CHAPTER 1

Why Read a Book on Sales Ethics?

Many—if not most—of us will abandon attempts to follow our values simply because we don’t believe it is possible to do so.

—Mary Gentile, Giving Voice to Values

The Salesperson: A Changing Profession

It’s daybreak in Milan and Renato would prefer to be spending the day at home even though the cramped space of his studio apartment is stifling. In fact, he’d enjoy a day in bed with a temperature, because even that would be better than another day at work.

Renato is in his early 50s. He has been working for Joy Motor for years, but shortly, over a year ago, the decision came from above to transfer him to Milan. On paper it looked like promotion “you will be handling executive customers from our central offices” they told him. It took just a few days to discover the “catch.”

Renato is a car salesman who had been working contentedly in a branch owned by the parent company, but far removed from the controls of the central office. The work was pleasant, he was producing results, and his bosses were indulgent; as long as sales were high all he had to do was show his face in the office once or twice a week and they were satisfied. At the annual sales meeting, Renato was the star: His superiors praised his achievements, and quoted him as an example to other less productive colleagues.

It had not been easy at the outset; he had wanted to go to college, perhaps a major in architecture, but there wasn’t enough money and he wasn’t that keen on knuckling down to study. Through a friend, he found a job as a sales clerk with a car dealer. Renato was shy and rather quiet at the time and his first outings with an experienced seller were quite a trauma. Customers asked him questions he was unable to answer, his bosses expected him to conclude sales but he didn’t know how to go about it.

In Milan, he is now responsible to the executive customers of a large multinational in the sector, but he feels as though he’s back in the early days when his work felt like an uphill slog and even getting out of bed was an effort, let alone making it to the end of the day.

Yesterday, for example, when his boss had asked him for a report on sales trends and forecasts, he couldn’t get away with the type of answer that would have satisfied his former branch managers: “Shame I don’t have a crystal ball!” spoken loudly and with a knowing look to his colleagues. Now his behavior is a source of embarrassment for the sales department. In addition, he has to go in every day and produce a list of appointments for his bosses as well as attending monthly meetings held mostly in English. Yet, strange as it may seem, these are not the biggest problems he has to face in his new position: What Renato really finds unbearable now is working with the customers. First, the boss he has now is not ready to give the nod if Renato decides to bring the price down—any discount has to be authorized and justified and even then is rarely granted—and to top it all he’s facing tough competition from the Asian products that are flooding the market at bargain prices! Any lunches or expenses, a key part of his personal sales technique, are closely monitored.

The customers are different too. It’s no longer enough to add on a couple of optional extras to close a deal, they want him to listen carefully while they explain their needs and then guide them through their choice with suggestions and hard facts, as well as being on hand afterwards to clear up any problems.

Renato’s smartphone never stops beeping, what with e-mails arriving at all times of the day and incoming calls from his boss or his customers; in fact, it hasn’t stopped in the 12 months he’s been here in Milan. He now hates his job, along with his colleagues who are in league with the company, his inflexible bosses, and the place in which he has to live. His deep dissatisfaction has repercussions on his mood, which in turn affects his relationships. From the shy boy he once was he had learnt how to smooth talk his customers, but now he struggles to find the right words. He seems sullen or bored when interacting, and sometimes even worse, he feels vulnerable and helpless when dealing with others. What’s happening to him? How can he break free from this situation?

Renato’s story may be common to many sales reps and other sales pros forced to deal with a profession that is changing, and that maybe they did not consciously choose, but rather grew into. Over the years, they have developed a sales technique that is no longer acceptable to their customers. They may still see their job as essentially based on experience and direct practice in the field, while managing sales strategies is the task of either sales directors or those in the marketing department. When suddenly asked to initiate a new regime of method and efficiency, they feel unprepared and their pride as sales veterans is wounded. These changed circumstances leave them feeling out of place and angry, they can no longer operate freely and in the only way they know; they feel they have lost the strengths that enabled them to win the tug of war with their customers! By contrast, many young marketing, management, or economics graduates see sales as an unprofessional stopgap, an expedient to use as a springboard to their real career. Indeed, universities in Europe very rarely discuss the act of selling and thus reinforce its relegation to a competence that you pick up in the field, rather than an actual profession to which you can accede after completing a specific learning program. Yet you need only browse any job listing to see that the majority of positions advertised are for salespeople, and many of these posts will remain unfilled because the generalized distrust of the sales profession combined with the lack of any specific curricular training make it difficult or unattractive for a young candidate to apply.

This situation has led to the reflections and the issues that this book will tackle:

•  How is the sales profession changing?

•  What new tools are required to remain competitive in the markets?

•  Can sales be an actual profession with its own pool of skills and abilities and regulated by a code of ethics?

In addition, we will focus on:

•  What is the real objective of a seller?

•  What personal characteristics and skills must you develop to excel in your work?

•  Can you be a good professional if you don’t like what you do?

We aim to answer these and other important questions that the sales profession is facing today and to provide arguments to help Renato and colleagues like him to discover or rediscover their passion for sales, while at the same time obtaining results in a market that is changing thanks to the crisis.

Renato, and his colleagues, will accompany us through the chapters of this book with their personal experiences, providing case studies and topics for us to consider. They will evolve as we move forward and will achieve an awareness and transformation that we hope you will make your own.

What Is Sales Ethics?

Let us make one thing immediately clear: This book is not going to discuss cooperative societies, nonprofit organizations, or what insiders call the civil economy. We do not intend to discuss the means of achieving a more democratic company organization or of showing greater concern for employee well-being, nor indeed do we wish to encroach on areas regarding the social impact of companies and the assessment of their results beyond the purpose of profit.¹ The concept of down-shifting, known as the strategy of slowing down and changing the basic concepts of capitalism, is equally beyond the scope of this book. As interesting as these fields may be, we wish to concentrate wholly on sales and on the relations between salespeople and their customers.

We believe that alongside the highly recommendable attempt to re-establish market logics by sensitizing them to social and humanitarian issues, we can also provide ethical tools that may improve our approach to customers, both in terms of efficiency and mutual well-being, while remaining within the paradigm of maximizing individual advantage that still informs our system.

The production of profit, and the idea of success linked to it, remains a potent motivation in many professional areas (and this will likely continue) and, above all, in the area of sales. If we were to shy away from the profit motive, many readers would lose interest in the topics covered by this book, and our attempts to encourage an ethical reform of the economic system would be undermined. On the other hand, the discussion of sales within a social cooperative, for example, would still be tricky because in the collective imagination business is inextricably linked to the idea of creating individual advantage by pursuing opportunistic behavior at the expense of the customer (or consumer). Sales and cooperation have yet to find a common ground. For this to come about, we need to first rehabilitate the figure of the salesperson, and to do this we must overcome the idea that there is necessarily a conflict of interest between salespeople and their customers.

This book intends to demonstrate just how outdated this idea of a conflict of interest actually is. By contrast we will provide evidence that the pursuit of ethical behavior will not only resolve conflict between the actors in the negotiations, but can also help to increase—in an absolute sense—the benefits that each will derive from the sales deal.

We discovered that it is possible to achieve significant success, thanks to ethics. Indeed, Adam Grant, professor at the Wharton School clearly argued this thesis and gave ample demonstration of the results in his interesting book Give and Take.² In this analysis, he clearly shows us, numbers in hand, that if you adopt a giver strategy based on respect and the creation of value for others, you are likely, on average, to obtain better results than those who adopt a taker behavior, focusing merely on obtaining personal benefit.

We will show that there are many other good reasons to write about ethics in sales. But before we go on to examine them, we need to explain in greater detail what we mean by ethics applied to sales.

If you look up the meaning of the word ethics, you’ll see that it comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning behavior and habit. Ethics is concerned with the way we act and our deeply held values. Thus, it is very important when talking about ethics to remember that its meaning has a practical dimension, that is, ethics involves more than abstract philosophizing, it indicates that we must learn to act, and find tools, that allow us to assess the outcome of our actions. These tools and actions must be coherent with our identity. In judo, for example, there is a principle that defines the ethical goal of the discipline: Sei Ryoku Zen’Yo. This term could be translated roughly as optimum energy use. For the practitioners of judo, ethics are an operational tool to achieve better performance and greater efficiency and this approach is applied through constant training of the mind, body, and heart to adequately recognize and use the energy carriers involved in encounters with others. You too will learn to recognize the energy and the forces at work within a sales relationship and to use them to build value for all the actors involved. Ukè and Torì (the two opponents in a judo encounter) do not, in fact, face up to each other to decide who will win and who will be defeated, but to study together so that both may improve their abilities and skills.³

Over time, the word ethics has actually taken on multiple meanings depending on the period and context of its use. For the purposes of this work, the most interesting are those linking it to the concept of morality and the reciprocal nature⁴ of actions.

When can we define a specific behavior as moral and an action reciprocal?

Generally, we define behavior as moral when it aims at the common good, and an action is described as reciprocal when there is a balance between what we give and what we take, between rights and obligations. It follows that ethics is very much concerned with the way we relate to others. Indeed, if we consider what we said earlier, it is not possible to act in an ethical manner without a relational exchange: Where would the reciprocity be otherwise and how could we pursue the common good?

Sales also inevitably involve an exchange between people. If we consider the essential meaning of the verb sell, we will find that it denotes the giving of something to someone in exchange for something else, in order to obtain an increase of well-being. Sales and ethics are thus two activities with a specific aim that both involve a relationship as their operational tool. If we look even closer, the end itself is also the same: both have as their goal the creation of well-being, though ethics focuses on common well-being and sales involves that of the individual. We will return to this apparent divergence of aims in Chapter 3 when we discuss the economic theory of strategic games. At this point, it’s sufficient to appreciate how, by mixing the purposes underlying sales with those of ethics, we can obtain the four cardinal principles of Sales Ethics, which will guide negotiations and operational decisions in our work.

1. The efficiency of the action: Giving customers what they really need, while making the best use of resources and time and ensuring mutual satisfaction. Ethics, in our view, is linked inextricably to efficiency and the balance between giving and taking. Efficiency means finding a point of contact, or synergy, between the salesperson’s goals, which we will refer to as the seller value, and those of our customer, which we will call customer value.

2. Customer value: In any negotiation, it is essential to identify the customer’s objectives and then work to build value for him or her. In the chapter dealing with key concepts, we will explore further what we mean by value (actually a wider concept than the simple sum of customers’ material needs and wants), by giving a definition that combines both tangible and intangible aspects. Customers possess knowledge, information, and a culture from which they derive their style of communication and interpersonal relationships. It is necessary to understand and accept them because, as we will see, the way we relate to others contributes to creating value.

3. Seller value: If we fail to ensure our own well-being, we will not be able to build value for others. The premise that you cannot achieve success as a salesperson unless you are able to build value for yourself is fundamental to Sales Ethics, and you cannot build value if you are acting while burdened by a conflict between objectives and individual interests. You must enjoy what you do. Your first step to achieving ethical behavior therefore involves a reflection on what creates value for you both in tangible terms, that is, the remuneration deriving from the sale, and intangible terms, such as satisfaction and personal growth.

4. Principle of the salesperson’s ethical responsibility: Quantum physics teaches us that the mere act of observing a system will change the system itself. Relationships are complex energy systems and any action we undertake, or even if we choose not to act, will generate consequences. We can do much to increase or decrease the value of an exchange in terms of well-being. Given that the way we act, communicate, and interact with a customer is a key element in the system, these elements will help to either create or destroy value for both actors.

In the following chapter, we will address many of the concepts introduced in the definition of the key principles. What we wish to emphasize for now is that an ethical approach to selling requires that you endeavor to create an exchange that brings value to yourself and to your customer. It also means acting to maintain a balanced ratio between the resources invested and the rewards gained, to respect what we could call the ecology of the trading system. We will continue to bear in mind these four principles in the discussion of the different phases of Sales Ethics that follows later. Each action proposed aims to improve the efficiency of the negotiations, while creating customer value and generating well-being for all those involved in the trade-off. At the same time, we will focus on the various elements of the offer system than on salespeople control directly, thus emphasizing each seller’s responsibilities.

The Current Economic Scenario

What led us to write a book entirely dedicated to Sales Ethics and why did we spend months in Boston to do it?

The answer lies in the profound changes currently underway in the economic scenario that from the point of view of Sales Ethics lead to a profound reinterpretation of the role of the sales professional.

The Recent Crisis in the Markets

What actually is it, and what caused it? So many folks have been asking these questions, and looking for the answers in all sorts of places. Despite divergent points of view, most people would agree that the market collapse was triggered by a confidence crisis, caused by a series of scandals and frauds, especially in the world of finance. The markets have taken a long time to regain lost ground and in many cases (as in Italy), their delay in responding has been astounding. How can we explain this? Our interpretation, as experts in business relationships, is that the crisis of confidence has instigated powerful demands for change. It is no coincidence that the markets that have recovered more quickly are those that reacted to this demand for change, by adapting their structures and their behavior. Rebuilding confidence means, in fact, changing the behavioral paradigm and resetting market relations. As far as commercial activity is concerned, it specifically means re-establishing—on ethical grounds—the relationship between sellers and customers.

For many years trust, reputation, and ethics were regarded as being marginal to classical economic theory, but when the crisis moved from the financial and industrial sector to the political and social arena, the crucial role of negative externalities generated by the behavior of many economic agents became clear. In our opinion, if we want to set the markets back on course we must first reintroduce rules and behavior that put ethics and trust at the forefront of market laws, and restore their dignity as economic tools.

To clarify our outlook further, it could be useful to review how the last recession evolved.

When the Lehman Brothers’ investment bank failed in 2008, there was an immediate reaction in the financial markets: Wall Street, soon followed by the stock markets of the world’s major economies, burned billions of dollars decreeing the end of entire estates as well as the failure of credit institutes that until a few days previously had been considered robust. From the virtual economy of the stock markets, the tsunami soon hit the real economy, sweeping away industries and organizations and wiping millions out of jobs. These two phenomena—the financial crisis and the industrial crisis—have spread pretty much through all the world economies, though the intensity, speed, and effects have obviously varied. From that point on, however, the DNA of the crisis changed, generating a specialist virus that hit harder in countries whose internal organs had particular characteristics. The phenomenon became political as well, and was especially virulent in the countries whose institutions and representative bodies were weaker and increasingly disconnected from the electorate. Around the world, governments fell, parties disappeared, and elections were called hastily giving rise to political conditions that would have been previously unthinkable. However, the virus had not yet exhausted its mutations, so—after contaminating finance, industry, and now politics—it was preparing to attack civil society and its basic values. Revolutions and demonstrations are the visible effects of a deep social crisis that now informs our political and economic life. This social crisis, whose infectious agent lies within our own consciences, must be resolved quickly because this in the only way to resolve the other dimensions of the phenomenon and to avoid a vast domino effect. To remedy this interior crisis, it is necessary to smooth over the conflicts of interest that put us in separate camps and force us to compete opportunistically with the excuse of ensuring our economic survival. Equally, we must resolve an identity crisis that is created when we use a similar excuse to act without heeding to our personal values.

International Competition

Even before the recent recession, the western markets had been faced with aggressive new competition from countries like China and India where the cost of production could not, and cannot, be even closely compared to those of more developed economies. Low labor costs and huge production volumes have allowed businesses from these areas to offer very low prices on the international market, with products whose characteristics are continuously improving and very often have a similar quality to western products. In fact, entire industrial sectors in the West were caught unprepared and have been overwhelmed by price competition so aggressive and so sudden that they had neither the time nor the means to organize an effective response. In many economies, there was an immediate attempt to respond blow for blow, by dropping prices and offering terms that were more advantageous to customers. However, it soon became obvious that our Asian competitors would inevitably win a price-cutting war. Italy, which for many years had been competitive on international markets thanks to low inflation and wages at home, was particularly helpless as the single currency made it impossible to resort to devaluation policies and the influx of new competitors meant Italian products were no longer competitive.⁵ Companies that rely on a brand image linked to value aspects such as quality, prestige, and performance decided to play the card of differential value. The message to their customers was essentially, “we are more expensive but our product is far superior.” Many sectors are still backing this strategy, although the diminishing differences as regards features between western products and those produced elsewhere, means that with time this tactic is destined to fail.

So what strategy should we adopt?

We believe that this is where ethics comes in; we will therefore devote an entire chapter to understanding the mechanisms that can transform ethics into a powerful tool for sales and commercial differentiation.

To compete successfully, we need to work on these elements once again, making them central to our strategic approach to the market and hence to act along the lines of Sales Ethics.

The Peculiarity of the Italian Situation

The first article of the Italian Constitution states, “Italy is a Republic founded on work.” It is rare that constitutions make such a direct statement; unfortunately, an element that could have brought added value to the country has often been transformed into a pretext for suspending the logics governing the labor market.

Italy is in fact a Republic founded more on the right to claim a job regardless of your merits, skills, or commitment, rather than the right to work. This misinterpretation of the words of the founding fathers has led to a severance between jobs and ethics, as if our Constitution had solemnly enshrined that rights in the workplace come before obligations, ascribing a diminished role to the latter. The ethical rehabilitation of professions is therefore a challenge to which the fate of the Italian Republic is inextricably tied.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence speaks rather of the “right to pursuit of happiness,” thereby suggesting that happiness and not work is the purpose of human action. It also emphasizes the right to pursue happiness and not the right to obtain it. What we would like this book to make clear is that it is possible to achieve happiness through the practice of our profession. Working to derive more than just economic well-being from our work is a right, as well as a duty to our employers, our customers, our country, and ourselves. Moreover, the responsibility for exercising this right-duty is our own. In a society like ours that concentrates, above all, on finding new and more sophisticated ways to divide the pie of well-being, we must first attempt to be the ones who contribute to it by using our skills and expertise to create value before claiming it as our right.

Italy is also a country historically impervious to change. When the protagonist of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard spoke the famous words “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,”⁶ he was stating something that Italians have known for a long time and with which they tend to collude: Power and social innovation are antithetical terms. How can a country like this react efficiently to a recession that hides a profound demand for change?

Furthermore, this demand for change was generated by a crisis of confidence in the markets, caused in turn by behavior that was at the least opportunistic and sometimes illegal, a type of behavior that seems endemic in Italy and which many Italians consider innate in the practice of certain roles and professions. The ethic of success and well-being would seem to be infected by this attitude: In our country, we tend to believe that if you want to get ahead of the pack you have to break the rules or at least adopt a predatory behavior. We are so convinced that this is the only way to get results that we ignore the example of other countries where things work differently. In commercial deals, this idea of outsmarting the other guy is particularly common and one of the main reasons why Italy has such a great need for ethics in business.

When we started attending college in Boston, there was widespread amazement that two Italians had traveled all the way to the States to study the issue of ethics in sales. What most people could not understand is why a society like ours—based on robust Catholic values, with strong family ties, and culturally accustomed to framing relations in the medium to long term—needed to learn to be ethical in a country where these social institutions are less powerful. When we talked it over with people in the United States, we realized that Italy has to tackle issues typical of societies with a strong Catholic culture, as previously discussed by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that is, the need to rehabilitate the social role of personal success and the idea of wealth. The apparent dichotomy between prosperity and morality is fueled, on the one hand, by the misconduct of certain economic and political leaders, and on the other hand by an interpretation of the Christian message that proposes poverty as a symbol of honesty and moral conduct. We believe that we can achieve well-being while remaining model citizens and upstanding human beings. We are confident that Italy can face up to this challenge and defeat it and that by doing so our country will once again enrich the culture and education of other countries, as happened in the past. The family will once again be a force to foster our values so we can go out, face the world, and fulfill our dreams, rather than being merely a clan that provides protection and favors to its members. Catholic morality will be the engine of ethical relationships, structured to last and to create value over time, not an excuse for inaction or worse, a defense people use to acquit themselves of responsibility.⁷

There is a famous photo taken by Robert Capa during the Allied landing in Sicily in World War II; it shows an old Sicilian peasant indicating the way to an American soldier who is kneeling to compensate for the two men’s difference in stature. We would like this picture, then as now, to illustrate the role that awaits the Italian nation: To guide others along the right path even when they are larger and better equipped than we are, but still need assistance to achieve success and shared value. Let’s not forget that the Italian lifestyle has traditionally combined home and professional commitments in a harmonious balance that ensures quality time spent with the family and at work, which may provide a model for other countries. Our desire is to contribute to Italy’s exports by circulating a new conception of sales and relationships that will be exported alongside our excellence in design, fashion, and food.

The Evolution of the Sales Profession

Rightly or wrongly, for many years the salesperson’s job was seen as based on experience and a talent for communication rather than requiring any acquired professional skills. In certain markets, such as the Italian one, both customers and colleagues in other departments have always viewed salespeople with suspicion. In the collective imagination, successful sales directors are people who have worked their way up from the bottom and built up their fortune by cleverly manipulating relationships to their own advantage. Supposedly, their professional competence is not based on management studies but rather on street savvy which has permitted these people to garner a wealth of useful tricks for exploiting any situation to their own ends. For years, companies have viewed their top performing salespeople with a mix of awe and respect. Although sales directors may have been aware of their representatives’ unorthodox behavior, they preferred to turn a blind eye to the actions of any seller who assured a good volume of sales. Colleagues from other offices imagined sales to be cushy job in a department where you could entertain your customers at sumptuous lunches, drive luxury company cars, and take advantage of flexible working hours. Like any prejudice, this image of the salesperson does contain a grain of truth. For many years, folks started out careers in business by working as sales reps, often with an independent contractor’s agreement and compensation based on commission. Frequently candidates were not required to have a particularly structured curriculum to get into sales. The selection process revolved around two fundamental questions: “Are you a good communicator?” and “Do you like to travel?” No universities offered specific courses designed for salespeople, and even if these had existed not many human resource managers would have considered these classes a requirement to sell. Through the years of economic boom, many sales-people made money by exploiting their experience and savoir-faire, thus fueling the idea that selling was more a knack than a true profession.

This way of thinking remained practically unchanged until recently when the downturn in the markets caused people to alter their approach. Dinners and luxury cars were no longer enough to finalize deals, and salespeople found themselves subject to enormous pressure to bring home results, while their flexible work contracts afforded no protection. Sales-people were no longer the envy of their fellow workers. Sales directors, in an effort to understand what was happening to markets in free fall, began demanding reports and analysis that their staff were not qualified to draft. The whole house of cards on which the sales profession was built seemed ready to collapse.

The time had come to adapt the role of the salesperson to the evolving commercial context, and to rehabilitate it in the eyes of the customer, the company, and society. To reinvest this role with professionalism, the abilities and talents already considered necessary are now considered insufficient without the professional skills currently required. The new salespeople will find that ethics provide a powerful tool to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of their work.

The Customer-Oriented Culture and Its Various Manifestations in Italy and the United States

We still have to explain why we went to Boston to start writing our book on Sales Ethics—there are in fact many reasons, but two predominate. Firstly, the United States has a strongly customer-oriented culture, which is at the heart of any serious sales activity, and practically all the country’s educational institutions offer degrees in economics (Boston boasts of producing some world-leaders in this field) providing at least one course dealing with ethics.⁸ Harvard, MIT, Bentley University, and Babson College—to name just a few—have been carrying out research in this area for some time. We took the initiative, and went knocking on doors. True to American tradition, we were rewarded with the privilege of gaining access to some of the research that these institutions are carrying out on ethics in business.

Why do American universities attach such value to ethics?

The reason is that these institutions have learned one of the most important lessons to be culled from the crisis, that is, consumer confidence is the market’s real driving force. It may be money that makes the world go round, but it is trust that drives people. And trust must firstly be built, and then carefully nurtured with thoughts and actions that are prepared through constant and tireless training of abilities and skills.

As our friend and English teacher Tom Madge explained to us, Anglo-Saxon culture distinguishes between kind and polite—two seemingly similar concepts. Being kind goes beyond being polite and implies a level of listening and sympathy that Italians sometimes take for granted, but which is not so readily available in other cultures. Hence, for international readers of our book, we want to present an approach to relationships that entails a greater richness and presupposes a more genuine interest in others. We want to discard the maxim of easy come, easy go which is often applied to relationships to signal the ease with which they may start and then finish, as this necessarily implies that they will end too swiftly to generate real value.

Another fundamental difference between Italian and American companies is that enterprises in our country are predominantly owned by the families that founded them. In companies like Barilla, Ferrari, or Armani, the founding entrepreneur or family members still play an important part in running the company and in interacting and communicating directly with employees. This leads to more personal and cohesive internal relationships that in turn lead to shared values, and a widespread sense of belonging and entrepreneurial culture. By encouraging the adoption of Sales Ethics in public companies as well, our goal is to spread this conception of work based on shared responsibility and closer relationships.

The tools created to enhance the marketing experience can no longer be limited to giving customers a foretaste of the consumer experience by, for instance, convincing them to try a product to verify that it is superior to another. Nowadays, customers need to be more deeply involved in the value system that the offer expresses, and to achieve this you need to build strong relationships with them, based on trust and listening. You must be able to explain to potential customers not only what you are selling and how but you must also be able to illustrate why this exchange can lead to shared well-being. We should therefore adopt a new way of working that focuses not only on the material aspects of the sale but also on the more intangible factors; we must, in fact, organize our marketing techniques according to a new value-oriented approach, the natural evolution of that customer-oriented approach with which you are probably familiar.

This book will allow us to share these insights with you, as well as a range of knowledge acquired during our months of research in Boston. Italian culture and perceptions are an inextricable part of our approach, which aims to provide you both with useful tools and a new grasp of sales that can change your perspective of the market and your relationships with customers and colleagues.

¹ For example the stakeholder theory.

² Grant (2013).

³ The reference here is to traditional judo, an educational discipline that is very different from the sport that many of us will have seen during Olympic competitions. Traditional judo is not defined as a martial art but as an educational discipline whose aim is to acquire—using both your body and mind—principles that may be useful in life. In traditional judo, therefore, the combat is only a metaphor for learning.

⁴ We will consider the concept of reciprocity in greater detail in Chapter 2.

⁵ A whole generation of our salespeople, who are used to bargaining with the price as their main weapon for convincing customers to buy, now find themselves at a loss when required to use other arguments. That is why it is crucial to re-establish the principles and basic techniques of sales.

⁶ Di Lampedusa (1960).

⁷ Corrado Augias (2012) in his book Il Disagio della Libertà (The discomfort of freedom) explains very clearly the mechanism of double standards typical of Italian society, whereby judgments of social and civil behavior are disconnected from an individual’s moral behavior or the religion they profess.

⁸ Business ethics.