In my 20s, I took a trip to Lanzarote. A friend of a friend lent us their apartment in the capital, Arrecife. At the time, the island was absolutely crawling with timeshare salespeople. Personally, I couldn't care less about buying a timeshare, I had barely scraped together enough cash for the flights, let alone a property investment

But then a street rep approached us with a golden hook: “Do you want two days of free car hire?” The catch? We just had to sit through a timeshare pitch. Free wheels meant we could escape Arrecife and drive out to Playa Blanca for a change of scenery. (What we didn't know back then was that Lanzarote actually has a fantastic, cheap, and regular bus service, but that’s a story for another day).

Looking back, that timeshare sales team operated exactly like a modern B2B tech sales org. They had SDRs roaming the beaches and bars, hunting for leads to feed to their AEs. When our beachside SDR started asking qualifying questions, I immediately failed the BANT criteria: I was a year too young, and my budget was exactly zero.

Instead of disqualifying us, though, she chose to game the system. "Look," she whispered, "I’ll put you through anyway, but when you get to the office, you have to tell them you’re a year older and that you just inherited £30,000."

With two days of free driving on the line, we weren’t about to ruin the play. The next day, we were picked up and brought to the venue. When the front desk asked the qualification questions, I lied through my teeth without breaking a sweat

Then came the presentation. We watched the video, sat down with the AE, and went through the whole pitch. I actually started feeling incredibly guilty. The poor guy never stood a chance, but he was laying it on thick. Afterward, he confessed he had a "really good feeling" about us". It got worse: he told us he’d just bet his sales manager that if he couldn’t close us, he’d shave his mustache off

We didn't buy, the mustache presumably met a tragic end, but we did get our prize, a tiny Fiat Panda. We spent the next two days exploring Playa Blanca, though my guilt was heavy enough that I made sure to meticulously clean every grain of sand out of that footwell before handing back the keys

Conclusion

There is a vital lesson here for anyone working in sales: Customers don't always tell you the truth, because your product isn't always their goal. As sales professionals, we like to believe that a prospect enters our pipeline because they have a business problem we can solve. But sometimes, buyers are incentivized by entirely different, hidden motivations, whether that's gathering free market research, pleasing a boss, filling a vendor-evaluation quota, or, metaphorically speaking, just trying to get a free Fiat Panda for the weekend. If a deal feels too good to be true, or if a prospect qualifies a little too perfectly on paper, look closer. You might just be the target of a phantom buyer who has absolutely no intention of buying