You can’t rely on exaggeration

Many people’s first instinct when it comes to marketing is to find the strengths and turn up the dial to 10.

One moment you’re selling a CRM, and the next you’re selling the CRM that’s going to turn your entire work world upside down.

Over-exaggeration is a short-sighted way of approaching marketing.

If you cannot fairly and accurately advertise what you’re selling, your value proposition is simply not strong enough to capture more customers and higher margins.

The antithesis of this statement is to undersell your solution and act like it’s not as good as it truly is.

Yet the key point in the last statement is that we’re focused on “selling”.

You can advertise your solution however you want and market its value far beyond reality.

But if you're not making sales because the marketing pipeline that comes in has significantly different expectations of your solution, you'll spend time struggling with customers who will never convert in the first place.

You want your pipeline to be as optimized as possible, especially when it comes to human interaction with clients (as these interactions tend to carry the largest associated costs).

If you exaggerate enough to bring in a pipeline that generates more **profit *in terms of Lifetime Value*** than if you didn't, you could financially justify yourself.

The issue here is that, generally speaking, this is not a sustainable plan.

At some point along your sales process, you will have to clarify the truth to your customers (what was the reality instead of the exaggeration).

And if you don’t clarify and still take on these customers, you’ll deal with high churn, customer support costs, negative PR and reviews, a poor reputation, and more.

The problem with overexaggeration in marketing is that it borders on outright lying.

To avoid getting caught lying, marketers use various language and semantic tricks to have plausible deniability that they didn’t truly mean that; the customer just interpreted things a bit too much.

I am a strong proponent of discovering where your true value lies, focusing on increasing that value, and then making a fair and accurate offer to the market.

Accuracy is a sustainable practice that takes control into your hands.

I also believe that, for many businesses aiming for the long term, this approach is the path to growth, accompanied by the lessons you need to learn along the way.

Consider all the AliExpress products sold through social media ads that break after a few months or aren’t as good as advertised (I’m looking at you, skylight projector).

The manufacturers of those products simply don’t care about repeat business because their profit margins rely on one-off sales, and they’re not trying to build a reputable brand. If things go wrong, they’ll simply change names, and that will be the end of it.

Your business won’t have the luxury of simply changing names and moving on.

In general, for most modern companies that aim to remain sustainable and grow into the future, you have one, maybe two chances at maintaining your reputation.

If word of mouth spreads negatively about your company or negative reviews start accumulating online, your business’s future will be handicapped.

You might tell yourself, “the market is large enough, I can exaggerate and it’s fine. No one really cares.”

But the issue is greater than the assumption that “no one really cares.”

The issue is that you don't really care if you exaggerate because you're prioritizing profits over providing quality solutions.

To any marketer who writes something thinking, “this is not really true,” I always advise them to proceed with extreme caution.

You can play with semantics, if you want to play the short-term game.

However, if you genuinely care about learning how to build a business, about marketing, and about forming long-term relationships with long-term partners, you’re better off being known for having strategies that can scale the growth of an accurate reflection of a company.

Because if you can do that, you’ll grow with the company and always learn the right marketing lessons at the right stages.

Evaluate your value proposition and ask yourself: "Why do I need to exaggerate?"