Sales & Selling Archives

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 […]

If you still need more clients then you probably need different skills

by Tony Vidler Financial advisers who need more clients need to be better marketers than salespeople in todays environment. For most that means they probably need new, or more, skills. Not more technical skills; more commercial skills. While financial advisers have been figuring out how to get ever-more-compliant and deliver yet-more-paper over the […]

how many leads do you need for your marketing

Do you know what you actually need from your marketing?

by Tony Vidler It might seem like a dumb question: but “How many leads do you need?” One of the most common questions I get asked is “what sort of marketing should I be doing?”…and my response is “well, how many leads do you need?” Here’s the point: you can’t begin to work out […]

How do you create an “Act Now” mindset with clients?

by Tony Vidler One of the ongoing challenge in marketing professional services is simply getting people to “act now”. We have to overcome their lack of urgency. Because our service will still be there tomorrow, right? And usually the need to be addressed by us is a future need, and maybe well into the future….so […]

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