How valuable is your reputation?
We all know a key ingredient to anyone’s success is their credibility.
Your credibility and reputation form the image you portray in your market. It communicates your values and what you stand for. It also helps people quickly identify with you and begin to trust you.
Your reputation can take a lifetime to establish and often comprises a vast body of work that’s punctuated with decades of toil and hard lessons learnt.
So, when someone or something threatens to attack your well-earned reputation it’s worth fighting for!
In fact, this is one of the very few occasions when I strongly recommend going on the attack and eliminating the guilty parties without hesitation.
In business, we can be exposed to an array of deceptive and misleading conduct from others. At BOOM! we call this Black Phone™ behaviour. People largely resort to these unethical tactics due to low moral standards or utter desperation.
This is observed when your own people don’t get what they want or fail to understand how to get others to like, agree with and trust them, so they manufacture unethical tactics to compensate. We see salespeople bend the truth and invent fictional content to create leverage. As a result, they misrepresent and throw their company and their customer into harm’s way.
This is when salespeople try to discredit the competition. They attempt to plant seeds of doubt or blatantly lie to deter people from engaging other players in their market. We witnessed this disgusting display in the recent US election—it’s gutter level and is invariably born from a place or ignorance and fear.
Both attacks must be dealt with with uncompromising force and total commitment.
Internal attacks can be overcome by applying a strong moral code of conduct, clear and tangible values, capability and compliance frameworks, and ongoing coaching and support.
External attacks can be treated swiftly with strong action and in some cases, a legal hand.
It is of course challenging to control what unethical people say about you externally. What can be governed is how your own people represent your brand and treat your customers.
If exposed to any internal or external attacks ⎯ ready the flag and lead the charge!
Trent Leyshan is the founder of sales training company BOOM! Sales and author of Outlaw and The Naked Salesman.
Trent Leyshan is the founder of sales training company BOOM! Sales and the author of Outlaw and The Naked Salesman.
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