Sales Ethics

Alberto Aleo, Alice Alessandri

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781606499276
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Do ethics pay? In an attempt to answer this question, the authors analyze the economic theories that might rehabilitate ethics in the world of sales and turn them into an effective tool for conducting negotiations. This book proposes a "bottom-up" approach that starts from an analysis of sales activities to build a business style that, if adopted by an entire organization, can make the difference thus enhancing the company's success. Italian culture provides a backdrop to the book; the authors reinterpret the particular nature of the country's economic and social fabric and integrate this into an approach to business that can create authentic relationships, shared prosperity and quality of life across other cultures. Sale Ethics stimulates the development of a self-entrepreneurial mind-set that is useful in any field, and provides a simple and effective method of capitalizing on your own talents while respecting others and at the same time garnering the rewards of ethical behavior.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Why Read a Book on Sales Ethics?

Many—if not most—of us will abandon attempts to follow our values simply because we don’t believe it is possible to do so.

—Mary Gentile, Giving Voice to Values

Why Read This Chapter?

We will explain what we mean by Sales Ethics and why we thought it necessary to write a book on the subject. As we reflect together on these themes, you can get a clearer picture of the context within which a salesperson operates today, the macro scenarios that form the backdrop to the market, and the main differences between the United States and Italy. Before going any further, we want to introduce Renato, a salesperson whose evolution will accompany us throughout the course of the book. His initial doubts prompt him to initiate a journey of change that will transform him into an ethical salesperson.

The Salesperson: A Changing Profession

It’s daybreak in Milan and Renato would prefer to be spending the day at home even though the cramped space of his studio apartment is stifling. In fact, he’d enjoy a day in bed with a temperature, because even that would be better than another day at work.

Renato is in his early 50s. He has been working for Joy Motor for years, but shortly, over a year ago, the decision came from above to transfer him to Milan. On paper it looked like promotion “you will be handling executive customers from our central offices” they told him. It took just a few days to discover the “catch.”

Renato is a car salesman who had been working contentedly in a branch owned by the parent company, but far removed from the controls of the central office. The work was pleasant, he was producing results, and his bosses were indulgent; as long as sales were high all he had to do was show his face in the office once or twice a week and they were satisfied. At the annual sales meeting, Renato was the star: His superiors praised his achievements, and quoted him as an example to other less productive colleagues.

It had not been easy at the outset; he had wanted to go to college, perhaps a major in architecture, but there wasn’t enough money and he wasn’t that keen on knuckling down to study. Through a friend, he found a job as a sales clerk with a car dealer. Renato was shy and rather quiet at the time and his first outings with an experienced seller were quite a trauma. Customers asked him questions he was unable to answer, his bosses expected him to conclude sales but he didn’t know how to go about it.

In Milan, he is now responsible to the executive customers of a large multinational in the sector, but he feels as though he’s back in the early days when his work felt like an uphill slog and even getting out of bed was an effort, let alone making it to the end of the day.

Yesterday, for example, when his boss had asked him for a report on sales trends and forecasts, he couldn’t get away with the type of answer that would have satisfied his former branch managers: “Shame I don’t have a crystal ball!” spoken loudly and with a knowing look to his colleagues. Now his behavior is a source of embarrassment for the sales department. In addition, he has to go in every day and produce a list of appointments for his bosses as well as attending monthly meetings held mostly in English. Yet, strange as it may seem, these are not the biggest problems he has to face in his new position: What Renato really finds unbearable now is working with the customers. First, the boss he has now is not ready to give the nod if Renato decides to bring the price down—any discount has to be authorized and justified and even then is rarely granted—and to top it all he’s facing tough competition from the Asian products that are flooding the market at bargain prices! Any lunches or expenses, a key part of his personal sales technique, are closely monitored.

The customers are different too. It’s no longer enough to add on a couple of optional extras to close a deal, they want him to listen carefully while they explain their needs and then guide them through their choice with suggestions and hard facts, as well as being on hand afterwards to clear up any problems.

Renato’s smartphone never stops beeping, what with e-mails arriving at all times of the day and incoming calls from his boss or his customers; in fact, it hasn’t stopped in the 12 months he’s been here in Milan. He now hates his job, along with his colleagues who are in league with the company, his inflexible bosses, and the place in which he has to live. His deep dissatisfaction has repercussions on his mood, which in turn affects his relationships. From the shy boy he once was he had learnt how to smooth talk his customers, but now he struggles to find the right words. He seems sullen or bored when interacting, and sometimes even worse, he feels vulnerable and helpless when dealing with others. What’s happening to him? How can he break free from this situation?

Renato’s story may be common to many sales reps and other sales pros forced to deal with a profession that is changing, and that maybe they did not consciously choose, but rather grew into. Over the years, they have developed a sales technique that is no longer acceptable to their customers. They may still see their job as essentially based on experience and direct practice in the field, while managing sales strategies is the task of either sales directors or those in the marketing department. When suddenly asked to initiate a new regime of method and efficiency, they feel unprepared and their pride as sales veterans is wounded. These changed circumstances leave them feeling out of place and angry, they can no longer operate freely and in the only way they know; they feel they have lost the strengths that enabled them to win the tug of war with their customers! By contrast, many young marketing, management, or economics graduates see sales as an unprofessional stopgap, an expedient to use as a springboard to their real career. Indeed, universities in Europe very rarely discuss the act of selling and thus reinforce its relegation to a competence that you pick up in the field, rather than an actual profession to which you can accede after completing a specific learning program. Yet you need only browse any job listing to see that the majority of positions advertised are for salespeople, and many of these posts will remain unfilled because the generalized distrust of the sales profession combined with the lack of any specific curricular training make it difficult or unattractive for a young candidate to apply.

This situation has led to the reflections and the issues that this book will tackle:

• How is the sales profession changing?

• What new tools are required to remain competitive in the markets?

• Can sales be an actual profession with its own pool of skills and abilities and regulated by a code of ethics?

In addition, we will focus on:

• What is the real objective of a seller?

• What personal characteristics and skills must you develop to excel in your work?

• Can you be a good professional if you don’t like what you do?

We aim to answer these and other important questions that the sales profession is facing today and to provide arguments to help Renato and colleagues like him to discover or rediscover their passion for sales, while at the same time obtaining results in a market that is changing thanks to the crisis.

Renato, and his colleagues, will accompany us through the chapters of this book with their personal experiences, providing case studies and topics for us to consider. They will evolve as we move forward and will achieve an awareness and transformation that we hope you will make your own.

What Is Sales Ethics?

Let us make one thing immediately clear: This book is not going to discuss cooperative societies, nonprofit organizations, or what insiders call the civil economy. We do not intend to discuss the means of achieving a more democratic company organization or of showing greater concern for employee well-being, nor indeed do we wish to encroach on areas regarding the social impact of companies and the assessment of their results beyond the purpose of profit.¹ The concept of down-shifting, known as the strategy of slowing down and changing the basic concepts of capitalism, is equally beyond the scope of this book. As interesting as these fields may be, we wish to concentrate wholly on sales and on the relations between salespeople and their customers.

We believe that alongside the highly recommendable attempt to re-establish market logics by sensitizing them to social and humanitarian issues, we can also provide ethical tools that may improve our approach to customers, both in terms of efficiency and mutual well-being, while remaining within the paradigm of maximizing individual advantage that still informs our system.

The production of profit, and the idea of success linked to it, remains a potent motivation in many professional areas (and this will likely continue) and, above all, in the area of sales. If we were to shy away from the profit motive, many readers would lose interest in the topics covered by this book, and our attempts to encourage an ethical reform of the economic system would be undermined. On the other hand, the discussion of sales within a social cooperative, for example, would still be tricky because in the collective imagination business is inextricably linked to the idea of creating individual advantage by pursuing opportunistic behavior at the expense of the customer (or consumer). Sales and cooperation have yet to find a common ground. For this to come about, we need to first rehabilitate the figure of the salesperson, and to do this we must overcome the idea that there is necessarily a conflict of interest between salespeople and their customers.

This book intends to demonstrate just how outdated this idea of a conflict of interest actually is. By contrast we will provide evidence that the pursuit of ethical behavior will not only resolve conflict between the actors in the negotiations, but can also help to increase—in an absolute sense—the benefits that each will derive from the sales deal.

We discovered that it is possible to achieve significant success, thanks to ethics. Indeed, Adam Grant, professor at the Wharton School clearly argued this thesis and gave ample demonstration of the results in his interesting book Give and Take.² In this analysis, he clearly shows us, numbers in hand, that if you adopt a giver strategy based on respect and the creation of value for others, you are likely, on average, to obtain better results than those who adopt a taker behavior, focusing merely on obtaining personal benefit.

We will show that there are many other good reasons to write about ethics in sales. But before we go on to examine them, we need to explain in greater detail what we mean by ethics applied to sales.

If you look up the meaning of the word ethics, you’ll see that it comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning behavior and habit. Ethics is concerned with the way we act and our deeply held values. Thus, it is very important when talking about ethics to remember that its meaning has a practical dimension, that is, ethics involves more than abstract philosophizing, it indicates that we must learn to act, and find tools, that allow us to assess the outcome of our actions. These tools and actions must be coherent with our identity. In judo, for example, there is a principle that defines the ethical goal of the discipline: Sei Ryoku Zen’Yo. This term could be translated roughly as optimum energy use. For the practitioners of judo, ethics are an operational tool to achieve better performance and greater efficiency and this approach is applied through constant training of the mind, body, and heart to adequately recognize and use the energy carriers involved in encounters with others. You too will learn to recognize the energy and the forces at work within a sales relationship and to use them to build value for all the actors involved. Ukè and Torì (the two opponents in a judo encounter) do not, in fact, face up to each other to decide who will win and who will be defeated, but to study together so that both may improve their abilities and skills.³

Over time, the word ethics has actually taken on multiple meanings depending on the period and context of its use. For the purposes of this work, the most interesting are those linking it to the concept of morality and the reciprocal nature⁴ of actions.

When can we define a specific behavior as moral and an action reciprocal?

Generally, we define behavior as moral when it aims at the common good, and an action is described as reciprocal when there is a balance between what we give and what we take, between rights and obligations. It follows that ethics is very much concerned with the way we relate to others. Indeed, if we consider what we said earlier, it is not possible to act in an ethical manner without a relational exchange: Where would the reciprocity be otherwise and how could we pursue the common good?

Sales also inevitably involve an exchange between people. If we consider the essential meaning of the verb sell, we will find that it denotes the giving of something to someone in exchange for something else, in order to obtain an increase of well-being. Sales and ethics are thus two activities with a specific aim that both involve a relationship as their operational tool. If we look even closer, the end itself is also the same: both have as their goal the creation of well-being, though ethics focuses on common well-being and sales involves that of the individual. We will return to this apparent divergence of aims in Chapter 3 when we discuss the economic theory of strategic games. At this point, it’s sufficient to appreciate how, by mixing the purposes underlying sales with those of ethics, we can obtain the four cardinal principles of Sales Ethics, which will guide negotiations and operational decisions in our work.

1. The efficiency of the action: Giving customers what they really need, while making the best use of resources and time and ensuring mutual satisfaction. Ethics, in our view, is linked inextricably to efficiency and the balance between giving and taking. Efficiency means finding a point of contact, or synergy, between the salesperson’s goals, which we will refer to as the seller value, and those of our customer, which we will call customer value.

2. Customer value: In any negotiation, it is essential to identify the customer’s objectives and then work to build value for him or her. In the chapter dealing with key concepts, we will explore further what we mean by value (actually a wider concept than the simple sum of customers’ material needs and wants), by giving a definition that combines both tangible and intangible aspects. Customers possess knowledge, information, and a culture from which they derive their style of communication and interpersonal relationships. It is necessary to understand and accept them because, as we will see, the way we relate to others contributes to creating value.

3. Seller value: If we fail to ensure our own well-being, we will not be able to build value for others. The premise that you cannot achieve success as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Abstract
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: The First Step
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How to Use This Book
• Part I
• Chapter 1 Why Read a Book on Sales Ethics?
• Chapter 2 The Key Concepts in Sales Ethics
• Chapter 3 The Economic Theories Underlying Sales Ethics
• Part II
• Chapter 4 Preparing for Negotiations
• Chapter 5 The Phases of Sales Ethics
• Conclusions: The Second Step
• FAQ: Our Answers to Your Questions
• References
• Bibliography
• Index
• Adpage
• Backcover