Is Your Sales Force Showing Up Wearing Nothing but a Smile?

20 Oct Is Your Sales Force Showing Up Wearing Nothing but a Smile?

Is that how it feels when you visit a client with nothing but average products to sell? Financial Advisors have a business to run, clients’ dreams to fill and a staff to manage. As an asset manager is YOUR product different than that of the wholesaler that brought your clients doughnuts that very morning?

Perhaps, but unless your offerings are winning awards, unique in their space, and having superior performance, you really need something to make YOU stand out. The financial services business is a relationship business. Those of us that “get it” and are truly sincere in building those relationships, will succeed. Those that don’t, will have unnecessary stress and continue to struggle to push products.

One key to strengthening these relationships is to help advisors educate their clients, drawing them in, depending on you as a resource to support their business. What “value-add” are you bringing to the table? Your firm may or may not have the capacity to provide their sales force with collateral such as speakers, white papers, presentations, etc.

Then again, they might or they may partner with outside professional development firms. Either way, be prepared to have those discussions with your teams on how to be more than the person that brings the doughnuts. Bring the doughnuts AND an introduction to a person in the community to educate them on local resources, or a coach to help them be more efficient and productive, or teach them how to use social media.

Take a moment to think about the value that your sales force can bring to genuinely help them in some way. If you have had the good fortune of an initial meeting, listening to what they need, versus what you can sell them is a great first step to building that bond and trust that so many advisors are look for.

Missy Escribano and her team educate business owners, financial advisors, asset managers, and their staff by providing professional development opportunities to achieve personal and professional success. A keynote speaker, certified aging in place specialist, and CEO of Ripple Effect Strategies, Missy draws on over 20 years of experience in the field of education, most of that time in the financial services industry.

Click here for her recent broadcast for Foreside on Value Add Strategies.