Selling Through Personal Integrity

The Highest Ethical Standards Approach for Success – Next Steps

When you develop and employ the right selling philosophy, you become a unique type of sales professional — one that customers will trust and actually desire to do business with.

(Paragraph excerpted from Selling Through Personal Integrity, Frugal Speaker blog post, April 20, 2009, by Kenton W. Davis.)

In the last post, we established the importance of developing a “do the right thing” selling philosophy as the first step toward building a strong foundation of trust with your customers. This next step falls into the category of “the more challenging bit”, and will likely test the ethical mettle of many sales professionals.

The next step is to provide total disclosure!

If you’re truly serious about building a strong foundation of trust with your customers, you must be committed to providing them with full or total disclosure about every aspect of the product or service you are selling. Total disclosure ensures that the customer has all the information they need to make an intelligent and truly informed decision.

Let’s take a look at how the Free Legal Dictionary by Farlex defines the term “full disclosure”: full disclosure n. the need in business transactions to tell the "whole truth" about any matter which the other party should know in deciding to buy or contract...

Not much wiggle room in that definition!

Although it may seem counterintuitive to purposefully enlarge the “fine print” in the business transaction before the sale is finalized as part of one’s standard selling procedure, this is exactly what today’s professional salesperson needs to be doing to ensure continued success in the future.

Your willingness to openly discuss every aspect of the sale with your customer, beyond the usual “features and benefits” roll up, financing and credit stuff, and the perfunctory review of legally required disclosures— even to the point of determining that the product or service you’re selling may not be right for them— is the level of transparency that today’s consumer will expect in return for their trust and ultimately their business.

Continue to stay tuned for success!