A weakness your buyer finds for themselves destroys trust. A weakness you name first converts it into a proof point. The moment we started leading with our product's longest onboarding time in sales calls, our close rate went up.
For about six months we had a standing debate in our sales team about one specific thing: whether to mention, upfront, that our onboarding took longer than most of the competition.
The product worked well after onboarding. The results spoke for themselves. But getting there required eight to twelve weeks of close collaboration, some migration work, and a couple of phases that most clients found more involved than they expected. Some reps were mentioning it. Some were burying it in the contract. Nobody had agreed on a policy.
The argument for staying quiet was intuitive: why hand someone a reason to say no before they've said yes? The argument for leading with it was harder to articulate at the time. We tried it anyway.
The thing we found in a copywriting book
Around this time I was working through Luke Sullivan's Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, which is technically a book about advertising but contains more clear thinking about honesty in communications than most business books I've read. Sullivan has a concept he calls Embracing the Suck. The idea: if your brand has an obvious weakness, the worst strategy is to hope nobody notices. The better one is to tackle it head-on before your competitor, your reviewer, or your buyer's own research does it for you.
His examples are from advertising history, but the psychology maps straight onto sales. When you acknowledge a flaw first, something shifts in the room. The buyer stops bracing for what you're hiding. They start listening to what you're saying.
When you acknowledge a flaw first, the buyer stops bracing for what you're hiding and starts listening to what you're saying.
Sullivan frames it as a creative principle. Marcus Sheridan, in They Ask, You Answer, frames it as a commercial one. Sheridan calls it disarmament: the act of naming your weaknesses, costs, and limitations before anyone asks. His argument is that buyers in 2026 arrive at sales calls having already done 70 per cent of their research. They know your rough pricing. They've read reviews. They've probably seen a comparison article. The question isn't whether they'll find the weakness. It's whether they hear it from you first.
What the test actually showed
We ran an informal split for a quarter. Half the team led with the onboarding timeline in the first call. Half held it until questions came up. The reps who led with it tracked their outcomes separately.
Close rates were higher for the group that led with it. Significantly. The deals that did progress moved faster because there was no late-stage renegotiation when the client eventually read the contract properly. And the clients who walked away after hearing the timeline upfront? They were going to walk away eventually. We'd just saved everyone four weeks of meetings.
Our onboarding is pretty straightforward. The team will walk you through it once you're ready to start.
The honest thing to tell you now is that onboarding takes eight to twelve weeks. That's longer than most. Here's why it's built that way, and what you'll have at the end of it.
The version on the right is harder to say. It requires confidence that your product justifies the ask. But that confidence, when genuine, comes through. And a buyer who hears that from you on the first call files it under "this person is straight with me" rather than "I'll need to watch out for what they're not saying."
The psychology is simple and most people ignore it
Sheridan has a line that stuck with me: buyers today are like patients who've already looked up their symptoms before the appointment. They arrive suspicious and ready to catch you out. Disarmament works because it removes the thing they're most prepared to find.
There's also something more basic going on. When someone volunteers a weakness, it activates a heuristic in the listener's brain: this person is telling me something that doesn't serve them. That costs them something. Therefore it's probably true. And if that's true, I'm more likely to believe everything else they say.
Buyers already suspect your limitations. The only question is whether they hear them from you or discover them alone.
The reverse also holds. When you learn a limitation after you've committed, trust collapses fast. Not because the limitation is necessarily deal-breaking, but because you wonder what else they weren't telling you. The hidden flaw becomes evidence of a pattern. The self-disclosed flaw never does.
What Embracing the Suck sounds like in practice
The script matters. Naming a weakness badly is worse than not naming it at all. You're not confessing. You're contextualising.
I should mention, our onboarding is a bit involved. Sorry about that.
Our onboarding takes longer than most, and that's by design. The clients who get the most from the product are the ones who go through the full process. I'd rather tell you now than have it come as a surprise six weeks in.
The second version does several things at once. It names the limitation. It explains the decision behind it. It signals that you're invested in the buyer's success rather than just the deal. And it closes with a statement of intent that's hard to argue with: I'd rather tell you now.
Sullivan's framing is useful here too. In advertising, Embracing the Suck works best when the weakness contains a hidden strength. Long onboarding is evidence of depth. A niche product range is evidence of focus. A premium price is evidence of investment. The limitation and the selling point are usually two sides of the same thing. Naming the limitation first is often the most efficient route to the selling point.
What we changed permanently
The onboarding conversation moved to slide two of every discovery call. We built a short section into the deck called "What this requires from you": two or three specifics about time, internal resources, and transition expectations. The reps who found it hardest to say at first were the ones who'd been least sure the product was worth it. Having to say it out loud forced a useful reckoning.
The rep who resisted it most came back six months later and said it had become their strongest trust-building moment. The moment they named the limitation, buyers leaned in. Several told her it was the first time in months they'd been in a sales conversation where they felt the other person wasn't managing them.
The suck, embraced, turned into the pitch.
