sales skills Archives

Professional Triage: Targeting The Immediate Need

by Tony Vidler A huge mistake many advisers make is trying to deliver comprehensive advice to a client concerned only with an immediate need. We need to recognize when triage is required, as opposed to when ongoing nursing is needed. The immediate need is the more often the trigger for an advice client to […]

How To Get Buy-In From Clients To Full Advice

by Tony Vidler Clients often want advisers to deal with just one element of financial planning…their current “burning issue” that triggered the need for advice to begin with. Getting them to engage in full advice can be tough and they need to understand what you CAN do for them, and where your knowledge and skills […]

How do you know your financial advice is suitable?

by Tony Vidler Knowing that your financial advice is suitable for a client is something that every professional adviser is willing to attest to, but proving it when challenged can be incredibly dificult. Advisers are increasingly being challenged and therefore seeking assurance that their practices are robust and will withstand such scrutiny. Whether that scrutiny […]

Help Referrers Really Understand Who You Want To Meet

by Tony Vidler One of the reasons referrers don’t give us quite the right quality referral most of the time is that we are often very poor at describing the person we work best with when we are having a referral discussion to begin with. It’s our fault; not theirs for the wrong sort […]

Paying COI’s: Perhaps prepare for the harvest before you prepare for the feast

by Tony Vidler Is it appropriate to be paying COI’s a share of your success from their influences? Or, to put it bluntly, nother way, should you share remuneration or the spoils of the sale with referrers? Personally, I think not. However, it is actually just a little more complicated than that […]

Compliance: Here are the only 3 things that matter

by Tony Vidler Whenever the topic of the “advice process”, or compliance, comes up most advisers imagine themselves as the plane in this picture: Compiance is largely considered a burden – albeit a necessary one. As is usually the way of these things a substantial body of documentation has blossomed over the years which […]

Uncomfortable with Referrals? No problem…there is another way…

by Tony Vidler Being a firm believer that Word-Of-Mouth marketing is THE most effective form there is, I do bang on about being referable and engaging with the target market…but… REALITY CHECK: Some people just never feel comfortable giving referrals. In fact there IS a good chance that you will jeopardise your existing […]

Clients need to be reasonable and meet expectations too

by Tony Vidler It is not unreasonable to have reasonable expectations, is it? Whenever we enter into an agreement with somebody else to work together on anything it is fair to say that we both have expectations about how the arrangement is going to work. That applies whether the arrangement is moving into a […]

Why Good Content Matters (and what it looks like)

by Tony Vidler Pretty much every time I get into a discussion with professionals about building up their business they begin by thinking that the answer is “get more prospects“. There is no doubt that getting more prospective customers helps build a business of course, but what builds a business faster and less stressfully […]

Why don’t you roll the dice and ask for referrals anyway?

by Tony Vidler On some things you just have to roll the dice and take your chances in life. Asking someone for a date….getting on a plane…or asking for referrals. It doesn’t always work out of course, but as a great hockey player once said: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” […]

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