The moral duty of a salesperson
“The role of marketing is to change someone’s perspective on a thing”
(Rory Sutherland)
As an advanced professional in Sales or Business Development you’ve perfected your craft. People will buy from you. If you’re really good you’d be able to sell everything to almost anyone. Maybe you proud yourself with sentences like “I sell water to a well”. Yeah, you can, you’re a genius. But is this right? What’s the long-term effect when using your talent to sell things that people don’t really need?
A talented surgeon would be able to remove your kidney without much damage to your body so that you can sell it on the market for organs. And he could take a profit share as compensation for his service. Would he do so? Probably not (at least in most parts of the world). He lives and works by a core value that medical practitioners call the ‘hippocratic oath’.
Sadly, we don’t have a comparable ethical principle in the profession of sales. Performance based incentivisation triggers short term thinking in most sales people. You daily see examples of someone who uses their skills to sell things you don’t really need. If every salesperson in the world would live and work by such an oath we probably wouldn’t have seen that many bad things in the world (financial crisis, etc.)
Why don’t we apply comparable ethical standards in the profession of sales & marketing?
The moral duty of a salesperson is to help people to find and to get things that ultimately improve their lives. Before starting your outreach and crafting your pitch you really need to be sure that the person or company really improves their game by buying from you.
So what could be the moral duty? One idea could be to always do your best when finding out what your prospect really needs. Does your product really make a sustainable positive difference for the person you want to sell to? Can you build a clear (business) case for this? Did you listen to your spokesperson first before shooting at her with your standard pitch?
Finally, the most important question for most of us: What will we get from such a change in perspective? I strongly believe that we build long-term, healthy relationships with other human beings. Those relationships will help both sides. Opportunities will come and go and when they appear, selling to deserved friends becomes very easy and rewarding.