Don't Fearmonger

A common sales tactic is to exaggarate the downside risk of not buying. Often when someone is considering giving you money, their first question is “what happens if I don’t do this?“.

Many founders are well prepared with compliance lists, or security issues, or anything else that could cause complete disaster if the potential customer doesn’t use the offering, or tries to do it themselves.

You’ll often see this on calls with (bad) accountants or lawyers. “If you don’t have a contract that covers every aspect of employment law, your employees will sue you and you will go bankrupt”, or “If you don’t pay VAT properly in every country that you do business in, that’s tax evasion = jail”.

Software engineers tend to do this too. “If you don’t pay for this cloud offering you’ll get hacked”, or “We need 8 months to rewrite this CRUD app to make it SOC-2 compliant”

Find the balance

As an expert, it’s your job to make people aware of risks, but also to help them manage that risk. Usually this does not mean eliminating it entirely, and if your advice is “we need to go hardcore and eliminate this risk”, you might thin you’re helping your chances that they will get scared or see it’s difficult and give you business, but in reality they’ve seen this trick many times before and will just get frustrated.

If you have real experience with both the liklihood and the mangitude of potential risks, and you can put this into context for your customers, you will be valuable. If you only know about the theoretical magnitude of the risks and your advice is always “spend lots of time and money to mitigate this” you are not useful.