“Glengarry Glen Ross” is a riveting movie about selling that will both entertain you and make you cringe at the same time, particularly if you make your living selling. At the very least, it will make you question your own code of ethics. Based on David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same…
Sales people talk or send e-mails to customers and prospects all day long. They make sales presentations, handle objections, quote price and delivery, write proposals, and close orders. After a while it almost becomes automatic or second nature since this is what sales people do. Yet, sales people probably don’t think of themselves as acting…
Let’s turn the table and look at selling and ethics from the customers’ perspective. Trust me, buyers know unethical behavior when they see it and they keep score. What does unethical selling look like if you are the buyer? • Misrepresenting the product’s specifications, warranty, or capabilities. • Bashing the competition (warranted or not). •…
I received a flood of responses about my recent blog on “Ethical Selling”. Most were private e-mails from sales people who have had to defend their ethics. For many, the most frequently confronted issue was the company’s need for more sales versus the code of ethics of the individual sales person. Others wrote about the…
Long term customer relationships are built on trust. Trust is the single most important ingredient in a successful long-term selling relationship. Trust is the belief that you will do your part, that you will deliver what you promise and that you will fulfill your obligations in the relationship. These commitments can be in writing, verbal,…
For most of us, knowing the difference between right and wrong is pretty clear, but sometimes doing the right thing is hard to do. Or, let’s say we are challenged to make the right choices. Our government helps us out with our decision making process about right and wrong by making laws that specifically tell…
Another aggressive negotiation tactic or dirty trick that is played more often than you think is the intentional mistake. Usually it comes in the form of a proposal which has an error in your favor; it is a deliberate trick to get you to agree now. Examples could include a pricing error, the sales tax omitted, or a quantity mistake.
Cell phone usage has radically changed over the past five years. It was not that long ago that corporate usage of cell phones was considered a luxury and their usage was closely scrutinized for cost reasons since it was so expensive. It is an understatement to say that cell phone usage today is ubiquitous.
A recent study by Transparency International, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending global corruption, surveyed 11,000 business executives. The survey studied the business ethics of the world’s top 30 exporting countries. The end result of the study as a stacked ranking of the nations most likely to offer bribes.