We are on the cusp of a tidal wave of AI scams, and I don’t mean some chatbot trying to get your Medicare number. I mean deception that would make the Count of Monte Cristo look like Humpty Dumpty. To all the risk managers out there, I would warn that your sales team, like any line of communication, is the secret tunnel into your castle defences. Particularly if you are a sales manager accountable for your sales team’s time and spend. Here is a blog about Australian law in sales, https://www.outsold.com.au/australian-law-and-your-sales-team/.
As a fractional sales lead, I see all kinds of dubious sales plays. There’s a sales tactic I ran into recently, and it is so genius and deceptive that I barely recognised it after 30 years in the trenches of sales. This scam will be huge. It took a week to replay it in my head before I could reverse engineer it. It took me hours just to explain it to AI. When the AI finally got it, the AI then refused to discuss it, gave a huge list of laws it broke, not just federal and state but moral codes as well. The AI said publishing this technique would be incredibly damaging, because by demonstrating it, people would replicate it. Which is ironic, because it largely uses AI purchasing agents and is highly replicable. I agree wholeheartedly. I have zero interest in teaching predators how to use this sales technique. This is me offering 30 years of sales experience telling you how to spot the fin in the water.
I called it the Wounded Rabbit.
A salesperson identifies an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), the person they want to sell to. Instead of approaching that target as a seller, they approach the company as a potential customer or prospect, asking to be pitched, asking for a proposal, sometimes even appearing inside a genuine looking tender request, expression of interest, or other buying signal. There will be a website, LinkedIn profiles, even a meeting with a key decision maker, someone with a title like CEO, who is either the actual wounded rabbit, or actually a salesperson themselves. To an AI, “social proof” like a website and social media profiles is a one minute task.
The stupid, obvious version is to bait and switch once you’ve got the decision maker on the phone, and start selling your own product. I’ve seen one sales trainer whose “killer pitch” was “tell the CEO I have some really great news for him.” Sure, it gets them on the phone, and sure, you’ve technically pitched them, but you’ve done the opposite of building a relationship. You spat in their face.
The Wounded Rabbit is not that. It’s far more subtle. Here’s a basic version of it, without the mechanics, tools, process, or language. First, know that in every human interaction, one person buys and one person sells.
Let’s say you sell paintbrushes. You reach out to painting companies and pretend to be their ideal customer, like a facility manager, and ask them to price a simple but lucrative commercial painting job. Then, for some reason, you specify that the paintbrush you sell be used on the job, and you request that in the tender. This is a basic, silly version of it, but it triggers an internal buying process with a bias already built in. It’s kind of like a mystery shopper, but way worse. As an example, the painting company may actually buy or request samples of that paintbrush from the very people who requested it, to make sure they can work with it. Put simply, they’ve moved past product research and into testing.
The target, believing they’ve spotted a new “wounded rabbit” or an easy sale, activates their own internal sales process and lowers the defences. The prospective customer spends money on their own cost of sale and customer acquisition buying your product, and opens the door wide. You tell them you need what they have. They pitch. This is particularly destructive for consulting, where the product is intangible knowledge, and they ask, “what is your process, how do we know you can do what we need?” In this case, “can you demonstrate a major commercial painting project where this brand of paintbrush was used?”
Now they buy a bunch of your paintbrushes, use them on an existing project, and the paintbrush sales manager moves you through their sales pipe, past prospect, past meeting booked, past qualified, past proposal sent, past negotiated, past sale, into repeat business.
Their CAC equals zero. Their Customer Acquisition Cost becomes nothing. The customer paid their own CAC for you. But the key risk here is YOUR CAC goes through the roof. They transfered their cost of sale to you.
The salesperson then invests in meetings, putting together a proposal of service, trying to demonstrate expertise, oversharing process, pricing, capability, sales process, initiating internal operations to use the product, sometimes free strategic thinking they’d never hand over to an actual competitor or vendor doing due diligence. Somewhere in that conversation, the roles quietly reverse, and the “buyer” ends up positioned as the trusted advisor recommending their own product back into the deal, or the requirement is worded so specifically that only their own offering can satisfy it. The basics being, you switch roles from seller to buyer. It’s not push sales, it’s pull sales, like marketing.
It’s called the change of meaning principle. Once you recognise you’re being sold to, your guard goes up, you scrutinise claims harder, and you hold information back. (Friestad and Wright, 1994, published in the Journal of Consumer Research.) It works because of something called the Persuasion Knowledge Model. People build up a kind of internal radar for persuasion attempts over a lifetime of being sold to, and the moment that radar fires, everything about how they process the interaction changes.The Wounded Rabbit works precisely because that radar never detects a threat to put up your defences. The target isn’t on guard, because as far as they know, nobody’s selling them anything. They think they’re the one asking the princess to the dance.
A few things worth watching for if you get new inbound.
Looking a little too good to be true.
A quote request that comes out of the blue.
Trust your intuition, it is an ancient human behaviour built to protect us.
Something doesn’t make sense. Feeling off is probably for a reason.
Be curious. Like, how did you find out about us? Why do you need this?
If they are too eager.
No objections.
In short, don’t do this stuff. A Harvard Business School study by Eccles, Ioannou and Serafeim tracked companies with high ethical and sustainability standards against low ones over eighteen years, and found the high standard group significantly outperformed. I always say being straight up honest is always best. I always start with a version of “Hi, I’m Jamie, I’m here to sell you X.” Same as nobody likes getting a LinkedIn request followed by a pitch slap. The key reason is that nobody is smart enough to maintain a web of lies. You can’t build a relationship on deception.
More thinking like this at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
If something like this happens to you and you believe it crosses from clever into misleading or deceptive conduct, that’s a matter for the ACCC under Australian Consumer Law. If the pattern looks less like a competitor being cheeky and more like a structured attempt to extract sensitive commercial information under false pretences, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, run by the Australian Signals Directorate, takes reports from businesses on exactly this kind of targeting.
