Читать книгу Media Selling - Warner Charles Dudley - Страница 96

All salespeople are responsible to themselves for doing what they believe is good or bad, right or wrong, and is based on their own conscience or moral standards. John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, said that there is no pillow as soft as a clear conscience. Purposely acting unethically will erode a salesperson’s self‐esteem. By acting ethically, salespeople increase their self‐esteem, self‐image, and self‐confidence and do the same for their company. By acting ethically, salespeople develop a long‐term perspective, which benefits their mental health and their company as well as the customers and consumers.

Unfortunately, some salespeople and sales organizations are more motivated by greed, in making money or “getting the stock price up,” than in building a highly respected personal or company reputation. Such greed inevitably produces cheating, which is a cancer that erodes a person’s or a company’s reputation and eventually will kill the company. Those who conduct business unethically know they are doing so, but they continue doing the wrong thing because they believe they will not get caught. However, they are playing an ethical lottery in which the odds of being discovered are high, as we saw with Enron and Harvey Weinstein. Practicing ethical behavior every business day is the only sure way of maintaining a reputation, and self‐esteem grows as the result.