Advanced Selling Skills for Financial Services Professionals

The Principles of Selling in Today’s Market

• Online and face-to-face
• Processes to customer journeys
• Emotion is motion
• People still buy from people
• How salespeople add value
• Making the complex purchase an opportunity

Financial Services Sales Training Exercise: Click to buy – or help to buy? 

The Buyer’s Core Needs & Wants

• What are you really selling?
• The four basic financial needs
• Linking products/services to customers' life stage
• It’s not your product, it’s how they feel about it
• The process as a competitive edge

Exercise: Defining needs and wants – from your product pick 

Defining the Process/Your Part in the Customer Journey

• Your last big buy
• Identifying the Critical Success Factor Analysis
• Spotting improvement opportunities
• From rapport to completion – step by step
• Timelines: how long asking/how long talking solutions?
• Designing the paths to the sale, the upsell and the cross-sell

Exercise: What did you buy – and how did you buy it? In-depth analysis in pairs 

Essential Skills to Advanced Skills

• Initial impressions
• Questioning to build understanding and trust
• Advanced active listening
• Signal spotting
• Understanding their positions
• Seeking solutions using benefits
• Identifying the obstacles
• Moving to the best solution

Exercise: Selling the room – uncovering buyer’s needs 

From Transactional to Relationship

• The ABC of retail
• WIIFT(What's In It For Them)/WIIFM (What's in it for me)?
• Touchpoints
• Talking benefits
• Building dialogue through effective questions
• Finding in-depth customer desires
• Using questions to provoke thought
• The vision thing
• How trust is developed

Example: The complex sale – identifying the first point of sale 

Question & Objections: Handling and Prevention

• What will they ask?
• It’s not the price, it’s the value
• Question or objection?
• Basic objection tools
• Advanced objection handling
• The root causes of objections
• If not now, then when?

Exercise: Question & Objection roulette – call black or red? 

Completing the Business & Building for the Future

• Completing the process
• From commitment to action
• Identifying the next steps
• One-stop or repeat the process?
• Building your skills
• Developing through feedback

Exercise: The complex sale – why should they buy from you? Practice including individual feedback 

Financial Services Sales Training Conclusion

At Redcliffe, financial sales training courses are delivered by a trainer who works with all levels of management helping them develop new skills to improve organisational sustainability.

He specialises in helping organisations achieve their goals, by developing their people & increasing sales. Recent projects include Finance for Sales with Tata Steel, Finance and Commercial Negotiation Skills for ESPO, and a “mini MBA” programme for Oman Broadband. This includes leadership and communications skills programmes for financial services, manufacturers and healthcare professionals.

He specifically designs training for companies to help managers & leaders understand how their decisions affect overall performance. This training, which includes financial sales training courses, has been delivered in 25 countries across Europe and the Middle East, with clients in at least 150 organisations, including 8 insurance companies, 7 banks, 5 energy services companies, plus hotels, automotive companies, retailers, agriculture, charities and public sector organisations. His background in financial services enables him to work with a wide range of institutions to develop their business and communications skills. He can combine this with coaching and leadership skills while remembering that professionals in many organisations have to develop their communication skills to match their responsibilities.

His qualifications include an MBA from Cranfield University, and he is a Master's Practitioner in NLP. He also holds the Financial Planning Certificate, is Level A qualified in Psychometric Testing through the British Psychological Society, and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development. In addition, he is a Member of the Institute of Training and Occupational Learning, The Chartered Institute of Bankers, an Associate Member of the European Mentoring & Coaching Council, and a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association.

Key Skills & Achievements

• Improving Impact in Communication, & Communication for Performance, FBN Bank London
• Persuasion, Influence & Negotiation in Financial Services – open training in London
• Negotiation Skills for Client Relationship Building in Mergers and acquisitions - London & Miami, plus Deloitte London
• Change and Resilience Training – Invesco
• Financial Oversight training – James Hambro LLP London
• Universal Banking Skills - Major Strategy, Change, Innovation & Sales Skills development 10-day programme for Middle Eastern bank, involving main board members and senior management
• Strategy, Risk, Organisation Culture and Key Account Management Skills for Divisional Directors and Managers– Kier Group
• Communication Skills for Managers – Charles Stanley
• Financial Analysis & Development workshops - American Express Bahrain
• Advanced Financial Statement Analysis – Bank of Palestine, Ramallah
• Finance, Budgets & Business Case webinars NFU Mutual
• Influence & Persuasion Skills – Co-Operative Bank
• Building Impactful Relationships – Handelsbanken UK
• Compliance Training, including Retail Distribution Review, Regulator visit, professionalism & ethics, and Conflicts of Interest – for Insurance brokers, banks, & investment advisors – in London & across the UK
• Boardroom communication skills –UIA Insurance UK
• Investment Strategy & Pension Fund Accounting – Nigerian National Pensions Regulator, Lagos
• Management & Leadership Skills, plus Advanced presentation Skills - Senior Partners, London Stockbroking firm
• Business Planning & Financial Management Skills training – Self-employed insurance agents running their own agencies
• Mentoring Skills for Deutsche Bank

Mentoring and coaching business professionals in skills and personal development

• Coaching for business development – Finance Director of the private retail chain, Insurance Broker, Pensions specialist and Senior Solicitor
• Mentor for Mowgli – the cross-cultural mentoring charity

Development and delivery of training solutions for managers working with high-net-worth clients in retail financial services

• Delivered and developed a substantial consultative sales programme for new Account Managers and Account Executives
• Delivered sales management training to Centre Managers and Sales Managers enabling them to increase sales and develop their staff through coaching
• Trainer training in sales and instructional techniques for new team members, enabling them to quickly deliver effective training courses

Responsible for staff providing sales and service to personal customers in branch banking

• Developed sales in areas of investment business, leading to multi-million-pound introductions to bank investment managers
• Running courses in management, financial sales training, negotiation & lending skills
• Controlling lending and recovery negotiations through a team responsible for a multi-million-pound lending book
• Reducing the level of bad debts through effective management of the lending team and their processes
• Developed and maintained a multi-million-pound business from a portfolio of high-net-worth clients

Our highly interactive advanced financial services sales training is suitable for professionals working in both finance and other industries where sales are becoming more dependent upon relationships rather than online transactions. Participants will:

• Learn the importance of selling skills
• Improve selling skills appropriate to their market
• Describe the buying process
• Understand buying motivations
• Develop relationships, not just sales
• Improve skills focused on lifetime values
• Make sales a conversation, not a pitch
• Considering the customers’ needs and wants
• Using questions to uncover needs and wants
• Improve handling of customer questions
• Make more sales to their chosen segment

• The focus is on integrating selling with your marketing strategy.
• A tailored approach to your business and its targeted market segments.
• Ensuring basic techniques are combined with more advanced skills to enable you to apply new skills immediately.

Our advanced financial services sales training is a ‘must know’ for:

• Financial services professional in client-facing roles
• Accountants, Auditors, Legal representatives and insurance professionals who are direct client contact
• Brokers, Account Managers and client Managers who handle building client relationships
• Wealth Managers in relationship-building roles
• Financial services professionals who handle client relationships in face-to-face meetings and also online meetings

Financial sales training courses are also a ‘nice to know’ for:

• Service businesses looking to enhance relationships through cross and up-selling
• Financial services client relationships teams

No, it’s not all done on Amazon – and it never will be. The role of sales is changing and today salespeople do not have to be talking brochures or order takers; but add value to the process, the customer and the sale. Working with the latest thinking in this area you will see how important your skills are, and how important it is to develop them.

This can be especially important when you are selling services or intangible products, where the “shiny box” does not exist. Realising that customers have increased choice means the competition is not just in products or services, but how customers experience them, and the sale is the first stage of that experience.

Our advanced financial sales training is aimed at people involved in sales who are experienced, and probably working in high-value sales, the sale of services/intangibles, or business-to-business when the sale may be part of a consultative process. Realising there are no limits to how far skills can be improved, you will gain a wealth of knowledge and skills which can be applied to a variety of situations. The training will be highly interactive and include practice sessions where you can implement new skills in a situation where learning from mistakes has no downside.