Selling Through Personal Integrity

The Highest Ethical Standards Approach for Success – Next Steps

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.

(Paragraph excerpted from Selling Through Personal Integrity, Frugal Speaker blog post, April 23, 2009, by Kenton W. Davis.)

In the previous post, we identified “providing total disclosure” as another important step toward building a strong foundation of trust with your customers. In this post, we touch on the importance of presenting yourself as a deeply knowledgeable professional.

The next step is to be an expert!

Building a strong foundation of trust with your customers requires you to be an expert in all facets of your business. Beyond delivering a masterful sales presentation, you must also possess an impressive level of product knowledge, be capable of correctly addressing any service and delivery related questions, and demonstrate flawless execution of the contracting and financing paperwork.

In a selling situation, are you capable of unequivocally answering, both factually and honestly, any questions that your customers might throw at you? The operative words here are, of course, “factually” and “honestly”. In today’s business environment, making it up as you go along, winging it, or simply not knowing the answers, will only serve to reinforce the current growing consumer perception that it is simply too risky to trust a salesperson. Whether shamelessly unethical or simply unprepared, none of the above can be considered an acceptable manner in which to respond to a customer’s question.

With consumer confidence hanging precariously in the balance these days, the slightest misstep by a salesperson can cause the “scales of trust” to tip away from making a sale— and rightfully so. The consumer deserves to be served by an expert, someone completely knowledgeable and ethically committed to earning their business.

Today’s successful sales professional must strive harder to be the consummate professional and present themselves as a deeply knowledgeable professional— an expert. They must be completely honest about what they know and what they don’t know, and committed to continually learning more about the products and services they are selling. They must bring an uncompromised level of preparedness to every interaction with the customer, while applying nothing short of the highest ethical standards approach for success.

Continue to stay tuned for success and the final post in this series!