Advanced Selling Skills for Financial Services Professionals

The Principles of Selling in Today’s Market

• This financial sales training begins by exploring online and face-to-face
• Processes to customer journeys
• Why emotion is motion
• People still buy from people
• How salespeople add value
• Making the complex purchase an opportunity

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 stages
• It’s not your product, it’s how they feel about it
• Exploring 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 concludes this section of financial services sales training

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?
• Why 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
• This section of sales training for financial services ends with developing through feedback

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

Conclusion

Advanced selling skills for financial services professionals courses at Redcliffe are delivered by an expert who helps develop new skills and improve organisational sustainability for all levels of management. He specialises in helping organisations achieve their goals by developing their people skills and increasing sales. He designs training for companies to help managers and leaders understand how their decisions affect performance.

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 also includes leadership and communications skills programmes for financial services, manufacturers and healthcare professionals.

His financial sales training courses, delivered in 25 countries, cover Europe and the Middle East with clients in at least 150 organisations. This includes 8 insurance companies, 7 banks, 5 energy services companies, 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.

He holds an MBA from Cranfield University and is a Master's Practitioner in NLP. He 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.

Alongside this impressive list of honours, 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
• A Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association

This advanced financial services sales training is interactive and suitable for professionals in finance and other industries where sales are becoming more dependent upon relationships rather than online transactions.

Participants will:

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

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

This is also a ‘nice to know’ for:

• Service businesses looking to enhance relationships through cross-selling 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. Today, salespeople do not have to be talking brochures or order takers: they 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 sell 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 in how customers experience them, and the sale is the first stage of that experience.

Redcliffe Training's Advanced Selling Skills for Financial Services Professionals training course is for sales professionals experienced and 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 for a variety of situations.

Training is highly interactive. It includes practice sessions where you can try new skills in a situation where learning from mistakes has no downside.