From an article on nice-but-cheap bottles of wine in the NYT:
Let’s face it, you can find hundreds if not thousands of bottles in [the $10 or under category], down to the lowest of the low. We cannot try them all and say, “Here are the 10 best.” But we can give you some suggestions as to where to look, while offering up some good examples. …
Here’s what I find remarkable about this: The writer, Eric Asimov, isn’t saying anything that should be shocking when he points out the impossibility of finding the 10 best wines under $10. And yet it stopped me in my tracks. In saying the obvious, he became much more credible to me. Because most of the other “best-of” lists you see don’t concede their obvious limitations. “Hey, look, it’s absurd to think that we’ve found the best 10 albums of the year, out of thousands that were released…”  Asimov’s admission made me more curious, not less, to hear what he had to say.
It reminds me of the sales world. We’ve all come across salespeople who are reluctant to admit any weakness in their product or service, no matter how insignificant. As many a sales guru has pointed out, building trust involves being candid, and being candid involves admitting that your products aren’t flawless.Â
Admitting weakness can, oddly enough, make your core ideas more powerful.
Fantastic! Your example was the perfect complement to my last blog entry about admitting weaknesses in job interviews. When trying to get a job, most people try to hide their limitations and fear the consequences of being open about them. Your post provides another strong reason to be honest. I just posted a new entry, SalesFreak, and linked to your blog and book. Thanks for the material.
Dave
I’m a big fan of the blog, but I have to admit I had exactly the opposite reaction. Being a wine enthusiast, I followed the link before reading the rest of the post, and when I reached the exact sentence quoted, I quit reading and went back to the post. My reaction was “hey, they didn’t try that hard to find good wines, so why should I read any more?” I was surprised when I got back to the post to find it devoted to praising the very line that made me lose interest. Not an invalid point in principle, but this example didn’t fit. If the story’s author admitted that maybe it’s impossible to find the best of the best, that would be credible, but the “we drank some cheap wines, and we didn’t try too hard to find good ones, but read on to hear the results of our lackadaisical effort,” approach had the opposite effect on me.
Thanks David. And Steve, I think if I’d read the subtext as “we didn’t try too hard to find good ones … lackadaisical effort,” then I’d probably agree with you. That wasn’t my read on it.
The water in San Francisco may be good enough to drink from the tap, but in Los Angeles, our idiotic City Council mandated the addition of fluoride, a known carcinogen, with the idea of raising the quality of dental care for poor minority children. As a consequence, I even buy bottked water for my dog and would never drink our tap water. The fact that a point is valid in one location doesn’t mean that all of the variables are the same somewhere else and you therefor can’t extrapolate a generalization from the first point of reference.
By not hiding your product’s limitations, you appear more real. Customers tend to trust you even more because they know they won’t encounter unwanted “surprises” down the road. Though I think there is a proper way of going about it…