As a sales manager, you find yourself faced with the following situations. Identify the ethical or legal issue in each and discuss how you would handle the problem. (All of these were experienced by former students.)
a. The regional sales manager, your boss, forwards several ethnic jokes and lewd e-mails to you and your entire sales and support staff. Two of your salespeople complain to you.
b. A customer has called and asked you to send someone else to his office as he does not want to be called on by his currently assigned salesperson. When you ask why, it is because he doesn’t want someone of that sexual orientation calling on him.
c. You’ve asked a salesperson to create a training session for the entire sales team, a task that will require the salesperson to spend about $60 on materials that company policy expressly prohibits salespeople from charging on their expense report. She agrees and then submits an expense report with the $60 down as entertainment of a client, an acceptable expense. You notice it on the expense report; she hasn’t said anything about it but you know she was conducting a training session on the day in question and couldn’t have entertained the client that day.
d. The company has introduced a new product and requires all salespeople to memorize a demonstration script. To encourage salespeople to learn it, a contest was developed by your boss to award a new HDTV to the best presentation of the demonstration. Two salespeople come to you and say, “Let’s just let Beverly represent our team. We don’t have time for this. We need to be out selling.”