| Preface
•
In an eagerly anticipated speech, a well-known
CEO advises a convention audience of senior
managers, “the overwhelming majority
of ethics problems I’ve had to deal
with come from people who talk about how
much integrity they have. In our company,
that’s a red flag.”
•
The author of a new sales book exhorts salespeople
to sincerely care about their customers.
Quoting venerable sales sage, Zig Ziglar,
he writes: “people don’t care
how much you know until they know how much
you care.” The author’s new
book is: The Science of Influence: How to
Get Anyone to Say YES in 8 Minutes or Less.
•
In an effort to “elevate the ethical
behavior of salespeople” a motivational
speaker known for his impassioned speeches
on the importance of principled selling
offers an on-line Sales Ethics Checklist.
The checklist was plagiarized from another
website.
Values.
Principles. Integrity. Virtues. Ethically,
we live in an ironic age. U.S. president,
Bill Clinton’s wily assault on truth
and meaning, Michael Moore’s political
bias artlessly touted as “documentary
filmmaking” and high-minded mission
statements brightening the hallways of organizations
like Arthur Anderson and Enron have made
people necessarily wary ? if not cynical.
In a sense, we seem to be drifting relentlessly
downwards to, “a looser more skeptical
relationship with the truth” (Stengel,
2000, p. 13).
Unspoken wariness is bound to flourish when
the concept of truth itself becomes corrupted
into just another flashy commercial offering,
like “body language”, to be
colorfully presented by lavishly paid speakers
at sales conventions (where copies of the
their presentations, slickly packaged into
four gospel-like “modules”,
always seem to be conveniently available
for purchase at the back of the auditorium).
Salespeople today are routinely indoctrinated
in the black art of projecting the appearance
of trust, warmth, sincerity and caring.
The “sincerity industry” relentlessly
pitches integrity and principles as if they
were commodities and seems unmindful (and
unbothered) by the inherent irony in training
people to act sincere. Salespeople have
understandably forgotten to ask: “what
is it about acting sincere that makes me
sincere?”
The driving purpose behind this book is
to answer that question. The answer was,
is and always will be: “nothing”.
Regardless of your sales setting, the presentational
style you use, or the number of times buzzwords
like “trust” “empathy”
and “empowerment” are factored
into your sales presentations, trustworthiness
remains an ethical ideal grounded in honorable
behavior. The formula has not changed. Honorable
behavior still requires honorable intent.
No approach to selling has a monopoly on
virtue. So it is not for us to favor one
method while rejecting others. That is not
our purpose. Doing so would only serve to
liberate salespeople from one selling caste
only to replace it with another. That said,
we have not been reticent to charbroil those
sales gurus who’s proprietary preachments
rant that salespeople who disagree with
them are unprofessional, and as an afterthought,
probably doomed to hell.
Selling is not inherently dishonest and
salespeople need not disguise or apologize
for their once-proud profession. Selling
is no more or less honorable than any other
profession and surely much more honorable
than some. Like other professions, when
selling is practiced with honor and skill,
it does not require high-minded rhetoric,
transparent excuses or ethical pretenses
to be effective. Hopefully the pages that
follow will provoke thoughtful discussion
among sales professionals about the moral
legitimacy of what they do and challenge
their need to pretend to be doing anything
other than selling.
We hope you enjoy reading this book. It
is not a sales makeover and does not require
you to change either your personality or
your principles. The only prerequisites
are an open mind and an inquisitive spirit.
George W. Dudley.
Behavioral Sciences Research Press
John
(Jeff) F. Tanner
Center for Professional Selling
Baylor University |
