In a blog last year, one aspect of compassionate capitalism was covered, namely, the idea of ethical
executive compensation levels (the link is http://karmasutratkos.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/contours-of-compassionate-capitalism.html).
That post generated some heat and dust. Some
people felt that business should not be mixed with spirituality. Others felt
that extraordinarily high compensation levels for executives are ‘earned’ and
we should not grudge them their ‘just reward’.
As Gandhi said, there is enough
on this planet for our needs but not for our greed. In today’s world, bringing
spirituality and ethics into our model of unbridled capitalism has become
essential, for the survival of our planet. The paradigm of greed and
consumption on steroids, as often seen in countries like US where many families
have more than 3 or 4 cars and dozens of high end electrical gadgets spells doom for our planet, especially if
copied by striving billions in populous countries such as China and India. If
supercars, high end electrical gadgets and gargantuan houses with swimming pools remain
the much-extolled goals of capitalism, it will also continue to widen the gap
between the haves and have nots. According
to this Fortune article published in 2017, the present wealth inequality
between haves and have nots in US is worse than Iran or Russia1.
Other developing countries like India, which are copying the capitalism model
of the US without strong checks and balances are destined to go the same route.
Like in US, we are going to see more and more superrich and abysmally poor in
many of these ‘fast developing’ countries.
While the numbers in the superrich club tend to grow moderately, the numbers
in the abysmally poor club grow at an exponential, much faster rate. For these
reasons it is imperative that we develop and implement this paradigm for
compassionate capitalism quickly.
In this blog, we will talk of what
could be more ethical selling practices in a compassionate capitalism
practising firm. Readers are also requested to add their own thoughts to this
bullet point list.As we probably know, selling is
personalised persuasive communication used by salespeople for promoting
purchases of their goods or services. Recruitment professionals and talent head-hunters
also use these skills to entice human resources into their companies. The thumb
rules proposed in the following paragraphs could be used, with minor
adaptations, to all persuasive communication situations.
We all know that most people want
to avoid salespersons, just as talented skilled people avoid cold-calling
recruiters. Sometimes, people put up notices specifying that salespeople are
unwelcome in their premises. Sales people are often perceived as aggressive, liars,
unpleasant, pestilential, poor listeners, pushy and so on. There are instances when people buy something
from a door to door salesperson just to be able to get rid of him/her.
These days, the more progressive
companies train their sales people to be good listeners and to be empathetic,
polite and keep their promises, all the while speaking highly of their product
(strong defence of their product). Salespeople are also trained these days to
avoid attacking competitors directly by name although they are often encouraged
to sneak in an indirect comment putting down competitor’s product or its
features. Undoubtedly, if these rules
are followed by salespeople, it makes their interaction with prospects more
pleasant. However, since this training does not come out of conviction from the
companies to practice a more ethical or compassionate selling approach, it is merely
tactical window dressing. The pressure on sales people to meet their targets
remains high and the management does not really care whether their top
salesperson really has been polite and empathetic all the time. Success is
worshipped. Companies have awards for top performer in sales and no awards for
the most empathetic or most serving salesperson. (If queried, companies might
answer that only the most polite, sincere and empathetic salesperson would anyway
get the most sales. This would not be true,
especially in the short-term). This blog
builds up further to what the
progressive companies might have already achieved in terms of making selling
process more pleasant. (There are of course many companies which are
still at the first stage where their sales people are aggressive, pushy,
half-liars or deceptive. We are assuming that most reputed and progressive business
firms with some level of integrity have crossed that bridge and come out of
that selling mind-set…)
In order to understand a more
radical, compassionate capitalism approach to selling, let us look at the
selling style of greatest spiritual leaders (although they were not marketers
in the very conventional sense). For example, Lord Krishna, when asked by Arjun
whether it is useful to have the war and to fight his relatives, could have
easily suggested the easier, more pleasant path and advised everyone concerned
not to have the war. But he suggested the harder path of battle for duty for
Arjuna. Jesus Christ did not invite his disciples by stating that he will give
them money, palatial mansions or riches, but in fact stated quite the opposite.
He tells those who want to join him ‘anyone
who loves their father and mother more than me is not worthy of me’. Not a very enticing message, is it? No recruiter would ever dream of telling a
potential candidate that if you join this company you will have to forget your
family or love them less. Similarly, he advised his disciples to ‘take their cross and follow me’. Again,
not a rosy picture here. In some stories of Prophet Muhammad I came across
recently, it was mentioned that he often told his followers that they would
face difficult situations and potential loss of life and gave them an option to
leave him.
There are other things we can
glean from these leaders for our model of compassionate capitalism. Jesus never
go around asking people to become his disciples. Jesus simply did what he
wanted to do - his preaching, his
miracles etc. backed by his personal style of living. People who wanted to be
his disciples flocked to him. Mirabehn, the disciple of Gandhi, was not sought
out by Gandhi. She wrote to him asking to join him. In fact, while he invited
her, he also warned her about the ascetic lifestyle and discipline of his
ashram.
Based on these we can come to
some principles of salesmanship for an ethically driven, spiritual model of
compassionate capitalism. Business firms which seek to ethically reform their
sales department to conform to this model of compassionate capitalism must
follow these rules (needless to say, those organisations which call themselves
charities must have been following these rules in some form, one would hope):
- Sales people must not seek to persuade prospects or ‘convince’ them to buy our products. Make information available about the products to prospective customers. Visits if any, must be made by sales people to only inform about the product and serve the customer. If they (the prospects) want the product or service they will let the company know. In fact sales people must be encouraged not to ask any questions to ‘get the sale’. Just leave the information about the products.
- In fact, visits must be made by sales people only if they want to give something to a prospect. Every sales visit must have a clear bottom line – what are we giving the customer? (For example, companies could give away knowledge/information, free participation opportunity in seminars, some free solutions or useful products). Products which are given away must not advertise anything about the company. If our company is giving away a diary it must not mention anything about the product or your company. It should be just an excellent diary that our prospect can use. It will not have any advertisements about our company or products. Only then is it a genuine give away.
- If a prospect asks about the attributes of a competing product, the salesperson must genuinely praise the real advantages of a competitor product, without trying to put it down in some indirect way. For example, when our prospect points out that our brand of vacuum cleaner is much heavier, replying ‘our vacuum cleaner is much heavier, but we provide more colour options’ is not right. (It is also insulting to the intelligence of our prospect). Our salespeople should simply and calmly acknowledge that the competitor’s vacuum cleaner is light weight.
- After elaborating on the strengths of our product, our salesperson must also tell the real disadvantages of our product and the areas where our competitor’s product is better. If the prospect says at the end of our balanced presentation, ‘your competitor’s product seems better because of so and so…… why should I not go for that product?’, instead of defending our product endlessly, our salespersons must say, ‘Yes, indeed in those areas our competitor’s product is better. Please go for them if you feel so. However, even if you go for our competitor’s products, if you need any support or help or information or any other service from me, please do not hesitate to contact me’.
- Those salespersons who use the competitor’s product for their personal use must disclose this to the customer and honestly state why they have themselves chosen to go for a competitor’s product.
- If the customer wants a product in 3 days and our absolute minimum delivery time is 3.5 days we must honestly tell them that our delivery time is 3.5 days (even a half day), even if that leads to customer walking away. Salesmen who make commitments knowing they cannot deliver exactly as desired by the customer, must be punished.
- If our firm's product is not necessary, the salesperson must discourage the customer from buying the product. For example, if a customer feels that a replacement room heater is necessary whereas in reality the existing heater with slight change in settings can improve the performance (something the customer was unaware about), the sales person should make the customer aware about this and discourage them from buying their company’s product. Sales people who actually save a customer’s money by this gesture should be rewarded. Similarly, recruiters who feel there is not much for a prospective employee to gain by leaving his/her present job must discourage them from resigning from their present jobs.
- Recruiters who are talking to potential employees must not merely tell the company’s stated values, mission or vision, but tell potential employees about the actual implementation steps taken by management to instil those values in the company. For example, instead of telling ‘our company values diversity’ the recruiter must tell the actual numbers/percentage of diverse racial mix, genders, disabled people in the company and its different departments etc. Instead of saying ‘our top management has an open door policy’, the prospective employees must be told about situations where a lower level employee has actually walked into the Managing Director’s office and spoken about some issue, based on which some action was actually taken by the top management.
- Every recruiter must have a slide in their presentation which must tell the unpleasant things that the company did or was accused of doing in the past 5 years. If the company was in the news for money laundering, involved in any sort of cases of corruption, fined for wrong doing by any regulators, sued by any customers or taken to employment tribunals for unfair dismissals, bullying or sexual harassment, this must be mentioned without the recruiter going into a lengthy defence of the company. If there were no such negative facts, the recruiter of the company must still depict sincerely, the disadvantages of joining the firm.
- Sellers and recruiters must remove aggressive terms from the selling activity lingo. The language which we use often defines our mind set about that activity. Right now, the language we use is the more aggressive type - ‘capture customers’, ‘get them in your bag’, ‘get the business’, ‘don’t let them escape’, ‘keep them under your watch’, ‘nail them’ etc. If we look at the terminology often used by sales managers, recruiters etc. the metaphor is often that of a hunter (sales people) and prey (the customer). There is no place in a compassionate capitalism paradigm for this mind-set. More positive, empathetic language could be ‘helping the customer’, ‘serving the customer’, ‘making customer happy’ and so on.
Companies
which are committed to creating a global capitalistic business environment of
compassion, ethics and sustainability can have a system of ‘naming and shaming’ (or
any other suitable punishment) for those who violate these rules.
Some readers
might say, the above rules are not practical. Company’s sales might go down
drastically if one follows these rules, especially in an unscrupulous
marketplace where other players in the market are trying to put us down. Well,
no one said that running a business on the lines of compassionate capitalism is
going to be an easy cakewalk (perhaps
even if I had my own business firm and a team of salespeople, I might not have
the courage to put all of these in practice). However it is not impossible.
Ideals always
seem impossible to achieve or implement. Those businesses which took the first
steps towards sustainability, recycling or environmental friendliness must have
all faced initial costs of new plant/machinery, people etc.
Ideals are
something we can strive towards and with some efforts, able to achieve. Buddha
never said that non-violence against animals is impractical and hence we should
dilute that ideal itself. He laid down the ideal and while some of us are
striving to achieve it, others have already reached there. In terms of compassionate capitalism too, we
will strive to get there some day (hopefully not too far away).
Besides, we
also owe it to our planet.
Staju Jacob is the author of path-breaking book Karmasutra The Karma of Sex, which deals with the karmic spirituality of consensual sexual actions. This book is available globally on various Amazon sites in Paperback , Kindle, Sony Kobo, Google books, Iphone Ibook etc. He can be contacted on Twitter through @KaRmasutraTKOS
1 Reference quoted in the article : 1.Fortune, 2017.
http://fortune.com/2017/08/01/wealth-gap-america/
