How to Maintain Ethical Boundaries in Sales by InsideView

[Doha]

There's no point pretending all salespeople exemplify perfect morals. Some salespeople engage in unethical sales practices. For example, they may omit important details from pitches, lie to customers or pressure them to make a decision immediately. Sometimes salespeople cross a blurry line from aggressive to unethical by pressuring clients too much to close a sale, or putting too much emphasis on deadlines.  If you're not sure whether your behavior is ethical, or if a team member is acting within moral reason, it's best to err on the side of caution so you don't offend customers. Blatant lies should be avoided at all costs and other questionable behaviors should be monitored closely so you don't cross any lines. Some salespeople have acted in the following unethical ways:

    Lied about a product's availability, benefits or features to get customers to buy.
    Pressured customers to buy immediately rather than giving them space to make a decision
    Sold products they knew didn't meet customers' needs while assuring them the product is what they needed.

You probably won't get into legal trouble for using these unethical sales tactics. However, these tactics are ineffective even if they aren't illegal. In the short run, they may produce results, but the consequences can be more than a business can bear; they often cost customers and negatively impact your organization's reputation.
You don't want these tactics to be associated with your business. If a customer feels cheated, he or she is likely to tell others about it. Potential customers then avoid you because, unsurprisingly, they don't want to be cheated too. The power of word-of-mouth to destroy your reputation is enhanced by the availability of social media; if customers complain about you on Facebook or elsewhere, the complaint can literally travel around the world in just a few minutes. This can drastically affect your reputation.
And why does your reputation matter so much to your sales? As the new adage goes, what happens on the Internet stays on the Internet forever. The more buyers can learn about you online, the more important your reputation becomes. A top notch PR team can't save you from the reputation damage a public scandal will create. Company's no longer have control over their brands ? their employees and their customers do. Whoever initiates or welcomes an online conversation about your products or services takes part in building your brand, and if people don't like doing business with you, your potential customers will hear about it. You can't fake customer satisfaction, and unethical behavior is the first way to destroy it.
Even if you manage to escape with your reputation unscathed, you won't get repeat business.  You want customers to come back over and over in order to maximize your profits from each sale. You also won't be able to up-sell or cross-sell products when you only see each customer once, and you'll make far less money than you would off of repeat sales.
Unethical sales practices not only destroy lucrative sales opportunities but also waste your money. In order to get new customers, you need to spend money on marketing and advertising. You can spend less on marketing when you have lots of repeat customers; unethical sales practices reduce the impact of your advertising dollars in addition to requiring you to spend more on marketing.
Being ethical and being a salesperson are not mutually exclusive. In fact, you need to build trust with customers to be effective in sales, so you'll need to avoid unethical sales practices. These types of practices can never get you the results you need in the long run.