There is no doubt that AI has taken over the sales landscape and is transforming it. With great power comes great responsibility.

While AI can supercharge efficiency and personalize outreach, it can also introduce ethical concerns if left unchecked. The good news is, used correctly, AI can be a powerful tool to enhance your ethical practices. It can be a gamechanger not only in sales but also in customer service, increasing efficiency and effectiveness in businesses.

Ethics in business

Trade, just like any other area in our lives, is governed by a set of rules. Business ethics are principles that govern moral behaviour in a company. Company ethics play a big role in creating the perception of a business in a customer’s mind, and that has a big influence on its success. Some of the principles that govern ethics include respect, fairness, trust, and responsibility. Every company has its own principles that it operates on, that governs its business. This will dictate how the business interacts with its customers, its employees, other companies, its investors and the government. Business ethics are responsible for helping businesses make ethical decisions and build trust with customers.

Importance of business ethics

Business ethics guides how a company operates and helps them to keep in line with the set laws and regulations. This helps a business to have a good reputation, which leads to a high customer lifetime value.

Business ethics looks into the welfare of employees, helping the business to have a high retention rate. A high retention rate helps the business to grow and prevents a high turnover.

Business ethics is very essential when it comes to relation with customers. It helps to promote trust, and this promotes a good relationship with customers, which increases its sales.

Business ethics also influences the relationship the company has with investors. It also helps companies to attract the right investors and keep them.

Principles of business ethics

According to Study Smarter, there are seven principles of business ethics that guide the code of conduct. The seven principles include:

Accountability Accountability means a company taking responsibility for their actions. This includes both good decisions and bad decisions.

Care and respect There needs to be mutual respect between business customers, employees and stakeholders. The working space should be safe for employees and customers.

Honesty Every business needs to ensure transparent and honest communication between all the stakeholders involved. This also involves employees being honest with clients and vice versa.

Healthy competition Every business should encourage healthy competition in their workforce and reduce conflicts as much as possible.

Loyalty and respect for commitments In some cases, there might be disagreements between the business and employees or the customers. This should be resolved, amicably and respectfully. Employees have a responsibility to be faithful and uphold the business vision and values. Businesses should also look into the agreements they have with their employees.

Transparency There should be transparency within the organization to help build trust. This includes when it comes to both positive and negative information.

Respect for the rule of law All the set rules of law, such as corporate roles, gdpr rules regulations and guiding business principles should be adhered to.

Benefits of business ethics

Competitive advantage: Customers, investors and stakeholders would rather cooperate with a company they feel is transparent. This gives the company an edge over competitors. Better business image: When a company is compliant to business ethics, it makes it attractive to customers and investors giving it a better reputation. Lack of legal problems: Compliance saves them from being on the wrong side of the law.

Drawbacks in business ethics

Time constraint: It takes time to develop, maintain, implement and adjust business ethics. Sometimes the laws change from time to time, and it takes time to learn and adjust according to the changes.

Ethics vs profits: In some instances, dwelling on ethics so much comes with an opportunity cost, lowering the profit one can make eg so much transparency can make some customers to shy off.

Ethics in Sales

Ethics in sales follows the same principles as ethics in business. It is a set of moral behaviours that govern sales people. The ethical principles are the same across different industries and companies. In sales, company owners and customers expect a certain moral conduct from the salesman.

Sales code of conduct

A sales code of conduct is meant to define the way salespeople operate, make decisions and treat all other stakeholders such as customers, colleagues, suppliers, etc.

A sales code of conduct is designed to define selling behaviours such that salesmen know what is desirable and what is not, ensure high standards of practice, lower the risk of fair trading breaches, ensure a good business reputation is maintained, and ethical decision making.

An ethical sales of conduct should define how your salesmen find and approach new customers, interaction with customers, the pricing and payment methods, conflict management, selling approaches, warranties, refunds and after-sales service.

Although many companies have a sales code of conduct, there are still ethical challenges that salespeople face. Some of the ethical challenges they face include: Honesty and Transparency: Salespeople may feel pressure to exaggerate the benefits of their products or services in order to make a sale. There are cases where there will be lies about the features of the product. In most cases sales people will not talk about what their product cannot do, they only focus on the positives. For instance, most will not be honest about the impact of the product to the customer as if it is negative as it will affect their chances of buying.

Pressure to Meet Targets: Sales targets can sometimes lead to aggressive or manipulative sales tactics. This may lead to unfair treatment of customers. It is also unfair to pressure prospects into buying when they do not have a pressing need, are not ready or cannot afford the product. Using scare tactics or creating a false sense of urgency are all manipulative and unethical.

Conflicts of Interest: Salespeople may encounter situations where their personal interests conflict with the best interests of the customer or their employer. For instance their primary interest is making sales and hitting the target regardless of what it takes. They do not prioritize customers' needs and company values. In some cases they may recommend a product that gives them a higher commission even if it's not the best fit for the customer, or accepting kickbacks from a third party in exchange for a sale.

Customer Privacy: Salespeople may have access to sensitive customer information and must handle it with care and respect for privacy laws and regulations. Sales people should also not use sensitive customer information for their selfish gain such as price manipulation tactics. They should also not share customer confidential information or invade their privacy.

Unethical Treatment of Competitors: Speaking negatively about competitors' products or services with false information is a big ethical no-no. Even though it may be tempting to highlight the weakness of competitors' products or tarnish their name to look better, it is unethical. It is a better approach to focus instead on what your product can do.

Here's how AI can power your ethical practices

Building Trust

Other than sending spamming emails, companies can use AI to segment leads and predict their pressing questions such that the emails address the questions before a customer asks them. Doing that will help you adapt your offer to their needs. This helps to build trust with the company and gives a competitive advantage. Sending relevant emails also prevents the emails from falling into the cracks of spam filters, increasing the delivery rate. By the emails not going to spam indicates that the recipient of the email can trust the company sending emails.

By predicting the customers' questions, AI can give recommendations on how the customer can use the company’s product for their needs.

Personalizing the customer experience helps to build trust, which influences the results one gets. It can improve how customers perceive the company and build customer loyalty.

Defining target groups

Through AI, you can precisely test and define target groups so ensure you are doing the right targeting. This will help you uphold ethical standards as you will only focus on the right target group for your product.

Informed Decisions

Through AI, customers are empowered to make the right decisions. By addressing the customer questions in a timely way, a customer can make a decision in a timely way as well. For instance customers can make informed choices on how they can interact with a company’s systems.

Communication

AI can help you to know how to communicate with your clients. It can help you know the strengths of your product and help you align according to the needs of your customers. You can also communicate the impact of your product without having to lie, especially if the impact is negative. AI will give you an idea on how to honestly talk about it without being offensive. You will not necessarily have to say what the client wants to hear.

When it comes to comparing with competitors, AI will give you ideas on how to show your product as the best choice compared to competitors rather than attacking the competitor and making them look bad. Eg you can show a case study of a customer that moved from a competitor to your product. You can easily do a feature comparison with a competitor to show why your product’s feature is the best for the prospect’s pain point. You can also easily show what makes your product unique.

Ensuring Fairness and Accountability

AI algorithms can help you analyze your sales practices and detect any potential bias. This will ensure fair treatment of all customers.

AI helps adapt pricing and marketing offers to individual customer needs (dynamic pricing). This will help you to offer fair pricing to customers, helping you be ethical in terms of treating your customers well.

Prioritizing the Right Leads

AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify leads who are a good fit for your product, preventing wasted time and potentially unethical sales tactics on unqualified prospects. AI systems can easily identify your ready-to-buy customers from a set of leads, helping you channel your energy in the right direction. This will also help you save on resources and increase your conversion rate as you will be focusing on leads who are close to making a purchasing decision. This will help you save time and increase the effectiveness of your sales activities.

Data-Driven Guidance

AI can analyze customer interactions and suggest ethical communication strategies that prioritize building genuine relationships over high-pressure tactics. Through AI, you can respond to customers in a timely and relevant way. AI can analyze vast amounts of data, helping you to forecast future sales and marketing trends. This can help you to align strategically, even when it comes to meeting the ethical needs of the customer.

BuyerMind and ethics in sales

BuyerMind is your champion when it comes to helping you be ethical in sales. BuyerMind is an AI engine that will help you meet your goals and be on the right side of the law. Some of the ways BuyerMind can help you to be ethical in sales include:

Not spamming people

When you are doing cold outreach, it is very easy to spam people. Giving people information they do not need. However, with BuyerMinds ai engine, you can easily predict customers' questions prior so that you address them using cold emails. It is also possible to segment leads so that you segment them according to their needs. That makes your outreach easy as you will be dealing with people of the same need at the same time. When you communicate with people with relevant content, it will prevent the emails falling through the spam filters.

Right Targeting

It is common for companies to have a high number of leads but that does not mean they are all interested in becoming your customers. It is also hard for companies to identify ready-to-buy leads from their leads. With BuyerMind, it is easy to segment leads accordingly. BuyerMind has the ability to predict customer questions and group them according to awareness levels. This will help you have the right targeting since you target them according to their awareness levels.

Right communication

There is no doubt that it is a challenge to know when to communicate with prospects or customers. Through BuyerMind’s data engine, you can study user behaviour and thus know when is the right time to communicate. Through predicting customer behaviour, you can know their pain points and that will help you know what they want to hear.

Company reputation

BuyerMind will help you uphold the company reputation in many ways. One it will help your emails not to be detected by the spam filters, hence you will not be flagged for spam. It will help you send relevant content to your customers in a timely way, which customers love. BuyerMind will help you personalize your customer experience and this makes all the difference. When you tell your customers what they want to hear, it helps them to highly regard you.

Keep up with the changing laws eg GDPR compliance It may be cumbersome to keep up with the changing business laws and regulations. Luckily, with an AI engine like BuyerMind, you can easily keep track of the changes and adhere to them.

Ethics is a sensitive subject and needs to be kept into consideration if you are looking to have the best relationship with your customers. Observing ethics in sales will help increase your conversion rates, cutting down your costs. With a tool like BuyerMind, you can easily use AI to ensure you oblige to ethics in sales. This will help you not to be spammy, have the right targeting, communicate well, uphold the company reputation and keep up with the changing laws.

Do you want to take your ethics in sales to the next level? Let’s have a conversation on how BuyerMind can help.