Why is it important for a business to have a code of ethics? You just have to look out in the real world and see that I think most cases, companies that do bad things that do ethically questionable things that eventually gets out and they pay a really severe price. Look at Wells Fargo, who was thinking like off the scale overly aggressive as far as incentivizing their employees to sign up people for checking accounts and they had so much effort that was put on that, these employees started to just sign up people for checking accounts and other things, whether those people agreed to it or not. I mean it was just incredible amounts of fraud that have occurred. Wells Fargo is paying a pretty severe price for that. I think that what that really gets down to, and I think the biggest issue that a sales manager has to deal with when it comes to ethics is, short versus long term. In the long run, I think people would understand the importance of behaving ethically and all. But in the short run, sometimes you can get away with playing fast and loose with things. That's a huge problem for businesses and employees within there and sales managers that are working for that. How do you balance the need for short-term performance versus sort of that long-term perspective? What are some of the potential benefits that a company might see from practicing good ethical behavior? I'd say the biggest one is the ability to generate customer trust and rapport. I'll put another way, if you do stupid things, if you behave unethically, you're breaking customer trust. I'll tell you, once that's gone, it is really hard to build that back and you pay a really severe price for it. What's one of the most unethical actions you've ever seen a business try to get away with and what happened from it? Well, I've read about where companies have just directly misrepresented and lied to customers about some product claim or some product performance and that kind of thing, that's really bad. I've not personally seen one thing fully, but they seem to occur with great regularity. I think the kinds of problems that you see that are a little more, maybe garden variety, but things that I think are real challenges to salespeople are as follows: number one, I think that balancing customer needs and benefits versus company needs and benefits is a really challenging thing. Companies need to grow, they need to generate more revenue, and I think at times, there's times when customers are in a sense taking advantage of and perhaps sold products that they don't necessarily need or want, but the company was under such pressure that they didn't feel that they had any real choice with that. So, I think number one, it's, I think taking advantage of customers in that manner. Number two. I think is having to do with customer integrity issues. So, in certain types of selling situations, you may learn about a particular customer and things that are going on within that customer and that information shouldn't be shared with other customers who often are competitors to them, yet the pressure can be enormous, I've had cases where company A has gone to me saying, "Hey, what do you hear about company B?" They're fishing around trying to get the dirt on some other company. If I'm true to my relationships with my customers, if I respect the integrity of that relationship with them, I shouldn't be sharing things between those customers or at least not sharing things that are somehow of a proprietary nature. I mean if it's information that's commonly available, I guess I don't have a problem sharing that. But there's a lot of times where you're being told of things that aren't great. My own personal experience was a situation where I was having a meeting with a customer and I noticed on the customer's desk was a gigantic legal document, and everybody can read upside down, and realized, it was a bankruptcy filing for that company. So, they were looking at bankruptcy. He did, in a couple of weeks later, they declared bankruptcy and all. That would not be information that would be appropriately shared with other people. You have to respect your relationships that you have with customers, with the integrity of that relationship. At the end of the day, the only thing that I have is my integrity. Destroying that, I'm lost. How does a failure to demonstrate ethical sales practices lead to an unsuccessful business? Well, I think like I said before, it's like a short versus long term. I hate to say this, but it's true. Sometimes in the short run, being unethical properly pays handsome dividends. Just is the nature of what goes on. In the long run, I think it does catch up with you. I think that you might get away with it on a sale or two, but ultimately it's going to hurt you. I think you'll end up I think paying a pretty severe prize for what you're going to do. Look at Wells Fargo, I hate to pick on them, but here's a company that has lost billions of dollars of market value through all these really unethical business practices that they were involved in. It's going to take them a long time to get out from under a lot of those problems. What can a business do to improve its ethical behavior? I think that there's a couple of different things, number one, ethical behavior starts at the top. I mean if the senior managers are behaving ethically, that sends a powerful cue to everyone else and that. Number two, I think it's important that companies have published codes of ethics, have policies in place that they govern employee behavior and things it can do and then finally, it's living that policy. So, if there's problems that occur, that they're addressed. A lot of companies they'll have these policies, but everybody knows that certain things are permissible or they look the other way when those things are being done. Well, what that means then is that you have no policies. So, you could say is the enforcement of those policies really left something to be desired. That's the third leg of that triangle. So, some professions like medicine and journalism have established ethical codes and serve as a baseline for anyone who does that job, do you have anything like that in sales? Yes we do. When we talk about that in our lectures, there's a code of ethics that like our sales trade group has form. I think a lot of companies have developed codes of ethics that govern themselves, although maybe not just in the sales area, but really within all their practices and things that they do. It's ultra important to accompany and what they stand for. They talk about like most companies have a mission. That's an important part of things. Usually, if you have a mission, you also have like a vision statement. For just what you view. If you were wildly successful, this is what you would all accomplish in life and all. The third part of that is a code of ethics. It's important that we define what behaviors are acceptable towards the fulfillment of those missions and visions that are out there. Having that is ultra important to employees.
