25 Gems from a financial planning sales guru

1. Sales and marketing is all about moving people through a buying cycle
2. People cannot buy what they do not know
3. PR – It’s all about creating an experience
4. Make ideas scalable
5. Stop networking; start tunnelling:
6. Don’t do all the talking
7. Learn more about your prospective clients than they know about you
8. Invite your clients to sample your services – don’t try to sell them
9. ‘How you feel about me is not a popularity contest – it’s what they think about my work’
10. Narrow the final choices available to your client
11. Decide how you want to be known
12. Utilise a ‘teaser technique’, eg: “Here’s what happens next”
13. Deliver as promised
14. Emotion steers decisions
15. Search for yourself online in the way your clients would search for you – using their words, not yours
16. What is your staff saying about you?
17. Staff and teamwork lesson taken from famed movie director, Martin Scorsese: “The first thing I do is make sure everyone on set is making the same movie”
18. Asking for the sale: find your ‘ask’ script
19. Channel the Disneyland attitude of ‘Showtime’ – keep your staff/business conflicts behind the curtain”
20. Do you have people in your business that are folding towels that don’t need to be folded? The lesson here is productivity – does your business embrace unnecessary daily processes?
21. Knowing what to do and then doing it are two very different things
22. It only takes one nugget of information to change your income
23. Deliver consistency of service, eg McDonald’s, Disney
24. Extras count – make your clients feel special, eg a ‘Club Member 
25. Every time your client visits you or a member of your team they are reaching a fork in the road.  One bad bowl of soup can ruin a patron’s opinion of a restaurant, just as ‘one bad bowl of soup’ provided by you or your practice staff can have a detrimental, long-term impact on your clients’ opinion of the services you provide.   

Posted on May 21, 2014