Sales Joke of the Day (April 12) Honesty.

A Vice President of Sales for a large insurance company was interviewing young sales reps from other firms for a new prestigious position with their company.


"I'm sure you can understand," said the Vice President of Sales to the first applicant, "that in business such as this, our personal integrity must be beyond question.  So what I need to really know is, are you an honest salesman?"


"Honest?" replied the young salesman.  "Let me tell you something about honesty and how it runs in my family.  I'm so honest, that I paid back my father all $25,000 he lent me for my education, even though at that time he was suffering from severe heart disease."  At that moment the salesman looked up and said, "Rest in peace, Pops."


"That's very impressive," said the Vice President of Sales.  Just how did you pay your father back so quickly?"


"Well, with the commissions from the term insurance I just sold him.   Dad always used to tell me that honesty was the best policy."


Moral of the story.   True sales professionals know that because of inherent conflict of interest, it's best never to do business with close relatives.  When you stop and think about it for a moment, you'd have to give your family member a hefty discount, which means low margins and hardly any commissions, and should anything ever go wrong with the product or service you'll have to give the platinum family level of warranty.   More time and less money are not the way to riches my friends.   Avoid the turmoil, send your family to the competition, and use them to get all the info on your competitor that they can lay their hands on!


"Honesty is the best policy."          -   Benjamin Franklin


"Confidence....   thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and unselfish performance.  Without them it cannot live."     
                                                    -    Franklin D. Roosevelt

Sales Joke of the Day (March 12) The Rejected Sale.

A tramp walks into a hardware shop and asks the salesman behind the counter for a bottle of Methylated Spirits.


"I'm sorry sir," says the man, "but I can't sell you that."


"Why not?" asks the tramp.


"Because you're going to drink it," replies the salesman.


"No, no, I'm not - I've been doing some painting and need to clean my brushes," says the tramp.


The salesman looks him up and down, notices his disheveled and generally dirty appearance and, once again says "I'm sorry, I can't sell you meths, I think you're going to drink it."


The tramp, clearly hurt by this assumption, starts to plead with the salesman: "OK, I know I might look a bit on the rough side and I admit I've had my low times, but I'm pulling myself back up. The Council have just given me a flat and it was in a bit of a state, so I've started decorating, to make it a bit more homely. I can't afford to buy new brushes, so I need some meths to clean the old ones I've got. Please, please, sell me some meths!"


So, feeling sympathetic, the salesman takes down a bottle of meths from the shelf and hands it to the tramp.


"Oh," he says, "haven't you got a cold one?" 


Moral of the story.   True sales professionals know that in order to succeed at sales, sometimes you have to turn down business.   Why?  Because over the long haul, you never want to sell something to someone that will cause them to be less satisfied or less healthy than they were before they started doing business with you.   That means as a sales professional, you would never sell something to someone they didn't need, or something that they did not now how to use, or something that you knew in advance would harm them.  There is one more thing in your sales career you should never put a price on, and that would be your integrity.   Do the right thing, and business will come your way.   Take short cuts for quick short term gains, and it will eventually catch up with you.


"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."   
                                                        -    John Sawhill