Selling in a transparent world

Are there benefits to living in a transparent world?

Selling transparently is the ethical way to go

Transparency is an ethic that spans business, science, and academia. It implies openness, accountability and two-way communication with underlying trust and honesty. 

It is a model against secrecy, corruption, dishonesty and is completely absent in all dictatorships. As such it is deemed to be a desirable attribute in democracies around the world. 

From media to government to NGO’s, the ideal of transparency has not always been upheld, however, with the ever-widening scope of technology, secretive behaviours are becoming ever harder to maintain. 

Of course, this means that there is some friction between transparency and privacy, specifically, privacy of one’s data, however, one’s personal data is still deemed to be safe from transparency, for now. 

Transparency must be a two-way street, if the public are required to be transparent, so should governments, public and private organisations and the media. Must be fair, right? You show me yours; I’ll show you mine. 

In the world of sales, transparency has always had a mixed reception.

Unethical salespeople try and hide everything they can from the customer’s stage managing the conversation to the point of hoodwinking the customer and giving all of us honest joe’s a bad name. Transparency is an anathema to them. 

From my side, being transparent, or, as I like to say, honest, with my clients, is at the forefront to ethical selling. I’ll always tell the customer everything, share everything about how we operate, what we say about them and how we work. We have open pricing policies, no hidden extras and deliver what we say we will deliver, including if we are not going to be able to provide the service in the time and manner previously agreed. 

The biggest hurdle in selling, is, and has always been, I believe, the fear of the customer of being deceived, the fear that the product or service being offered will not work as promised, that the person selling the solution is not to be trusted and that ultimately, customers don’t see the need or want what is being offered. 

Trust is one of the absolute key elements of sales and the customer must trust the seller to have the peace of mind that the service or product offered will do what it says on the tin, as it were. 

The perennial struggle for the salesperson to build trust, to try and persuade the customer that ‘you can trust me’ often works against salespeople as people in general don’t naturally want to make themselves vulnerable to others unless the customer can be sure about the salesperson’s honesty, competence, and reliability. 

Ethical salespeople build trust through consistent, open, and honest behaviour, through providing as much transparency as possible, from information on their website, social media, and direct interactions with the customer, to build that all important confidence. 

LinkedIn profiles with years of posts, without glaring gaps in employment, and many connections, demonstrates that the person they are dealing with is honest and open. Having a thoroughly completed, in-depth and established LinkedIn profile is a terrific method to generate trust. 

Transparency leads to trust; trust leads to working together.

This is the foundation of our thought processes behind ethical selling.

We’ve already seen customers of our customers give positive feedback about how much more trusting they were when they were trusted BY the salesperson. 

One of the questions I ask in my sales training sessions is ‘what is the fastest way to get someone to like you?’, the answer is, of course, ‘to like them FIRST’. 

The question, ‘what is the fastest way to get a customer to trust you?’ has the corresponding answer of ‘Trust them first!’ 

Salespeople are not the most trusting of creatures, many simply do not believe what the customer says and ultimately, create barriers to trust building by starting off distrustful of their customer. 

When you read that last sentence over, it seems crazy, yet it is something I’ve come across again and again. 

Trust, transparency, and honesty are the foundations of ethical selling. 

So, trust your customer, and they will trust you back. 

Honesty is really the best policy in sales and so aim to be transparent with your customer. 

If both salesperson and customer are equally transparent, business becomes easier, quicker and more enjoyable. 

So, if the best way to get anyone to like you is like them first and the best way to get anyone to trust you is to trust them first, then to get your customer to be more transparent with you, surely what needs to happen is for salespeople to be more transparent with their customer first?