A Pitch Built on Hallucinations
A vendor pitch with hallucinated numbers kills trust fast and turns an email marketing discussion into a bad upsell.
Going into a meeting without an agenda or supporting materials puts you at a disadvantage right away.
You get on the call with zero context. You cannot check the numbers, prepare questions, or see how any of this fits into your roadmap. You stop being part of a discussion. You just listen.
Instead of talking about system architecture, API integrations, or actual product strategy, you start picking apart every word on the screen. The conversation derails, the room tightens up, and trust is gone in five minutes.
A few days ago, an email marketing platform pitched us their solution. Solid technical background, established product. They wanted to show how their tool could fit our workflows.
Instead, they showed up with a deck built in ChatGPT or Gemini. A few prompts, an export, and a screen share.
The pitch focused on our passenger trigger emails. They suggested cutting our partner hotel offers entirely and replacing them with our own ancillary products. Baggage, meals, seat selection. On the slide, it looked convincing. Supposedly, only 2.8 percent of recipients book a hotel, making it a waste of email real estate.
That logic holds up right until you ask where the data came from.
An email platform vendor has no access to our complete analytics. They cannot see revenue from our partner networks, they do not track conversion by route, and they know nothing about our unit economics. When your trigger emails generate solid revenue per send well above the industry average, you know exactly what each block is worth.
That single condition unlocked an aggressive paid media strategy. Even off-season, an average cart contains 1.4 flight segments, which means partner fees add up quickly on round trips. With a strict Last Touch rule in place, marketing can afford to bid aggressively on search or display networks to overwrite the aggregator's touchpoint. Spending a fraction on a paid ad click wipes out a much larger commission fee.
Then came the usual pivot. Once the pitch started falling apart, the vendor offered to bring in their dedicated data analyst at an extra hourly rate to help us optimize the setup.
In a tense room where one side is pushing back on fabricated numbers and the other is trying to recover, pitching billable hours looks like nothing more than an awkward upsell.
There is no deal after a conversation like that.
This is the same kind of shortcut that shows up in The Illusion of Cheap Auto Attribution and Broken CPO, where the spreadsheet looks clever until the real unit economics show up. It also sits next to Email Is Dead. My Last Campaign Just Made $135k, because email only looks dead until you measure it properly. The sales side of the story is the same one I wrote about in Not Today, where a B2B deal dies the moment honesty leaves the room.
Using AI to draft notes or structure rough thoughts is fine. But when a model starts inventing your prospect’s business model and your team cannot be bothered to review its own slides, the sale is already over.
