MoneyWatch

Would You Use Dirty Tricks?

By Geoffrey James

Updated on: August 21, 2007 / 9:06 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

Scenario: You're on the edge of closing a big sale when an unexpected competitor suddenly appears, throwing a wrench into your plans. It's not a serious competitive threat, but you can't afford to blunt your momentum. You need some quick ammunition to convince your customer to ignore the pest. I asked an experienced sales professional how he would handle this situation. He agreed to tell me what he'd do, on the condition that I never revealed the source. (Warning, this is a real, honest-to-badness dirty trick.) Here's what he said:

Find out the competitor's admitted weaknesses. Go to www.sec.gov, and get their most recent 10K and 10Q reports. Look for a section entitled "ISSUES AND UNCERTAINTIES" (or something like that) which will reveal the competitor's weaknesses as seen by their own management. Search of the rest of the document for terms like "lawsuit," and "lawyer." With any luck, you'll find out that one or more of their customers are suing for non-delivery, or that that SEC has them under investigation. Copy and paste anything that makes the competitor look bad into a Word document.
Uncover the publicly-available dirt. Google the competitor's full corporate name along with terms such as: "dissatisfied," "problem," "lawsuit," etc. Chances are you'll discover at least a few articles showing your competitor in a poor light. (A lawsuit from a former customer is the gold standard in this case.) Cut and paste the most damning segments of those articles into your Word document, along with the URLs for the articles in question.
Alert the customer to both the weaknesses and the dirt. This entails finding a way to get the final document into the hands of your strongest ally inside the customer account. This entails a bit of finesse because it's unprofessional to directly badmouth a competitor. One way is to put a hard copy of the document into a folder entitled "Competitive Research" and "accidentally" leave it where your ally can look at it, perhaps when you visit the restroom. Another way is simply to share the document privately with your ally, but explain that it's proprietary research and can't be copied.

When I complained that all of this seemed over-the-top to me, my friend pointed out that it was far less extreme than some of the sales tactics he'd run into over the years. For example, when he was involved in a competitive sales situation against the now-defunct mainframe vendor Sperry for a system to be sold to a state government, the other team's strategy apparently included death threats for the female legislators and (allegedly) buying hookers for the male ones.

Whew! And I thought I'd heard everything.

I'm curious what you think. Is there any situation where it's appropriate to play a dirty trick on a competitor? (In the state government encounter, Sperry won the deal.) Or is this kind of behavior always over the line? Would it even work? Or maybe you have a better approach? I can think of several, including taking the high road. Or even damning with faint praise. I'm certainly open to any discussion.