Ethical Responsibility of Sales Managers

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Introduction

This paper will discuss how a sales manager can address ethical issues in a socially responsible way. In order to accomplish this, current ethical issues related to sales management, both foreign and domestic, will be discussed regarding an organization based in the United States. Analogies and experiences will also be discussed as they relate to study findings. In addition, the relevance of these findings to the argument made regarding solving the problem of ethical issues will be revealed. Also, recommendations will be made with respect to how sales managers may address ethical issues.
Current ethical issues related to sales management, both foreign and domestic
Current ethical issues related to sales management include topics such as unethical behaviors of salespeople in both a domestic and foreign environment. These include those situations related to the pharmaceutical industry, as well as other related industries, including incurring expenses related to marketing/sales that are considered to be beyond that of modest expenditures. The concern is that these expenditures will be passed on to the end consumer in the form of higher priced products such as pharmaceuticals and medical products, for example. Other issues include using high pressure sales tactics to coerce customers into purchasing products in the short run that may not meet their needs and may result in the loss of sales in the long run. In addition, unethical behaviors also might include salespeople that are being coerced to provide free items to customers, and this is likely to be a particularly serious problem related to sales representatives that sell diagnostic tools.
Another issue concerning ethics is that of the fair evaluation of s...

... middle of paper ...

...ven without spending money on additional marketing and promotional programs.
In other words, companies that cannot spend heavily on promotions in the Turkey marketplace, can still compete to some degree by ensuring that their salespeople meet these criteria. Many sales representatives did, however, report that they used free medically related items as a bargaining tool to get physicians to prescribe branded pharmaceuticals over generics in a high percentage of cases (Tengilimoglu et al., 2004). These issues, again, pose a great deal of concern for a sales manager in the pharmaceutical industry that must manage a domestic sales force with all of the new guidelines in the U. S. as well as for mangers that must manage salespeople in the global marketplace with the threat of these new guidelines and the need to self-regulate to some degree simply due to the threat.

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