It's all too easy to fall into the trap to put down your competitors when trying to secure new business for yourself. Pressure is high for you to secure that next sale but it really is bad 'business karma' to make a sale based on shooting down the opposition.
Take Gordon Brown yesterday. He had to deliver what was probably the most critical speech of his political career and his audience had these super whizzy 'Rate My Speech' gadgets and as soon as he moved away from talking about new policies (new policies rated many 5/5's in his audience) to slating David Cameron, the rating slipped to 1/5...
It's just not cricket; it's just not British to be disrespectful of the competition! And this very much applies to the business world today.
At my Kings Langley Athena meeting yesterday, I had one of my long standing members approach me to say she had been 'dis loyal' at having attended another women in business group (I soon put her at ease as I really don't have a problem at all with members networking with other organizations!) and she told me how horrified she was that the organization in question was just totally selling themselves in putting Athena down!
Instead of harnessing why they did things differently and coming from a position of integrity in explaining their thought process behind their comments, they just wanted to run Athena down and in fact they did Athena many more favours than they did themselves! People see through this and begin to question the attack selling tactics they that use...
So my ever loyal Athena member told them very politely that their system wouldn't work for her and that she couldn't possibly network with them in view of their business and personal values. It's not rocket science! People buy people in business. They buy their authenticity and integrity - those are the foundations that good business is based on.
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