Angels and devils



On Monday we shared with you the way the sales team that was the subject of our last So You ThinQ Can Sell contest overcame it’s challenge. I then had a call from someone I know asking me if I thought the solution used by the team was ethical?

Interesting question, I had not thought of it in that light, my first reaction was yes why not?  She then told me of how she was once recruited away from a job, but the intent and results were very different than for the team we discussed.

She was working for one of two or three major players in the sector, and was doing quiet well. While we don’t often think about it, our success is someone else’s failure, someone else’s declining revenues and margins. As her success mounted so did the frustration level of one specific competitor.

Turns out the competitor had their own little meeting and decided to also engage a recruiter. Not unusual, the team in the contest did it, and you can also see the comment from a recruiter on the winner post.

But here is where things went dark; it seemed the intent of the competitor was not to hire talent, but to stifle it. Once they brought her on board they limited her ability to work with clients, especially the ones she had relationships with.  It wasn’t long before it became clear that their intent was to keep her as a trophy in a case.  This move went far beyond undermining a competitor, which I think is ethical, talent is often hired away.  But curtailing the ability of the individual rep to practice their profession and earn their rewards seems not only punitive, shallow and very unethical.

The question I would ask you the readers, is do you think what our team did, that is have a hand in getting the DSS a new job, a job very he was productive and able to grow, an ethical or unethical approach.  I’ll go first; I think it was ethical because it did not negatively impact the individual, as it did in the other case above, which I think is clearly unethical.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto