What you’re doing isn’t sales, it’s immoral.
I know we’re hardly stealing from the poor. We’re in business-to-business sales and our clients aren’t strapped for cash but not all of them are multimillion pound organisations either: they are family businesses, startups and NGOs, none of whom should trust their budget with a team led by your morals.
Every day you tell blatant lies about data security, upsell when there’s no need, and rearrange numbers to disguise hidden costs. The way you work isn’t just unprincipled, it shows you can’t do your job honestly. How can you be so proud of achieving targets when you know how they were created? It’s like an Olympic athlete who wins a race ran on performance-enhancing steroids, or a golf pro lying about his handicap – do you really feel like you’re a winner, or a success?
It could be that you just enjoy the commission, and this would be easier to understand. But you routinely lecture us on sales tactics, reprimand us for our lack of drive (read: our will to lie), and arrogantly tell us how to do our jobs. It’s clear you feel superior to the rest of us: a true salesman, as you say. But what you don’t understand is that we’re playing a different game altogether – ours being an honest one.
There are team members whose figures are not far behind your own, yet they achieve their sales through know-how, charisma and integrity. Teach us to be like them. Don’t teach us “fogging” to hide product features which are incompatible with the clients’ needs, don’t tell us to compromise a company’s data privacy by lying about encryption capabilities, and don’t think acronymising a new process to misleadingly upsell makes it any more OK as a business practice. (It may seem a more official sales tactic this way, but it’s as skilful as selling a counterfeit handbag.)
While you may like to think of yourself as a Wolf of Wall Street-like sales guru, remember the one thing you haven’t managed to win from us is respect. The new hires are scared of you. And those of us who have been here longer are outperforming you. No one respects your underhand sales tactics. You simply have an inflated commission and a warped definition of what it means to be successful.
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