Sales vs. Ethics

I know this topic doesn’t really come as a surprise to most people (especially any non-sales people who may be reading) but seeing it firsthand kind of did shock me. In the field I work in, financial services, the by-word has always been Ethics and even more so since Mr. Spitzer came on the scene a few years ago. Every year each of us has to take a continuing ed course, three hours or so, on Ethics where we are presented with various scenarios regarding “questionable” ethics and the right actions to take in them. Like most continuing ed courses the general feeling most of us get is “this couldn’t be more lame” and/or “what kind of idiot doesn’t know this?”

Well I’ve seen the idiot and he is us.

Over the years I’ve seen many situations where, although there may not be any real malice involved, the thinking is “we can make the sale, so we should make the sale” with very little thought as to how the client is impacted. Does the sale always come first? Shouldn’t there be some tangible benefit to the customer? We all think our product and our service and our company are better than the competition, but unfortunately that isn’t always the case. Some customers have perfectly good deals with other perfectly good vendors and what do we make of those situations? Isn’t that what the Continuing Ed classes are really supposed to be teaching us?

I’ve got an ethical issue with selling a product just to generate new commissions but due to the pressures of the job (or whatever) I don’t think a lot of sales reps see it that way. In certain industries (like Life Insurance) there are specific regulations prohibiting replacing products in this manner. Many of us have to put up with onerous laws and regulations that, for the most part, we think are unnecessary, overdone and a hindrance to our selling ability. If we don’t start policing ourselves and actually think about what we’re doing, there will be more and more and more such regulations.