Unethical Sales Practices Losing Customer's Trust

Unethical sales practices are once again being highlighted in the media and the result can only be loss of customer trust for the big retailers that have been caught.

What would your customers say if the media pointed out to them that you were using sales practices which appeared to hide underhand selling techniques designed to increase profits?

Unless you're in retail sales you probably won't be using the exact same tricks.

But, after you've read about the techniques below ask yourself:

'Are you doing anything that could lose your customer's trust if they found out.'

Read on and make sure you're sales techniques are not going to catch you out...

Unethical Sales Practices

The media and the Competition and Markets Authority are looking into potential sales techniques that mislead customers into thinking they are getting a bargain.

The alleged techniques include: Reducing the size of an item or a container to increase the profit made.

In some cases the price was actually raised while the size was reduced meaning the customer was hit in two ways.

Using different units of measurement so that sizes of items could not be compared.

Two sauce bottles were labelled as 100gms and 100ml, how do you know which one was the best value.

The Multi Pack Sales Technique

We've all seen the multi packs of food, confectionery, drinks, and many other items on sales in supermarkets. But have you ever actually compared the price with the price for an individual item?

It was actually costing customers more per item for the multi pack purchase that it would to buy the items individually.

Sales Offers

Items offered for reduces sale prices were found to have been on the higher, non-reduced prices for only a limited time leading to suspicions that the sale price was in fact the intended retail normal price.

Losing Customers

Any business that uses what customers see as unethical sales practices runs the risk of losing customers and worse getting a reputation for sharp practice and putting profit before people.

Once you get a bad name it's hard to change that customer perception.

Remember the timeshare vacation market, and more recently in the UK the unethical practices of door to door sales people in the energy and utility market.

Now ask yourself, 'Are you using any sales practices that could get you, or your business, a bad reputation?'

On my website,

Provensalestraining.com I present sales training, tips, and techniques from around the world that are ethical and proven to work.

If you think there may be ways you can improve your sales techniques, for any stage of the sales process, take a look at Proven Sales Training...

The Sales Buzz is published by the website www.provensalestraining.com.

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