Why Do They Teach Ethical Sales at University in Scandinavia?

Reading time: 7 min

by Passodue

In 2012 we were going through a profound professional crisis. Alice had just left the company she had helped to found, and Alberto had resigned from his last job. Disappointed by the dynamics we had experienced, we decided to spend some time in Boston, the city where a discipline that at the time still felt almost exotic to us had first emerged: Business Ethics.

We returned from that experience with a research project and the idea of writing the book that would later become “Sales Ethics”. When, more than two years later, we personally brought it to Michael Hoffman — founder of the Global Center for Business Ethics (HCBE) — the emotion was overwhelming: he personally accompanied us to place it on the shelf dedicated to books on ethics in sales, where specific contributions on this topic were still extremely rare.

Being among the first is exciting, but also difficult. Who would really be interested in such a little explored subject?

Over time, the book established itself, helping us build a new professional adventure between the two sides of the Atlantic. More recently, one of the most significant recognitions came from the Copenhagen Business School where, for several years now, a course dedicated to ethics in sales has been active and also uses our book as one of its reference texts.

Today we interview Professor Mogens Bjerre and Karsten Pirchert, creators of the program, to better understand how it was born, what results it is producing, and what it teaches future generations of managers and professionals.

Questions

Can you tell us how the idea of creating a course dedicated to ethics in sales was born?

There were two reasons – one is that we find the topic highly relevant in a management and leadership context – and thus also in a CBS context.

Secondly, we’re strong believers in value-based sales, sales management and leadership in general, but since we cannot access other people’s (i.e. salespeople’s) mind- and value set, we can only access their behavior. As there is a link between values and behavior, our ethical compass can be expressed in concrete behavior and expectations for these.

Finally, we base our approach on the perspective that if you want to “grow the numbers, you must grow the people”. If the growth must be sustainable, it must have an ethical foundation.

What kind of reactions have you observed among students? Which aspects of the course change the way they see commercial work?

First, we almost all have an ethical compass which is working perfectly fine. I.e. any deviations from ethical behavior stems from conscious choices. This came as a surprise for most of our students.

Secondly, during the course our students reflected on practices in their own organizations, and not all liked what they saw. Disliking these findings to such an extent, approximately one out of ten students decided to quit their jobs after having completed the course.

What results have you achieved and which benefits have participants highlighted?

That growth of the business is based on conscious choices related to the organization’s product and customer platform – i.e. what to be sold to whom? This was also reflected in discussions about when not to sell or when to leave the customer in the hands of more capable competitors.

What cultural differences do you observe between the Scandinavian and Mediterranean approaches to sales, sales leadership, and customer relationships? And what could these two models learn from each other?

None of us have deep knowledge about the Mediterranean approach, but we can see that the Scandinavian approach is developing in the direction of more outside-in perspective, more co-creation and more long-lasting commercial partnerships. We see more companies building their governance structure into their commercial terms and contracts, so that the customers commit to having C-level meetings, co-creation workshops and even collaboration about how to spend R&D funds.

We see that the buying centers are increasing in the number of stakeholders, which of course drive a similar development of the selling side, that calls for more team selling and approaches like “Trusted advisor”.

In the book “Sales Governance”, Professor Bjerre argues that the role of sales should become increasingly central and strategic within organizations. Yet many universities still dedicate little space to this discipline, and many students continue to consider it less attractive than other fields such as marketing. Why do you think this is the case?

We think it’s a legacy discussion – partly, and a discussion related to the image of sales – and sellers. Furthermore, sales educations are not considered a traditional university discipline – although “the business of business is business” – Milton Friedman. This implies that without topline, there is no company. 

However, sales have – for many years – been considered almost a type of art, as opposed to our perspective, that sales is a discipline that can be taught and eventually mastered as any other craftmanship.

Alongside your academic activities, you are also involved in consulting. How has companies’ interest in Sales Ethics changed over the years? And which forms of resistance do you encounter most often?

Compliance, ESG, and increased demands for reporting and transparency have led the way for the discussions and principles of ethical behavior in the organizations we work with.

We also think that our approach to sales and the way we define sales have increased the relevance and importance of ethical thinking and practice. We define sales as “helping customers making the right decisions for the customer, in the specific context” …

Many critics of Ethical Sales argue that it produces results only in the long term, while the corporate world seems more focused than ever on the short term. What is your point of view?

A recent post from the AMA organization stated that customers have less faith in products, but increased faith in the corporate brand, reputation and behavior. 

We therefore find that relationships are the building blocks of future revenue, and that these relationships must rest on a sustainable platform.

We gave the course a subtitle: “You can fool somebody for some time, but you cannot fool everybody all the time” to underline that if you are doing business with in a short perspective, you can be unethical, but is you are in business for the long run, you must be ethical.

How will the role of saleswomen and salesmen change with the rise of AI? And which personal skills will become more important?

Efficiency, automation, and the future of sales is pointing in direction of a challenging situation where the most important task will be to investigate where the customer is in the sales process and what convictions the customer has.

AI is driving a development across society where the smart people is getting smarter and the not so smart people will stay at their current level.

Since that distant 2012, many things have changed in the world, in our lives, and in the work we do. Thanks also to our collaboration with the Copenhagen Business School, we discovered the Scandinavian approach to business and professional life, capable of combining productivity and well-being in a way that many other European countries still seem to struggle to achieve.

At first, it also seemed almost incompatible with the competitive culture we were used to. Over time, however, we understood that this is precisely where one of the most important challenges for Europe’s future lies: proving that it is possible to build profitable companies without sacrificing people, relationships, and quality of life.

In an era that seems to reward aggressiveness, hyper-competition, and leadership models based on fear, speaking about Sales Ethics does not mean being naïve. It means deciding what idea of economy, work, and society we want to leave to future generations.

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