Visa or Mastercard?

Last week-ish I promised to share my experience with a toxic seller.

In this post about Toxic Selling, I talked about a separate guy I found who teaches very shady, underhanded tactics to close sales – they’re incredibly common, and being taught to honest unsuspecting folks like us, who are made to believe that being a royal a-hole is the only way to close deals.

It’s not 🙂

The story that shaped my ethos

In 2020, I had been following [a guy] online for a few years. He shared a lot of content, did lots of free trainings and screen-sharing type stuff, teaching folks to do better with their marketing (something I generally suck at).

He offered a program that was $5k USD ($8k AUD) that promised to build a customised 12 month marketing program for your business, with 1-1 coaching to guide you through executing it.

Quick side-note: Marketing is most effective when your offers are clear, well defined, and lots of other things that my offers were not (the ones I wanted to grow anyway).

His initial offer was to jump on a free call and walk you through what you might need for your business or offers right now – clearly saying that if this program was too advanced, he’d offer steps you could take to lift your game… which I just read as a smart move:

• If you weren’t ready for his program, I’d expect his plan to be that following his advice would get you ready so he could present the program to you again a few months later.
• For folks who were ready, I’d expect this to basically be a sales call.

So all good – I was genuinely buzzed to be meeting this guy and getting some advice from him after having followed his work for so long.

I booked the call for the following day.

At that point, I was excited to talk to him, and being honest with myself I expected the advice to be “go polish your offers and I’ll talk to you again in a while”. I was about 90% sure I was not going to sign up tomorrow.

On the call, I get a different guy – not the guy I’d been following – who says he’s going to run the screener interview.

Not exactly what I thought I was signing up for, but this guy was straight out of To Kill A Mockingbird – yes sir, no sir, well gosh darnit ain’t that a pickle… that cool southern-American accent that’s instantly likeable.

He told me about the program like it was storytime by the fire. Beautiful – all the things I was capable of, all the things they can help me with.

Me: “I’m not sure my stuff is quite ready…”.

Him: “Well gosh Danny now donchu worry ’bout dat.” Reassuring me the coaches would help me polish on the fly, have my back at every turn, and never leave me alone.

He finished his beautiful sales pitch, and simply ended with “now how would you like to pay, will that be visa or mastercard? 🙂“.

He got a bunch of objection this, hesitation that, umm, uhh, honestly I hadn’t planned for this… which he deftly parried with his well-rehearsed objection-handling.

This is where my memory gets hazy. A few minutes later, I was $8k lighter and wondering what the hell Atticus Finch just pulled on me.

Was I in control of my actions? Of course. Could I have just hung up the phone at any point? Yes, definitely.

So what happened? Not entirely sure.

It was completely my decision… yet somehow, manipulation played a role.

I’ve thought about that purchase for a lot of years. Honestly, I still feel like an idiot – it’s an embarrassing story to tell.

Had it turned out to be what they promised, that would have been something at least.

But what I was sold, and what I ended up with were two very different products – tell you about it tomorrow (and will wrap this up).