Hi, it’s Ben Lai from Sales Ethos. Today’s topic is telling the truth. The sales profession unfortunately has a very bad reputation for the behaviour of what’s probably a few unscrupulous individuals. One of the major sins of sales people is lying. Not telling the truth, omitting important information, painting things completely out of what the reality is. What is the benefit then of telling the truth? If everybody else is lying, or if others are lying? Isn’t that going to put us at a disadvantage if we’re going around telling the truth?
Short-term benefits of telling the truth
I would like to argue that it’s not, at least for the long run. You see, when we tell the truth and we know that we are telling the truth, our integrity is being protected. Integrity has very strong ties with our credibility and the trust that people have in us. The more we tell the truth, and we demonstrate that we are a person of good character, the more the trust levels are going to rise in our prospects.
Long-term benefits of telling the truth
That’s just in the short term but in the long term, I mean, wouldn’t you want to be able to sleep at night comfortably knowing that you are a person of integrity? That’s… The bottom line, we have to live with ourselves every day. If you can’t even be honest in the words that you say, how can you have any real self-respect. That’s my challenge to you. If you’re ever tempted to lie in a sales situation, just be aware that there’s going to be far reaching consequences beyond just the short term monetary gains that you might get from lying.
Telling the truth in sales practice
Now, what are some of the ways that we can practice telling the truth? Where are the potential pitfalls? One of the top areas is limitations. When a product or a service has limitations, we have to be forthcoming and tell the truth about those limitations. I’ve been asked to do other services apart from sales training. Some clients will ask me to do leadership training, or they’ll ask me to do conflict management. From that perspective, I could say yes, I can do all of that, because I’ve read one book about it in the past about five years ago but rather than doing that, what I do is I explain to them, that sales training is really my core.
Look, I could share a couple of ideas about that, but I wouldn’t put that as a service. I’m happy to share that information with you freely. I also have a referral network that I can recommend into. If you want a leadership speaker, then I’ll get a leadership speaker to come to you. So don’t be afraid to admit limitations. When you do this, you earn the respect of the person that you’re speaking to. They realize that you’re not just 100% biased and a yes man. When it seems too good to be true, it probably is. That’s what’s going through their mind. Admit limitations.
Being authentic in sales
The next thing that we can do to tell the truth is also to be authentic. This is a really hot topic at the moment. I’d like to go into more depth about this later on but briefly, being authentic just means being yourself. Don’t try to copy someone else, copy and paste someone else’s personality in order to be like them. Let’s just say you’ve watched a video of Grant Cardone who’s a hot shot sales trainer over in the US. You love Grant’s style, and then you want to go try his methods and his techniques in your sales call.
But then the problem is it doesn’t match well with your personality. You go and try to be Grant but you’re not Grant, you’re you. You need to find your unique selling style and be the absolutely best version of yourself that you can. That’s basically what being authentic means. Now the third thing that we can do to tell the truth in sales is to keep our promises. Now if you say you’re going to call in a week’s time on Monday, then make sure you call on Monday. If you say you’re going to be at a meeting at three o’clock make sure you turn up before three o’clock so that you can come in on right on time.
Telling the truth & punctuality
Punctuality is something that should really be a basic for us as professionals but unfortunately, so many people are just so poor at it. If nothing else, be punctual, but if you make any other bigger promises such as delivery time frames or whatnot, make sure that those things happen. No one’s expecting you to be perfect by the way. If you say that the product is going to arrive in a week and you get information that’s going to arrive in two weeks, then just tell the client. Tell the truth. Just pick up the phone and call them say, “Hey, I know I said that it’s going to be over in one week but unfortunately, some things have happened and now it’s going to be two weeks.”
Summary & conclusion
The sooner you disclose the truth, the more the person is going to respect you and trust you, even when you are unable to keep your initial promises. Communication is very important from that perspective. Telling the truth, we need to admit our limitations. We need to be our authentic selves and we need to keep our promises. Now if you are a sales manager or an entrepreneur and you’re looking for ways to boost your sales, feel free to contact me via the details below for a complimentary consultation. I promise you, I will be as truthful as I can as to whether I can help you or not. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and remember that integrity plus skills equals success.
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Transcript by rev.com