Selling with Integrity
A Kinesiology Instructor asks:
The vision of a child’s left and right eyes is different, for example, one being 1.2 and the other, 0.3. In this case, can the vision of both eyes be gradually restored to the point of balance after doing Vision Gym from the course of Visioncircles for three to five years? Yesterday when I recommended Visioncircles to a friend, she asked me this question. Since I only consider Vision Gym as exercises of vision upkeep, I dare not tell her they have any therapeutic values.
Conrad Ho answers:
I would only reply that I did not know! Even if there were actual cases of success, I was not sure whether it was replicable here. How would the kid use it after learning Vision Gym? Would she use them correctly? How stressful was her environment? How destructive would it be for her vision? There were too many operational details that can affect the result and these are unknown or uncontrollable to the instructor, i.e. it was full of uncertainty! The most important thing was the statement you had mentioned: “I dare not tell her they have any therapeutic values.” We are working on learning, not therapy.
After hearing this truthful answer “I do not know”, the consumer who insists on getting a therapy will leave. It seems a pity when a potential client could not be retained. However, having inappropriate clients whose demands the instructor cannot satisfy would pose a negative image in the market, an even worse long-term impact upon the instructor. It would be better to say the direct answer and then provide another angle – an educational perspective. Let the parents understand that there is a feasible alternative: the kid will learn some better ways to use her eyes. Tell the parents that treatment offers more immediate results. However, if the kid continues to use her eyes in inappropriate ways, her eyes will still be working unnaturally and her eyesight will still eventually degenerate more quickly than it should be. Longer-term problems will continue to arise. Therefore, suggests to the consumer that he should pay equal attention to therapy and learning, treatment and prevention. Either side should not be ignored.
If the parent originally focuses only on finding a cure, while the instructor provides a better solution – finding treatment and prevention, the consumer would become more loyal. They realize that the instructor would not talk her into the deal by lies. The instructor authentically wants to offer a better solution so that parents and children could achieve better results.
To put it simply, the instructor would not force themselves into serving clients in ways they are not proficient at or familiar with. Instead, they would offer what they truly believe to be better solutions to their clients, serving in ways they would like to as well as are good at, thereby, finding the “right” clients who would be satisfied with their services.
This is the philosophy of “selling with integrity”. The first major feature is honesty, which means being truthful to the facts, acknowledging them and speaking them out. The second major feature is integrity, which refers to holding onto one’s beliefs, choosing to base the action on personal values, not personal benefits.
Written by Conrad Ho on 5 September 2020, Hongkong
