Sales Tips

Ethical Selling: A Must-Read Manifesto for Sales Teams 

Gone are the days when salespeople were expected to sell ice to Eskimos. If anything, such a practice is heavily looked down upon in the current market scenario! The transition from exploiting customers to empowering them can be attributed to a variety of reasons. For a start, it could stem from customers finally managing to wield power.

At the same time, businesses have discovered that acting in customers’ best interests cultivates loyalty, increases revenue, and attracts long-term customer lifetime value. As such, the hype surrounding ethical selling seems absolutely justified.

What is Ethical Selling?

Sales ethics relates to a set of defined behaviors to safeguard all leads and prospects from malpractices in sales. It thrives under the tenets of integrity, fairness, and honesty to treat every individual with respect. Those practicing ethics in sales not only respect the choices and opinions of the leads or prospects but also empower them to make well-rounded, unbiased purchase decisions. 

The agenda of ethics in selling is pretty straightforward – help the customer purchase what they want, not just what you have to sell.

Tips to Maintain Ethics in Sales

Ethical selling may appear rational and easy in theory, but it is anything but so in practice. Salespeople experience intense pressure to meet their quota, so much so that they might slip up even without realizing it. However, here are some real-life, actionable ways to maintain ethics in selling:

1) Tell It As It Is

Picture this: you are on a call with a prospect that displays a high propensity for conversion. You may be tempted to exaggerate some of the features or impacts of your product just so that you could push for a sale. After all, making your product attractive is a part of your job! As tempting as it may seem, step back and evaluate the situation. 

Suppose you do happen to win the sales and the prospect purchases the product, you would be laying the groundwork for future disappointment. Your product will fall short of the promises that you have made, and the disgruntled customer will lose trust in your business.

Not just that, it would be the last you see of them as 91% of unhappy customers won’t do business with a deceptive company again. There’s more – they might even write you a negative review. So, they don’t just go alone; they take several other customers with them!

Does the single gain seem worthy of such damages?

Serve, Don’t Sell

Ricocheting off the previous thought – ethical selling is all about helping customers make informed purchase decisions. Formulated by Liston Witherill, the Serve Don’t Sell (SDS) method involves a series of five steps:

  1. Identifying the Perfect Fit Client (PFC)
  2. Discovering their personal/organizational pain points
  3. Offering your product/service as a solution
  4. Sending a proposal and handling objections
  5. Signing the contract and commencing training and onboarding

At first glance, it may appear like your run-of-the-mill sales cycle. However, upon closer inspection, you will realize that it follows a customer-centric process than a product-centric one. The goal is to help your customers and not sell for the sake of it. Such a shift in approach will also alleviate some of the pressure off of your sales reps.

Respect Data Sanctity

Data is the new oil – and salespeople sit on a treasure of data! However, with great power comes great responsibility, and ethics in sales address that as well.

Ethical selling involves treating customer data as sacred and maintaining absolute transparency in how you use it.

Unless you have explicitly sought consent from the customer, avoid sharing their personal data with third parties. Sharing personal identifiers such as their name, contact details, occupation, etc., is not only a gross violation of their privacy but could also land you in legal or regulatory trouble!

Even if you are running a business in a location that lacks any laws or regulations surrounding data privacy, drafting (and enforcing) organization-wide policies and educating customers about the same could be an excellent step towards infusing ethics into selling.

Maintain Accountability

We get it. Mistakes happen, but how you respond to them is an indicator of integrity. And remember, sales ethics is all about that integrity! If a situation arises where you are at fault, don’t shy away from stepping up and taking responsibility for it.

Pointing fingers, devising a cover-up, or trying to save face will not help you earn customer goodwill. In fact, it will only indicate that you care more about your reputation than the ethics governing your organization.

At the same time, propose an appropriate solution to remedy the situation and set right the tipped scales of ethics in sales. You will notice that such an approach will make customers more forgiving of your mistakes.

Avoid a Smear Campaign

Most salespeople may have heard the line, “why should we buy from you and not from your competitor?” Such a question may warrant an entire spiel about how your competitor is the worst choice. However, that’s not what ethical selling is all about. Criticizing, slandering, bad-mouthing, and talking down about your competition is unhelpful.

Ethics in sales require you to be honest and transparent at all times – even when you are carrying your comparisons with your competition. Approach it practically and perform a fair comparison; you may even highlight the distinct features of both options. If your product is a good fit for the prospect, they would, anyway, end up picking you! 

Closing Thoughts

Ethical selling requires organization-wide acceptance to be a success. At the same time, it must be incorporated into the very fabric of your business ideology so that your salespeople maintain the highest standards of ethics in sales. Open communication, transparency, and honesty are just the first few steps of sales ethics, while the journey is endless as you connect with prospect after prospect.

Sid heads the global Sales Team at JustCall. He has been instrumental in establishing the foundation for the GTM functions at JustCall, driving the organisation into a growth phase. He is passionate about enabling organisations to build great customer experiences using technology. He is always looking to help startups beyond work, advising early stage companies on all things Sales & GTM.

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