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I hate ‘ethical sales’.

I hate the concept that someone thinks I’m selling something to them and I’ve wrestled with this for years.

I want to change the name of this to convert it into something else, to embody and embrace the concept of service provision in return for remuneration because ‘sales’ has become tarnished and dirty and ugly. But the truth is that whatever you call it, it is a thing and it does exist and if you haven’t got a reasonable way to offer your services to improve someone’s situation in return for remuneration then you can’t get your work done to change the world.

In the street when you’re stopped by The Dog’s Trust, it’s a sales process.

When your son comes home from school and asks you to donate to him for the sponsored run, it’s a sale process.

When your friend phones you up to tell you that their partner has cancer and asks you to come around to help for a little while, sadly, that’s a sales process.

We are all in sales almost all of the time, trying to convince our partners that it’s reasonable to go away for a weekend of cycling or trying to convince our children to eat their vegetables.

The trouble with ‘ethical sales’ is it is a spectrum and everyone’s boundary lines are in different places. It just means you need to try to attract people to your environment whose boundaries are in a similar place to yours and the best way to do that is to give you the example of the meal for Grace’s birthday the other weekend.

We went our favourite place to eat which is not fancy but is a local ‘gastropub’ (again – hate that handle!) which is about 5 minutes from our house.

It’s the whole locally sourced food thing and we love it.

We went out for lunch, it wasn’t fancy, I had soup and a sandwich and a bottle of diet coke.

I love diet coke in bottles and it goes against almost everything I believe in but I do love it and I still drink it.

Usually when I go for a meal I go through two diet cokes and I like to go through two diet cokes. Here is the essence of ethical sales.

Firstly, they had diet coke so I bought it. It arrived before my meal and I drank some of it and part way through my meal I ran out. This is it.. this is the crux of it.

So, I have a problem in the middle of my meal and I would like someone to come and solve the problem (no diet coke) and I’m happy to pay for that problem to be solved (the price of the diet coke and possibly even a tip) Just at the point where I ran out of diet coke, the waiter (who was brilliant) came up and said “Is everything ok guys? Do you need anything?”

I asked for a diet coke, he bought it and it was added to the bill and I paid for it.

Now look at another situation that arose during that meal in a parallel universe where nobody came up and asked us if we were alright and I couldn’t catch the eye of a waiter.

I would be disappointed that there was no ethical sales in place.

And now another scenario - where the waiter asked me 7 times if I wanted anything else to drink, obviously just off a course in training to upsell as much as possible. He also asked me if I wanted to buy tomato ketchup or if I wanted a bottle of wine or if I wanted… you get it. Over and over again.

‘Ethical sales’ is setting the boundaries of how you offer your service to someone, understanding that they’re busy and don’t let them down.

In our place we just focus on never losing a patient who needs and wants treatment by having a gap in our systems. We don’t get it right all the time, in fact we probably don’t get it right a lot of the time, but we’re getting better and trying. It’s not about calling people 500 times to see if they want to go ahead with their treatment, but it is about calling people to see if they’re ok after a consultation and seeing if they have any questions.

Once for an extra drink during a meal, on average that’s probably enough. Twice I can deal with but more than that and we’re out of ethical sales and into sales.

Blog Post Number: 1923