Sales & Selling Archives

customer service pays for financial advisors

Professional Service: There’s extra money in going the extra mile with your service

by Tony Vidler Often advisers forget how valuable the service bit is in their “professional service” business. Everyone has heard some story about how a business did well from going the extra mile for a customer…but rarely do you hear about a professional services business that has a standing process for going the extra […]

Pitching Your Marketing To The Target Client’s Buying Journey

by Tony Vidler Most of your target market today go on a “buying journey”. That means they largely control what and when they will buy our products and services…and it is rarely a snap decision made the same day. It is a process of increasing awareness, education and trust building. Every practice needs to be […]

The Words We Choose To Use Have Power

by Tony Vidler If we want to give ourselves the best chance possible of influencing clients and prospects to change course, which is what professional advice is all about really, then there is no doubt that the words we choose to use can make an enormous difference. Enough experts have done enough research over enough […]

The Essential Soft Skills Needed To Influence

by Tony Vidler To influence others requires softs skills rather than hard core sales skills and techniques. The financial adviser is supposed to be an influencer…our role is to influence others to make better decisions than they would otherwise have made. In order to become a more effective adviser the ongoing development of the […]

Want Prospects To Open Up? Learn from the Pro’s who make millions doing it for a living…

by Tony Vidler We need prospects to open up if we are to to do our jobs well and help them as much as possible. That takes a bit more thought and skill than merely flicking between open and closed questions. In today’s world with it’s much greater emphasis upon individual opinion and with our […]

How to Position To Get The Right Referrals

by Tony Vidler Getting referrals is difficult enough for many, but to get the right referrals is even tougher. It’s always nice to get any referral of course, but it doesn’t help if we do get a referral and it is someone that we just can’t deliver great value to. So we do want to […]

Details Matter: They Can Double The Return On Your Marketing

by Tony Vidler Details matter. That attitude was a significant contributor to Apple’s success. It was the centrepiece of Steve Jobs approach to design. It made him (and Apple) swags of money. While beautiful design is perhaps not really the forte of professional services firms, we do share something in common with Apple back when […]

These 4 things make it easy for prospects to say YES

by Tony Vidler We all want all of our prospects to say YES, but getting them to do so isn’t necessarily about having a clever line that they can’t say “no” to. Which do you think is more effective with todays educated, wary and sophisticated consumer? 1. The clever sales technique that has you […]

Prospecting tip: “Fish at your feet first”

by Tony Vidler A fisherman friend gave me a great prospecting tip: fish at your feet first. His point was a simple one: why spend a lot of effort casting, and risking throwing your bait, and then having to reel in loads of line until you’ve caught the ones right in front of you? Isn’t […]

Lost Sales Skills: How to “get down to business” without drama

by Tony Vidler The advice industry has lost a lot of sales skills, and it needs them. If we are to help consumers make better decisions and change behaviour then we have to be able to help convince them to change. The first tension point for today’s professionals is how to transition from the […]

Sales & Selling

SEARCH BY SUBJECT AREA

Get financial adviser coach blog updates via email.

Other useful resources

Fresh ideas delivered to your inbox