For most companies, something has gone wrong in the past. There have been customers who haven’t loved their outcomes or their experiences with you. There have been employees who didn’t fit or didn’t have the outcome they had hoped for.

Have you ever Googled your own company? I don’t just mean the company name, I mean opening up a browser and writing in…

“What is it like to work with (our company)?”

Not “at”, but “with”. What will you find? In many cases, you might find your Indeed or Glassdoor scores. But what else?

How about writing in,

“Reviews for (our company)”

What pops up? Do you read them? Do your executives, your marketers, your sales leaders know what’s out there?

It’s rare that I come across a company that doesn’t at least have something out there. Maybe it’s an overpromise-underdeliver – at the customer level, or maybe the employee level. Maybe it’s a piece of functionality that doesn’t exist that companies wish would. Maybe your pricing is really high. Maybe it’s some bullshit…

Always assume that the truth will prevail.

If your truth or your company’s truth isn’t good enough to sell it, you probably shouldn’t be selling it anyway.

If the truth is enough to sell it, then how do you embrace the negative? Do you hope they don’t find it and just ignore it? Do you have a strategy to address it when and if it does come up?

Much like sports teams who use data to make decisions, I would like to share some simple, back of the napkin data on the paths this could take:

1. Hope they don’t find out: This is the strategy most companies seem to take. My advice? Assume they will. This is 2022, not 1980. The proliferation of reviews, feedback, peer connections and prospect research savviness screams that we can no longer hide things and expect to get away with it.
2. They find out, and reach their own conclusion: Suddenly, the client goes silent on you. Wonder why? Could it be they read something about you, and came to their own conclusion? Could they have decided that investing any more time in you and your solutions is wasted effort?
3. Your prospect finds out through your competitor: Advantage, competitor. Trust erodes. You’re essentially screwed. You probably have a talk track for how to handle it, but when you bring it up on the defensive, you (a) sound like you’re making excuses, or (b) sound like it’s a rehearsed talking point. The feelings are already there, and your logic is likely to polarize your consensus audience.
4. Your prospect already found it but doesn’t bring it up: You think all is good in the world, but there’s an invisible elephant in the room. That elephant is on the mind of your prospect, having created a bs filter by which every word you say is going through.
5. You lead with it: Trust is built. The filter is removed. You’ve owned it. If it is something that will impact the decision, you’ll find out now, versus later. You control the message, versus leaving it up to the competitor or the buyer’s own discovery to tell the story.

What odds do you give to them never finding out? I’d say, at the very least, it’s 25%. Do you want to roll the dice and end up having to deal with the 75% chance they do? Do you want to spend all that time on a prospect, only to have it come up in weeks and months, and torpedo all of your efforts along the way? Do the math…

But how?

When you engage with a new prospect, be transparent. Tell them your story, warts and all.

One company I recently worked with has some poor Glassdoor scores. There’s a reason. Their story is actually really compelling. They aren’t shy about what happened, and what caused the company to have to suddenly shift, and part ways with many they overhired. However, they tend to hide their story until asked. They’re finding power in the inclusion of their story early in their engagements.

“Organizationally, we have had a bit of a rollercoaster ride. We grew rapidly…actually, too rapidly. That rapid growth wasn’t sustainable, as our solution wasn’t going to grow at the same speed, and as a result, we had to make a pivot our entire business model. The shift required some hard decisions, and the result was some customers and employees who weren’t very happy. As you do your research, you may find some of that. We’ve made wholesale changes, learned from our past, and

 the remnants are still out there for viewing. As a matter of fact, our Glassdoor employee score is a 3.4 out of 5. We’re here today because of those changes. We’ve built what we believe is a strong, scalable organization focused on the right things. We’re excited about our future, we’ve improved our Glassdoor score over a whole point in the past 6 months (it was a 2.2), and would love four our future to include you.”

The prospect may ask for more information. Tell them the story. If it’s going to be an issue for the prospect to move forward with you, is it better to find out at the beginning, or the end? Is it better for them to find out on their own, or through you? Is it better for them to find out through a competitor, or through you? Is it better to clear the elephant from the room, or unknowingly let it sit there while you bang your head against the wall?

If it’s important enough to hide, it’s important enough to share. Own your truth. Lead with it.