One of the strangest things about business is that people lie. Or suppliers. Suppliers always lie.
I don’t mean kind of little fibs, I mean all out, stonking, blatant untruths. And what is double-y weird is that I don’t think most people do this deliberately – I think anyone selling complex, big-ticket, expensive, long-lived services just suffer a sort of baseline cognitive dissonance.
I’m not a marketer, but I’ve bought enough of it to know that it makes a good example. Imagine you want to buy something like SEO. Let’s say SEO costs £500+VAT a month. What is difficult to get the supplier to tell you is that you will have to spend at least that for a minimum of 12 months to know whether it even works or not. The supplier knows this, but they’ll never say it. And like I say I don’t believe this is wilful deception.
I think small businesses selling into other small businesses get so scared about what the REAL COSTS of any activity is that they end up subconsciously dialling back how much the REAL COSTS of things are.