Thousands Hit By Phone Bill Scams – The Times newspaper
25 Nov 2007
Mobile telephone companies have been in the news this week accused of lying about the prices potential customers will be charged for their calls in order to get them to sign up to a new contract. The same thing has happened frequently in the past with the sale of gas, electricity and many other products and services sold direct to the consumer. Who gets the blame – salespeople of course! The sub-headline in The Times newspaper read: Crackdown ordered on rogue salesman. But who is really to blame?
I’ve been working with salespeople for over twenty-five years and in my experience, the vast majority of salespeople want to act with integrity, honesty and be proud of what they do. In the business to business sector, it is the only way to be successful in sales. If a business were to purchase your product and service based on a lie, then they would be quite likely to take legal action and would almost certainly win. So what is going on in the business to consumer market and whose fault is it really?
Over the years I have been asked by several nationwide organisations to comment on and help to improve on their sales training. Typically these companies have difficulty recruiting and difficulty keeping their sales staff. When I have sat in on some of these companies’ sales training sessions, these are some of the instructions I have heard salespeople being given:
‘Don’t ever give your surname if asked for it – only your first name. Then you cannot be traced if there is a complaint.’
‘Lie about the price. If asked to put it in writing, refuse and say we don’t do that, a note of the price is held on the system to protect you.’
‘If someone asks to speak to a supervisor, just put them on to another salesperson in your team.’
‘Say whatever you need to say in order to get the sale. We can always wipe out any recorded conversations if we need to.’
‘You won’t get fired for bending the truth – you’ll get fired for not making enough sales.’
And so on.
Needless to say, I have refused to work with them.
If we take a typical large sales organisation with a large call centre as an example, there is normally a team of salespeople, a team leader and a supervisor. The team leader and the supervisor have a responsibility to listen in to the telephone calls and wherever necessary, coach the salespeople to improve their presentations and sales performance. They know what is going on and encourage it!
I am not suggesting that all business to consumer sales organisations act in this way, but according to Consumer Direct, the Governments consumer helpline, they have received over 25,000 complaints on the subject of mobile telephone salespeople in the past year and complaints to Ofcom are running at 700 a month. And maybe this is only the tip of the iceberg? So who is to blame?
It’s my opinion that it is the CEOs of the guilty companies who are to blame. They must know what is going on in their organisations and by ignoring it and the multitude of complaints, simply means they are condoning these sharp practices.
So come on guys – show your true leadership qualities and put a stop to it right now. Instead of shifting the blame on to ‘rogue salesman’, change your selling practices, change your commission structures, train people properly and pay them a good rate for selling with honesty and integrity. Make them proud of what they do and how they do it. In the end, you will probably spend a lot less on recruiting and training, so you will be no worse off and you will have a loyal and happy sales team and a loyal and happy customer base. Surely that is something great to aspire to?
If you have suffered from miss-selling or been encouraged to miss-sell, maybe you could e-mail this blog to the CEO of the company responsible.