No, ofcoarse you shouldn’t. If you are that desperate that you need to undertake in ripping off people who wouldn’t benefit from your product then you might have an operational or customer service issue within your service delivery, you don’t have a big enough market available or your sales and marketing strategy needs improvement. Be honest and say: “Gary, I’ve had a good hard think about this, I’m not in the game of selling to people who I don’t feel are going to benefit from my product, It’s ashame because I would love to do business with you but I just don’t think we are a fit at this moment.”

Don’t be disappointed with your inability to sell to this prospect, but disappointed with the fact that whoever booked the appointment did not qualify it well enough.

I get it, sometimes sales staff are under immense pressure from management and make sales just to shut everyone up. I understand… But look… The negatives in the long run far outweight the short term pressure realese of “having gotten a sale.” Jilted customers do the follwoing:

1) Take legal action

2) Say things about you to damage your reputation

3) Your company might need to refund them which is always embarassing as a salesperson

4) Have your integrity questioned

Try to use the somewhat wasted appointment to learn about their industry, practice a different technique, horizontal sales or ask for a referral. Often when I have respectfully denied someones business they really appreciate the honesty and will often repay that down the track by calling up and giving me a number of one of their friends. “Call Mark, he’s a good bloke, he’s an expert.” I’m an expert because I listened to their pain, problem and diagnosed it as not a fit with our product. I will completely disarm them about me being a dishonest salesperson. They will think of me as somebody with integrity that did the right thing… When most salespeople often would just take the sale.