When market competition heats up, you might provide extra incentives for your sales staff to perform. But be careful: Some employees may step over the line — to earn bigger bonuses or out of enthusiasm for the challenge — and use unethical sales tactics. Take steps to ensure your salespeople always walk an ethical line and operate with integrity.

Walk an ethical line: make a commitment to honesty

Culture starts at the top. If you clearly demonstrate, through both words and behavior, your commitment to honesty, your sales team will get the message. Your customers will too.

Try to anticipate the challenges your sales force may face as they attempt to meet sales goals. The temptation to sell more than your company can deliver, for example — or to recommend a product they know isn’t the best solution for a customer’s problem — may be strong. Those and similar sales strategies may land the account, but they do nothing to build the trust and credibility your business needs to keep that account over the long haul.

It’s also important that your company and salespeople don’t try to slip through loopholes when a situation requires taking responsibility. For example, some insurance companies that wrote coverage on homes and businesses damaged during Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and Hurricane Harvey lost goodwill by quibbling over what damage was covered. Ensuing legal battles and negative publicity have done nothing to raise consumer confidence in the insurance industry.

Promote lasting relationships

When your salespeople make a sale, require them to be clear about what the sale includes and what it doesn’t. Reiterate that their job isn’t simply to make sales, but to build lasting customer relationships. To do that, they must always keep the customers’ best interests in mind. To make sure the message gets heard, consider tying compensation to customer satisfaction and repeat business, in addition to sales revenue quotas.

That may mean acknowledging, for example, that one of your products won’t do everything the customer needs it to do. If a customer asks about a feature your product doesn’t have, your sales reps shouldn’t imply that it does. Instead, they should work with the customer to determine whether the desired feature is necessary and emphasize your product’s other features and benefits. Ultimately, however, they must be honest about any limitations.

Your sales force doesn’t need to steer customers to competitors, but they shouldn’t disparage the competition, either. And incentivizing customers to load up on unneeded products during promotions may boost the bottom line, but it won’t do much to build trust.

Shift priorities

Too often sales staffs are encouraged to focus on short-term goals, which makes them more likely to do “whatever it takes” to get a sale. It’s up to you and your managers to prioritize integrity and walk an ethical line . . . the kind of ethical behavior that’s crucial to your company’s long-term success.

(This is Blog Post #653)