing training has become, especially at large companies that are determined to meet ever-exploding quotas, sales targets and market goals. This leads to tactics that range from manipulative to unscrupulous and lead to a sort of “Close the deal at all costs” mantra, which only becomes more problematic when sales and marketing people know nothing about who they’re actually supposed to sell to.
The collateral damage tends to be the clients that the companies are on paper supposed to serve; relationships built through a fake rapport rather than authenticity, doing your homework, and most importantly, demonstrating a means and ability to solve a client’s problems.
These fake backstories and “what a coincidence” namedrops must still work because large companies employ them all the time, but that doesn’t mean they have to work on you. If you’re in a position to get pitched like this or if you receive pitches on behalf of a business, don’t shy away from the tough questions. Ask for credentials and validation, and most importantly, ask how this sales representative wants to help you. That’s how you find real partners rather than just people reading from a script.