To many business people, the belief is that honesty pays, but not enough. To survive in the cut throat world of business and sales, many feel that they need to lie or bend the truth to get anywhere in business.

But is that the case? Does being deceitful, dishonest and untruthful in sales and business really the answer to gaining success? In this article I am not just referring to small amounts of dishonesty or bending the truth, I am talking about all types and degrees of dishonesty no matter how big or small they are.

There is no such thing as a white lie. A lie is a lie.

Any type of dishonesty is created by greed for dishonest gain. Greed leads many business owners and sales people to lie. But you may justify by reasoning that “its business” and “business is business”. Many sales people even put the responsibility back on to the customer, saying that its the customers end decision and “let the buyer beware”.

But, can a theif justify his robbery by saying “let the victims beware”? Of course not! Same with in sales. If a salesperson is dishonest and makes a sale, they are just as bad as that theif. Both the thief and the salesperson have been dishonest.

The theif is dishonest by taking someones possessions without their permission and not telling them. The salesperson is dishonest because they sold the customer a product and not told them the truth about the product. The salesperson sold the product knowing all too well that if the customer knew the truth, they would not have bought the product in the first place.

Yes, honesty in business and sales may require greater time and hard work, but the satisfaction and joy from honesty and truthfullness far outweigh that from dishonesty!

But is this view realistic? Can salespeople who need to meet weekly targets follow it? Well yes they can! To illustrate, lets use an example of an employment placement coach whose job it is to place all types of people into employment, even those who are not the most preferred people to employ.

When you are advocating a candidate for a job, you may find it pays to be honest and upfront with the employer in the beginning. If you hide the negative points about a job seeker and just focus on whats good about them, the employer will be trying to evaluate them and the reasons as to why they are unemployed.

Not only that, but if they actually get the job and their negative side is seen by the employer, it will not only affect the security of their employment but also affect the employers view of you and any other candidate you recommend to the employer in the future.

Do you run a sales team? Have you ever noticed that sales people are brilliant at coming up with excuses for why their promised sales didn’t eventuate. I use a simple strategy on my sales team that stopped the excuses and doubled the sales.

A couple of years ago I read a very interesting piece of research. The business school of a major university was conducting an international study into sales management. One of the amazing things they discovered was that sales people who reported to a sales manager, on average produced less than sales people who did not have a sales manager.

The reason for this was that the sales managers tended to be critical of the shortcomings of their team members and this made the sales people nervous. They became so preoccupied with having to face the music at the sales meeting that their focus was on failure rather than success. If your focus is on failure then failure is what you will get.

This is all very interesting but there is still the practical matter that most sales people are performing well below their potential. So how does a sales manager get his or her team performing without creating the problem of failure focus?

When I first started managing a sales team I discovered that sales people had an incredible talent for coming up with excuses. They seemed to be able to justify any lost sales by giving you a plausible reason why it was not possible to get the sale. While I admired their creativity I also realized that in most cases the sale was getable. The problem I had was how to get the sales person away from the excuse habit and onto the success habit.

I also remembered when I first entered the sales world, and how my sales manager had harassed myself and the other sales people at each sales meeting. I used to dread going to those meetings.

I ended up creating a solution that got rid of excuse behavior, avoided the harassing situation and led to a doubling of my sales team’s output. I made a rule that the only excuse that a salesperson was allowed to offer was an excuse that was so good that if they wrote it on a piece of paper and took it to the manager of the local supermarket that the manager would be happy to give them a week’s groceries in exchange for the excuse.

Here’s how I used the “grocery excuse” strategy. I first explained the rule to each of my sales people. Then if during a sales meeting a sales person started to offer any form of excuse I would interrupt and say “excuse me Bob, can I buy a week’s groceries with this excuse that you’re starting on?” They would say no, and then I would say “then let’s focus on a real way that we can get this sale across the line.”

This crazy “grocery rule” worked like a charm. Within a few meetings it totally eliminated excuse behavior and turned the whole focus of the meetings into positive, success oriented thinking. The result was that the teams sales figures improved dramatically and my sales team didn’t fear the meeting.

If you are having problems with excuse focused sales staff then why not give my crazy motto a try.