“All buyers are liars” is an old sales expression, and like most old sales expressions, it’s half true and mostly unhelpful.
Buyers do shade the truth — about budget, about timeline, about who else they’re talking to. That’s not the same as buyers being fundamentally untrustworthy. Treat every buyer as a liar and you’ll miss the ones being straight with you. Treat every claim at face value and you’ll get burned by the ones who aren’t. The skill worth building isn’t suspicion. It’s calibration.