The power of selling
The power of selling:The gray area that sticks out most to me is one that I have witnessed in B2B sales while working in the oil and gas industry. While I wasn’t in sales I reaped some of the benefits of the sales lifestyle from a friend that was higher up in the company. He would bring me along to meet clients; which made sense for meals and meetings but it later became clubs and bars. He would buy all of their drinks and food while rarely talking business; essentially he was buying a relationship from the client instead of selling the client oil fracking services. A big reason this was unethical is it put the client in a position to spend company money on services that may or may not have been the best deal or quality simply for his own gain.
Under informing is another gray area because there is some separation between a customer’s due diligence and a salesperson’s information. Perhaps in this scenario the customer’s expectations are unrealistic or the salesperson leaves out specific information such as add ons that are required to meet the customer’s need in order to guarantee a future sale. Overall I think it best to divulge as much general information as possible and develop a list of frequent customer issues that may help in the future with what information to relay.
Knowingly over promising on products is fairly close to outright lying and we can see that it violates the first of our core ethical values in trustworthiness (Richmond, 2012). A salesperson may be able to get away with over promising to clients in the short term as people tend to forgive mistakes if they are perceived as genuine, but in the long term not delivering will likely cost you sales and your reputation.
Richmond, K. (11/2012). THE POWER OF SELLING, 1st Edition. [Chapter 4]. Retrieved from https://mbsdirect.
Classmate#2 Nowell posted:
When selling a product or service, some people will use any angle to get the sale, even if it is unethical.
Under informing – This is unethical because you are deliberately misleading or withholding information that could make you lose your sale. A good example would be a salesman omitting to reveal the fact that this new cell phone is likely not going to last more than one year, maybe two at best. It is just another form of lying to secure the sale. Though you might have secured the sale in the end, it is likely the customer was ripped off. That would be considered false advertisement if it were on a media ad.
Overpromising – It would also be unethical secure a sale by promising the product or service will arrive by X date while clearly knowing that is not the case. This is because you are not ripping them off, however you very well could be inconveniencing the customer by not providing the product they wanted when they needed it. A good example would be a wedding cake baker selling the wedding couple their cake knowing he can’t get it ready in time.
Overselling – This is unethical because most time, a salesman knows the customer is perfectly fine without the addons and side purchases. More often than not, overselling comes from pressure from above to make extra sales. However, that does not make it any less unethical to sell customers addons that they do not need, especially when you as the salesman know you are selling snake oil.
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