sales tools Archives - Tony Vidler

The 5 Essential Soft Skills For Professional Advisers

by Tony Vidler Technical knowledge will only take you so far, and sometimes (like when the world is in lockdown and there are no rational markets) they won’t tyake you anywhere at all. There are times when what you know just doesn’t matter. Knowing how to deal with people is all that matters sometimes. They […]

The Right Way To Present An Advice Recommendation

by Tony Vidler When you are presenting quotes or recommending product solutions, are you still giving the prospect a few choices, like 3 perhaps? Don’t do it. Consumers are onto it, so as a “sales technique” it loses impact…and it was never fabulous technique to begin with. More importantly, it undermines your professional […]

Compliant Advice: Paper Beats Scissors Every Time

by Tony Vidler When it comes to compliant advice Advisers really need to grasp that they are playing a game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” with every client engagement now. There almost certainly will be an instance where a client throws the Rock…. We try to beat it with Paper. Complaints authority or regulator takes to […]

Should you give a sly kickback to referrers?

by Tony Vidler One of the ethical challenges for professionals is how to appropriately recognise the value of a great referrer or Centre-Of-Influence. A little kickback on the sly? Hardly professional. Don’t talk about it and pretend there is no commercial significance? Not great for maintaining trust long term. It doesn’t have to become […]

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. Our service will still be there tomorrow, right? And usually the need to be addressed is a future need, and maybe well into the future….so there is […]

It’s Prime Networking Time!

by Tony Vidler There are two types of advisers at this time of year: 1. those who begin finding it tough to close out the game 2. those who are already started on a new game. Typically in December & January most clients are trying to close out their own business games….get THEIR jobs […]

Time Management Problem? Try Planning Your "Perfect Week" To Begin With…

by Tony Vidler Why is time management such an issue for professionals when they are good at planning? We can take it as a given that financial advisers and financial planners are good at planning generally. And they are very good at operational planning, which is that stuff that often gets referred to as […]

Question: What’s the worst that could happen if you asked this?

by Tony Vidler Great questions are integral to client engagement, but what is a really GREAT question? One of the keys to success for any professional is having strong sales skills, or to put it another way, the ability to influence clients to shift their thinking. Is that “selling” though, or is that just […]

Want Prospects To Open Up? Take a tip from the professional interviewers

by Tony Vidler Once upon a time everyone was taught the difference between open and closed questions as the key to engaging prospects…and it worked for a fair while. In today’s world with it’s much greater emphasis upon individual opinion and with our professional focus having shifted entirely onto what the client cares about rather […]

Using Gamification To Engage With Prospects

by Tony Vidler Behavioural finance meets gaming meets technology and that means “marketing opportunity”. One of the newer marketing concepts arising from these trends converging is “gamification”, and while it is being used in all sorts of industries to engage consumers with new products and services it doesn’t appear to have really attained great traction […]

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