Keeping Your Sales Force Clean

Don't let unethical dealings by individual sales reps ruin your rep

By Betsy Cummings

When Student Loan Xpress, a San Diego-based education finance lender, adopted aggressive sales tactics several years ago, the firm thought it was a stroke of genius. It would offer clients stock options and consulting opportunities, among other perks, to solidify a working relationship backed by financial rewards. Four years later, that sales strategy is backfiring, as attorneys general in several states are investigating whether the company's tactics were legal—a concern that's caused the company's clients, some of the nation's major universities, to question the ethics of their own loan officers and dismiss some of them in the process.

Unethical sales strategies delivered from the top down are hard for a sales team to ignore. But more often, sellers in the field get themselves into ethical or legal troubles all on their own when a well-intentioned message from the top gets diluted or tweaked in the field by mid-level managers or overly aggressive sellers.

"One thing that helps salespeople a lot is if a company has a very clearly stated policy," says David Hennessey, professor of marketing at Babson College, in Babson Park, Mass.

But even that message can fall on deaf ears, particularly in a marketplace where companies set high ethical standards only to "provide incentive structures that entice a sales force to go beyond the line" of ethics, says David Schmidt, professor of business ethics in the Dolan School of Business at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn.

One way to make sure sellers in the field are towing the line? Conduct surveys, suggests Richard Cellini, vice president at Integrity Interactive, an ethics and compliance training company in Boston. Online surveys can gauge how much a salesperson's ethics are slipping, whether inadvertently or not. Most salespeople who overstep ethical and illegal boundaries to close a deal, Cellini says, often do so accidentally by agreeing to bid rigging, backdating sales or even price fixing without realizing how much their actions are breaking professional and legal rules.
Many salespeople, for example, will roll in from a tradeshow boasting about a conversation they had with a counterpart at a competitive firm, gathering competitor intelligence in the process. But such meetings should be a red flag to sales managers since innocent discussions can lead to bid rigging, where competitors agree to bid on different pieces of business to ensure deals for each company. That is professional behavior that's questionable at best.