The truth might set you free..remember MIGHT!

I thought I would start this article a little differently than most. You see, in a lot of cases, when people are doing things for charity or asking readers for a little bit of extra ‘help’, it’s shoved in a little paragraph in italics at the end of the article.

In essence that seems fair enough, but if I don’t manage to hold your interests until the end of this page then two things are clear – first, that I’ve obviously run out of interesting things to say, and second, that my chances of getting anything from you are somewhere between slim and none.

Well, none of that nonsense for this bald headed sales person. At the end of April, I shall once again be running in The London Marathon. Now I hate running. I don’t do it in my spare time, I don’t find it “really clears my head” and given the choice, I’d rather sit down and listen to an entire Dido album – and that is pretty damn bland.

None the less, I am running to raise money for Dreams Come True – a great charity which help realise the dreams of terminally and seriously ill children. You can sponsor me – no, you SHOULD – no, you WILL sponsor me (Jedi mind trick – see what I did there) at www.justgiving.com/pauljrose2011 and thanks in advance for your generosity.

And so to the topic of this week's blog. In the last few weeks, our industry has been plagued by scams. People have purchased merchandise on dodgy credit cards, fake addresses, and all that sort of nonsense.

The scams themselves actually got me thinking – not so much about the criminal nature of certain people, but more about the nature of telling lies. You see, when you look a little further, so many people are telling little lies to us, every single day. They’re not evil (well, most of them anyway), it’s just that a polite excuse seems to be the accepted norm.

Think about all of those lies that we sales people have to hear every day. “He’s in a meeting at the moment”, “We’ve got your catalogue and we’ll come back to you”, “Send me your information and we’ll keep it on file”. AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGG!!! Why do we just assume that a polite lie is so much less offensive than a little bit of brutal honesty?

In a meeting? Seriously, how many ‘meetings’ can any one person realistically take in one working day and yet still be productive? I have one meeting per week and it’s held at a time of day when the phones are not likely to be ringing. Fact is, we know they’re not in a meeting, but we just blindly say thanks and leave a message any way – what a complete waste of time.

“Send me your information” – WHY? We all know that the ‘file’ your going to keep it in is currently sat under your desk housing three empty plastic cups and yesterday’s sandwich wrapper. Don’t these people realise that it actually costs us money to send out catalogues? That’s the thing – they do, and yet because they consider us a nuisance, they lose no sleep putting us to extra, pointless busy work.

My manner has often been described as ‘acerbic’, the less well read just simply opt for ‘rude’. I don’t really have too much of a problem with that. Sure, no one likes to be thought of as rude, but I just prefer complete honesty with people because it saves us all so much time.

I don’t want brokers to send me their information in the post only to follow up with countless phone calls – I am not interested and I tell them from the outset. They call and tell me that they don’t want to sell me anything, they just want to send me some information. Fine, but I’m not going to read it, so why don’t we just leave it there.

If you’re not interested in taking a sales call, isn’t it better to let the person know that? How about replacing “He’s in a meeting” with “He has no need for your services”? Sure, the caller might get their nose put out of joint, but any professional sales person will dust themselves off and make the next call.

Deep down, you’ve done them a favour – they won’t be wasting valuable call time on someone who is not buying. They’ll never really thank you for being so short with them, but in time they won’t remember you anyway, so who cares?

We are a society obsessed with saving time, and yet we allow some misguided sense of politeness to waste the very thing we’re trying to save. So be direct – I’m not saying we need to start being rude to each other, dropping our manners and generally becoming nasty people – I’m suggesting that the next time you consider telling a small fib just to make things a little easier, that you consider just how much more powerful the truth would be.