Integrity - The Bedrock of Character
From www.dictionary.com: Integrity is the "adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty."
True story: A friend of mine once worked as a systems engineer and developer for a small company where the founder pulled all the sales people together and said, "We're looking for two customers, dumb and dumber."
Several questions raced through my mind when I first heard this story.
Are there people dumb enough to do business with a company like this?
How can you live with yourself when that's your attitude?
Can I get their customer list???
(that last one was a joke)
How do you grow and sustain ANY customer loyalty when that's the culture of your company? Evidently you don't. They are no longer in business.
From Proverbs 10:9 we read: "He who walks in integrity walks securely, but he who perverts his ways will be found out."
I hear a lot of leaders speak about the desire to have sales professionals with strong character. I often ask them what they mean by character. The word they use most often in their answers is "integrity".
What Proverbs 10:9 says about integrity could be taken as a statement of fact to which we should listen and take to heart. We want to be secure in the solutions we are selling to our customers, and we want our customers to also be secure that what they have will perform as advertised. If we are selling any other way, we will eventually be found out.
I remember going through a phase when I was in elementary school. There were a whole slew of things I had done, and I walked around with a small cloud over my head fearing my parents would find out. There were the windows I'd broken at the gym, the fight I got it, stealing my teacher's paddle, and lots of other stuff (I only mention the things for which the statute of limitations has passed). Then it occurred to me one day - like switching on the lights in my head - "Hey, if I don't do these things, I don't have to worry about my parents finding out.." It was like a great weight was lifted from my shoulders and after a couple of months of walking the straight and narrow, I was surprised at how great it felt not to be worried about being found out. In addition I found the experience of not worrying as outweighing the "fun" of breaking things. There was plenty of other mischief I could get into where being discovered would not be that big a deal. (in a few more years I'll write about the dynamite)
Integrity applies to so many areas of our lives as sales professionals - how we talk with customers and co-workers. What we say about customers and co-workers. Are we building a solution that meets the customer's requirements or does it mainly meet our goaling requirements??? How do we behave when we're on the road?
And what if we start taking some very small shortcuts in the integrity area, because it helps us retire quota faster? Where will we be in the end, when we're found out?
Proverbs 19:1 also says, "Better is a poor man who walks in his integrity than he who is perverse in speech and is a fool."
That is a tough one for sales people to swallow. Nobody I know became a sales rep in order to be poor. And I'm not suggesting that it is better to be a poor man than a successful sales rep. The question is, at what price success? Never at the price of our integrity. When success in a deal or account will cost us our integrity, then it is better to walk away.
Posted at 03:00PM Jul 24, 2007 by George Miller in Personal | Comments[0]