I am not going to comment on the morale / ethical situation Tiger is in visa vis his family. I have no opinion about whether what he did is right or wrong. It’s his business. I DO however have an opinion regarding the way it was handled in as much as it is a great lesson for all in sales. Cover ups are always exposed.

Sometimes we mess up. Sometimes we make mistakes. If this happens to you  come clean to your boos, client or colleague right away. Admit your mistake, apologize and fix it. Don’ t fool yourself into thinking no one will find out. Eventually someone will. Taking responsibility is ALWAYS the most profitable behaviour (even when it feels like the most difficult thing to do). In Honesty Sells we recommend you take responsibility for screwing up, fix the mistake, and then get to work at re building trust. And that’s the key lesson learned this week watching the Tiger Woods story unfold.

Be upfront and open when handling mistakes. Doing anything else is just asking for a bop on the head with a golf club, a scratched face, a car wreck or worse, a lost sale.

Dedicated to increasing your sales,

Colleen

I spent time in the financial industry. My manager and I didn’t agree with my client selection. Dealing with insurance and investments, you have to put the clients needs ahead of your own.

After working for this company for almost a year I was brought in one day to have a “Chat”. I’m a young profession and my natural market are those who are my age and just startign to think about planning to protect their future.

In this meeting, my manager had informed me that he didn’t think I was reach my potential,. He had been nice enough to come up wth some guidelines as to how I as to conduct business. The following were my restrictions.

- No one with less then 200K to invest.
- No one under the ager of 35
- No one with a income that is less then 60K per year or combined 90K
- NO SINGLE MOTHERS

The last one was one that really bothered me and I asked for an explantion as to why. Hi reply was this. ” Single mothers are stupid. They are single with a child for a reason, because someone couldn’t stand to put up with their stupidity. Besides, they have no money and there for we as a company cannot make money off of them”.

I’m proud to say it too me less then 10 minutes to clean out my office and walk out. Since then both my training manager and a fellow advisor have left for the same reason. Someone’s greed was too big and they lost sight of the fact that clients, big or small are the one who pay the bills and we need to help them regardless of their life situations. 

People out there are sickening sometime and I am glad that I have the will to follow my beleifes and values that I hold in order to always offer a “What’s best for you approach”. I have always let honesty lead me in my work and after reading this book, it has just confirmed that going against what some see as the most profitable way, will in the end give me the success I deserve and allow me to be proud of the work I do to help other ensure their futire is in good hand and going to be there when they need it.

Some years ago, I was at home with my son, who was an infant at this time.  He was a little sick, and had already barfed down my back while I was holding him and was crying. I stripped off my shirt, and was walking around the house, trying to console him when the phone rang. Just what I needed!

I answered the phone, and some guy began his sales spiel about Pacific Exteriors siding. I immediately hung up and returned to consoling my baby.

The phone rang again immediately.  “Geez – what NOW?”, I thought and picked it up.  The same salesman’s voice said “If you hang up on me again, I will break your arm!”.  Naturally I hung up again.   I followed this experience up with an attempt to locate Pacific Exteriors to lodge a complaint, but this was before the Internet, and I had no luck.

The story continues…. 3 or 4 years later, I get a call at home from a lady who said she was from <company name>!  “<company name>!”, I cried.  “Let me tell you about the last time I heard from <company name>!”  I related the whole story to this poor lady who really couldn’t wait to get off the phone…

Subject: Hey Colleen.. quick question..

Hey Colleen,

It’s been awhile since I’ve been in touch.. sorry about that. We’ve had our heads down for almost a year solid building some pretty wild new tools for our XXX platform.

But that’s not why I’m writing today.

Right now, I’m hoping I can get you to help me out with ONE minute of your time and answer just 5 very simple questions about how you market your business today and what your biggest challenges are.

Take our little survey now! (We don’t require email or name or anything.. just your thoughts!)

In return, I’ve got a couple of thank you gifts:

First, a really good paper I just wrote that demystifies, once and for all, the email delivery problem that all marketers face. If you’ve been frustrated by the conflicting information, the excuses your email provider gives you, etc.. this paper will explain everything in clear, simple detail. It even includes an interesting history of how we got to where we are today with email delivery.

Second, I’m offering almost $50 worth of printing and postage that you can use to mail your prospects or clients with our system when it comes out. No strings attached at all.. you can even just demo our system for free, use the 50 bucks to mail your prospects and drum up some business, and then cancel.. no hard feelings.

Don’t have physical addresses? No problem, our system helps you handle that too.

If you’ve ever wondered if there was an easy way to send email AND direct mail… well, you’ll just have to check this out.

Thanks again for your thoughts.. we’re out to completely change the game for small business marketers, and your insights are invaluable to us.

Please take give us your thoughts!

Thank you!

******************

Sigh….I guess never having been in touch with me and “it’s been a while”are synonymous to this sales person. That opening line is designed to make me feel like I might know this company and person thereby psychologically goading me into taking the survey. Ding so will confirm my address and get me on their list. Not honest. Sure it might work in the short term but my rule is that if the activity is something you would be embarrassed about be caught doing. Don’t do it. You will only sacrifice the long term relationship and lifetime customer value.

It’s been a long time coming and we couldn’t be more proud. I am sincerely convinced that the marks a new chapter for sales professionals: abandoning the old tricks for long term, honest and more profitable relationships with clients.

Make sure you check out the official Hall of Shame and the ongoing list of top Sales Horror Stories, as voted by you!

Don’t forget – you can still submit your own horror story and vote of the other entries!

Colleen & Steven

I received many resumes written in both languages. Several of them included a note explaining that the potential candidate spoke a third language as well – usually Spanish or German.

The resume of one particularly promising candidate indicated that she was proficient in each of English, French and Spanish. So halfway through the interview, I suddenly switched to French. I asked her a question that would be simple for anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the language to answer, but it was obvious from the look on her face that she hadn’t a clue what I was saying.

Sensing that she might not have been completely honest with me, I switched to Spanish. She was equally lost. To give her one last chance to redeem herself (and allow myself to blow off a little steam after having been misled for the better part of the morning), I asked her, in Spanish, if she was a liar.

When my question was once more met with a deer-in-the-headlights look and stunned silence, I switched back to English, gave her back her resume and asked her to leave.

Funny – this time, she seemed to get the message fast enough.

He told me that he would be more than happy to give me a quote, but to get it, I would have to sign some paperwork authorizing him to look into how much we could save by moving to his service.

I noticed that the paperwork he gave me to sign had the word “contract” written in big, bold letters across the top of it. I asked him point blank if what I was signing was a contract, and he immediately assured me that it was not.

I wanted to make absolutely certain that what I was signing was just an authorization to get a quote, so I asked him again in a different way, along the lines of: “So by signing this, I will in no way be locked into any kind of agreement to buy energy from you at a specified priced over a set period of time. You are NOT locking me in to ANYTHING. Correct?”

Once again, he assured me that this was not a contract, and I would not be locked into anything in any way.

In order to process my quote, we had to call his head office to confirm a few details. In the course of our conversation, I asked the head office agent if the paper I was signing was a contract. She replied that yes, it certainly was, and by signing it, I would be locking myself in for three years at a fixed rate.

I couldn’t believe the blatant lie the door-to-door sales rep had told me. After thanking the head office agent, I hung up and happily kicked him out the door. Thank goodness not everyone in his organization was as deceitful as him.

The hotel’s RFP response clearly stated that there would be no food and beverage minimum. But in their second written response a short while later, they demanded a minimum food and beverage order of no less than $50,000.

When I called them to confirm the numbers, they told me that the $50,000 minimum was in fact for every two days of the event, making the total tally that much higher.

I spoke with my partner, and while neither of us was happy with the magically changing numbers, we agreed to go ahead as planned. The hotel sent over the final contract to be signed, and sure enough, it laid out our minimum food and beverage order of $50,000 – per day.

They had missed deadline after deadline in sending us the information, and when the contract finally did arrive, none of the clauses we had agreed to by email were included in the paperwork.

It was too late for us to do anything at the time but swallow our anger, strain our budget and proceed with the event. But you can bet that was the last time either my partner or I used the services of that particular hotel chain.

That’s all well and good. The only problem was, they didn’t advise their customers – or their sales team.

Four months later, we were all called together for a North American sales meeting and asked if there had been any quality issues with the product line. None of us had received any specific customer complaints, so they told us about the switch they had made, and congratulated themselves heartily on their success.

A few months later, one of my biggest accounts called to ask me about a change they had noticed in the quality of the product they’d been ordering from us for years. They asked me if anything had recently changed, and I dutifully told them that we now had a partner in China making the product to our specifications, and we had been shipping this instead.

For the next 15 minutes, the client proceeded to tear a huge strip off me for not advising them of the change. They were upset with my company for making the change in the first place, but they were even more furious with ME for not advising them of the change when I first heard about it.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. My company could have launched the made-in-China product as an economy line at a lower price, and still made a respectable profit.

Instead, by keeping the change a secret from both their employees and their clients, they cost themselves – and me! – one of our oldest and most loyal customers.

It wasn’t a top-of-the-line machine, but it was a solid sale, and I couldn’t have been happier. I treated myself to a celebratory cup of coffee (extra cream and sugar) and went to tell my manager the good news.

The party didn’t last long.

When I told him the particulars of the sale, he ordered me to send the customer a used copier instead of a new one because, and I quote: “they won’t be able to tell the difference.”

I quit the next week. As for my manager, I can only hope he got everything he deserved. Like, say, a transfer to the branch office in Siberia…