Why It’s Time to Redefine Mis-Selling

The financial services industry spent a decade learning that mis-selling is catastrophically expensive. B2B sales organisations are about to learn the same lesson - if they don’t take action.

When most sales leaders hear the word “mis-selling”, they think of payment protection insurance scandals, unsuitable pension products, and sharp-suited financial advisers who knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. They think of deliberate deception. And because they are not running that kind of operation - and neither are their salespeople - they might think that mis-selling is someone else’s problem.

This is a dangerously complacent attitude.

Because in today’s rapidly-evolving world of B2B Selling, with its subscription models, its as-a-service contracts, and its increasingly demanding buyers, new and far more pervasive forms of mis-selling have the potential to cause growing damage - to customer relationships, to renewal rates, to revenue predictability, and ultimately to the long-term health of the vendor.

Unfortunately, the definition of mis-selling has not kept pace with the reality of how B2B sales is now conducted.

The Traditional Spectrum of Mis-Selling

Let’s start with what most people agree mis-selling means and then examine why that definition is no longer sufficient.

At its most serious, mis-selling is deliberate and wilful. The salesperson knows they are misrepresenting their product or service, knows the customer’s expectations cannot realistically be met, and chooses to proceed anyway because they want the commission and the quota credit. Nobody I have ever worked with regards this as acceptable, and most sales leaders would dismiss such a salesperson quickly and without regret.

But wilful deception is only the most visible end of a much broader spectrum - and it is far from the most common form of mis-selling. Consider the following examples - perhaps you can think of others:

• The salesperson who mis-sells through basic ignorance or incompetence: who genuinely believes their product will deliver outcomes it cannot, because they have not been properly trained or because their marketing department has over-sold their company’s capabilities. The customer still ends up disappointed. The relationship still breaks down. The renewal still does not happen.

• The salesperson who mis-sells because they lack curiosity: who asks just enough questions to identify a possible use case, then pitches their solution before they have properly understood the customer’s environment, constraints, and expectations.

• The salesperson who mis-sells through avoidance: who senses that a particular question might produce an uncomfortable answer - one that could jeopardise the deal - and so decides not to ask it. This is perhaps the most insidious form of non-deliberate mis-selling, because it involves a conscious choice.

• The salesperson who mis-sells through inappropriate pressure: who finds a way to push a hesitant prospect across the line before they are ready, before internal consensus has been built, before the business case has been properly constructed.

• The salesperson who mis-sells through superficial qualification: who has checked the boxes on their CRM and declared the opportunity fully qualified, when in reality they have been speaking to people who cannot make decisions, about problems that are not yet urgent enough to act upon, with a budget that has never been formally approved.

• The salesperson who mis-sells simply through miscommunication: where what was agreed in the boardroom presentation was not quite what was put in the contract, and what was in the contract was not quite what the implementation team understood, and the customer received something that nobody in the vendor organisation would have chosen to sell them had they understood what the customer actually expected.

In every one of these cases, the outcome for the customer is the same as if they had been deliberately deceived. They invested time, money, and political capital in a project that did not deliver what they needed. And in the subscription-based world that now characterises an increasing amount of B2B commerce, the vendor pays the price - in the form of a customer who rejects the implementation, or who refuses to pay, or who does not renew, and who shares their negative experience with peers - often amplified through social media.

Looking Through an Outcome-Centric Lens

I want to introduce a more appropriate and relevant perspective - one that I believe gets to the structural root of the problem in a way that the traditional narrow definition of mis-selling entirely fails to capture.

In complex B2B sales environments, there is a critical distinction between two things that are sometimes confused:

Desired outcomes - what the customer believed they were going to achieve when they committed to the project.

Delivered outcomes - what the customer actually experienced once the solution was implemented.

In a well-run sales process, these two things should be almost identical. The vendor has invested time in genuinely understanding what the customer is trying to achieve - not just at an organisational level, but at the level of each key stakeholder who has a role in the buying decision. They have explored not just the functional requirements, but the tangible business outcomes that will define success: reduced costs, increased revenues, improved productivity, measurable competitive advantage. They have co-created a shared and realistic understanding of what “success” looks like.

In far too many sales processes, however, desired outcomes and delivered outcomes diverge significantly. And when they do, it is almost always because the groundwork was never properly laid during the sales and buying processes.

It is worth being honest about why this happens. Sometimes it is because the salesperson was in a hurry to close and did not invest enough time in genuine discovery. Sometimes it is because they were talking to the wrong people - contacts who could articulate their functional needs but not the business outcomes their organisation was ultimately seeking. Sometimes it is because the customer’s desired outcomes were genuinely unclear, and the salesperson chose to accept the situation rather than probing to ensure clarity. And sometimes it is because the outcomes the customer was hoping for were simply unrealistic - and nobody had the courage to say so.

There is also the multiple-stakeholder dimension to consider. In any complex buying decision, different stakeholders bring different desired outcomes to the table. The CFO is thinking about financial metrics. The operational leader is thinking about day-to-day efficiency. The IT director is thinking about integration and risk. The CEO may be thinking about strategic positioning. An outcome-centric sales approach takes all of these seriously - it understands that a sale which satisfies one stakeholder’s expectations while failing to meet another’s is unlikely to be successful or to generate the references, the expansion, or the renewal that makes the relationship commercially valuable.

The Commercial and Reputational Case

This is no longer just an ethical argument. The commercial consequences are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore.

In the era of large up-front B2B purchases, the sales organisation often treated the contract as the finish line. Once the ink was dry, it was someone else’s problem to make it work. The commercial relationship was largely concluded at the point of sale.

That world is vanishing fast. Today’s most prevalent B2B commercial models are subscription-based, usage-based, or outcome-linked. The initial contract is not the finish line - it is the starting gun. The vendor must earn the right to renewal, to expansion, and to advocacy. And they can only do that by ensuring that the customer actually achieves the outcomes they were promised.

This is why a failure to deliver on desired outcomes is not just operationally uncomfortable - it is commercially catastrophic. Customers who do not achieve their expected outcomes do not renew. They do not expand. They actively warn their peers, and in an age of peer review platforms and increasingly well-connected buyer networks, a reputation for failing to deliver spreads quickly. When you factor in the cost of acquisition, implementation, and the customer success resource deployed in a futile attempt to rescue the relationship, a mis-sold deal can easily result in a significant net negative return for the vendor - and yet, in many sales organisations, the salesperson who closes it is still celebrated for hitting their number.

The Structural Fix

Understanding the problem is the necessary first step. But what does the solution actually look like in practice? It requires deliberate choices at the sales leadership level.

This begins by mandating a much more rigorous and genuinely curious approach to understanding each customer’s desired outcomes at the earliest possible stage of their buying journey - not just the organisational objectives, but the specific, measurable outcomes that individual stakeholders are personally invested in achieving. These are not functional requirements to be uncovered; they are business outcomes to be understood, tested, and in many cases collaboratively shaped.

It also requires that proposed outcomes are realistic and achievable - and that the people best positioned to assess this are brought into the conversation before the contract is signed. This means involving delivery teams, implementation leads, and customer success functions during the sales process itself, not handing them a signed contract and expecting them to make it work. These functions should not only have visibility of what has been promised - they should have a voice, and in cases of significant concern, the ability to pause or redirect a sale that is heading towards a commitment the organisation is incapable of honouring.

This is not about undermining the salesperson or slowing down the revenue engine. It is about recognising that a sale that cannot be successfully delivered is a sale that is not worth making - and that the short-term cost of walking away from an unsuitable opportunity is almost always lower than the long-term cost of failing to deliver on it.

Practical tools matter here too. A clearly structured mutual success plan - co-created with the customer and built backwards from their agreed desired outcomes - creates a shared record of what was committed to and what both parties need to do to ensure those outcomes are achieved. It is the antidote to the post-signature “that’s not what we agreed” conversation that characterises so many troubled implementations.

A Modern Definition of Mis-Selling

Here is the conclusion I would like to invite you to reach.

Any failure to understand, honestly assess, collaboratively shape, and ultimately deliver on a new customer’s desired outcomes is a modern form of mis-selling. It may not involve deception. It may not be wilful. But it produces the same result: a customer who feels let down, a vendor whose reputation is damaged, and a commercial relationship that never reaches its potential.

The traditional definition of mis-selling, focused almost entirely on deliberate dishonesty, allows too many sales organisations to believe they are operating ethically when in reality they are systematically - if unintentionally - setting their customers up to fail.

The standard needs to be higher. In a world where customers buy on the basis of expected outcomes and renew on the basis of outcomes actually achieved, the bar for what constitutes a well-made sale has risen accordingly. The question is no longer simply “did the customer agree to buy?” It is “did the customer actually achieve what they expected to achieve - and did we do everything in our power to make that possible?”

If the answer to either part of that question is no, then somewhere along the way, something went wrong. And in most cases, the place to look is not the delivery team, or the implementation process, or the customer’s internal adoption rate. The place to look is the sale itself.

Sales leaders and CEOs who are serious about building sustainable, high-performing revenue organisations need to take this expanded definition of mis-selling seriously - and build it into the culture, the qualification criteria, the pre-sales governance processes, and the performance metrics of their teams.

The financial services industry learned this lesson the hard way, at enormous cost. B2B sales leaders have the advantage of being able to learn it in advance.