Dealing With Unethical Sales People

Good Morning. On Tuesday, Facebook and Instagram experienced an outage, and then yesterday, LinkedIn did too. According to reports (aka, what the intern told us), the outages left 1000s of sales reps without a way to procrastinate on making their cold calls. Condolences to all of those affected. 😁 

In today’s Follow Up:

• Unethical sales teams 🤔 

• Unlock your sales potential 🗣️ 

• Sales tip of the day 🧠 

• Sales around the internet 💻️ 

• Sales jobs, interview email & meme 😂 

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Fix Unethical Sales Reps and Save Your Sales Team

Let’s be honest… 

Sales isn’t known as the most ethical job there is. 

If you’ve been in sales long enough, you’ve worked with a sales rep or manager with questionable ethics. Someone who fudged the numbers, took a sale from another rep, or lied to a customer. All in the name of quota.

And big sales scandals like the Wells Fargo sales team fraud don’t help our cause. 

Sales scandals can wreck companies and careers. They bring bad press, big fines, and can even make individual reps personally liable. Scary, right?

But there’s good news. A study of 1,000 sales reps across 50 companies found 4 of the best ways to increase ethics on your sales team. 

And sales teams with high ethical standards lead to more customer loyalty, satisfaction, referrals, and commission.

Let’s take a look 👇️ 

1. Measure It 📊 

To stop unethical things from happening, you need a reporting system.

In the case of the Wells Fargo scandal, any sales rep who reported unethical behavior could expect to be fired shortly after.

To save your team from a similar situation, you need to give them a place to blow the whistle. And it’s not just about having a system in place to receive reports, you need a system in place to do something about it.

As the HBR article says: “a good reporting system is sponsored and promoted by executives, rewards honest and sincere reporting, and responds appropriately to complaints.”

Firing people for reporting unethical behavior = more unethical behavior.

2. Set Guidelines ❌ 

Sales is a rollercoaster.

When times get tough, it can be tempting to do questionable things to hit quota.

Instead of relying on sales reps to do the right thing, teams need to have clear guidelines in place for every situation.

• What happens if a rep sells in someone else’s territory?

• What if a rep promises a customer something we don’t have?

Guidelines for these scenarios need to be set before they happen, not after.

3. Align Incentives 🤑 

Our goal as salespeople is to sell. But if that’s the only goal, things can get dicey.

When it comes to aligning incentives, there are three things to focus on:

Quotas: When quotas are unrealistic, it leads to high turnover, a stressed out culture, and sales reps doing whatever it takes to meet those goals (aka, unethical things).

Quality: Goals should be aligned to what’s best for the company, which means bringing in high-quality, happy customers.

Comp plan: Reward sales reps for things that are good for the company, and they can control. This means factors like deal size, deal length, and customer satisfaction after working with the sales rep.

It’s not just about more customers. It’s about more customers who are happy with their purchase and remain loyal customers.

4. Promote Correctly 🆙 

If you want to understand a company’s values, look at the people they promote.

When you promote the rep who faked their call volume and stole deals from other reps, it sends the wrong message to the team.

If you want to build a culture of high ethics, promote your ethical employees.

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Interviewing Gone Wrong

Always double check the phone number… 😅 

Sales Meme of the Day