Expertise should sit outside the purchase path

“But our product is complicated.”

Fine. Then provide excellent expertise. That does not explain why the expert should be paid to steer me toward buying your product, or why consulting them must be the only route to purchase.

Complexity is a reason to improve the quality of advice. It is a terrible excuse for compromising its independence.

Three jobs stuffed into one incentive

There are at least three different jobs here: understanding what the customer needs, explaining a product and completing a transaction. A company may package them into one role because that is efficient for the company. The package does not automatically serve the buyer.

An independent assessment can define the requirement. The vendor can supply accurate product information. A purchase process can execute the chosen transaction. The customer should be able to move between those functions without being trapped inside one person’s incentive structure.

For an illustrative complex software purchase, an expert might document requirements, identify incompatibilities and compare implementation risks. That work remains useful even if no vendor is selected. It should not become worthless to the person doing it because a commission failed to materialize.

A different title does not change the paycheck

Calling the person a consultant instead of a salesperson changes precisely nothing if referrals, quotas or vendor payments still determine the preferred answer. The vocabulary has been through a spa weekend. The conflict has not moved.

An assessment has value when the buyer can use it outside the seller’s preferred transaction. Otherwise the investigation has a suspicious habit of discovering that the investigator’s product is exactly what was needed. A miracle, repeated every quarter.

I would rather pay for an explanation I can use and challenge than receive a free conversation whose success depends on what I buy afterward. The complexity makes that independence more valuable. The consequences of a bad decision are larger, and my ability to spot selective reasoning may be smaller.

The exception swallows the argument

Every time the compulsory salesperson is challenged, complexity arrives as the emergency exit. Fine for simple products, apparently, but this purchase is special. The implication is that uncertainty entitles the vendor to install its own interests inside the advice.

That is backwards. Uncertainty is exactly where I want the strongest separation between understanding the problem and benefiting from a particular answer. The expertise can exist outside the purchase path. The transaction can happen after the thinking.

There is nothing radical about wanting help that belongs to the person receiving it. What is exhausting is being told, again, that the price of understanding something is surrendering control to somebody paid to sell it.