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Building a Rock Star Sales Team!

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A number of businesses that I’ve been dealing with have identified clearly the value of having really excellent people in their sales team. They’ve seen quite significant differences in the performance of their most successful people as opposed to their weaker people. They’ve also noticed that these performances tend to get repeated, pretty much year after year. So what can you do to build a rock star sales team that will help you exceed your sales goals, year after year?

Know your team – scientifically!

Yes, I know it sounds very obvious but how well do you really know your sales team and do you judge them fairly? Or are your “best” sales people seen as such by reputation only, or as a result of long held beliefs that you’ve had in relation to their talent? Yes, reputations and your own gut feeling count for a lot, but on their own they are not enough.

If you are going to trust your brand to your sales team, you’ve got to make sure that they have the competencies and attributes to carry this out, every bit as well as you would do it yourself. So spend time working out what are these attributes (drive, professionalism, integrity, resilience etc.) and competencies (relationship building skills, advice approach, technical knowledge, writing / presentation skills etc.) that you value.

Once you have these identified, score all your sales team against these factors. In addition, you cannot ignore both their previous results and also the quality of their clientbase / territory – these should be brought into your analysis too.

Finally and most importantly, seek out the views of others. Get colleagues who also know the team well to score them too. Also, if possible, talk to some of your key customers. It’s quite probable that both of these other insights will throw up some surprises for you. Maybe they’ll uncover a “blind spot” you’ve had, which has resulted in you consistently under-rating / over-rating some individuals and maybe, just maybe it’s you who has to change!

Once you’ve done this exercise, you can be pretty confident that you’ve a solid view of your team and can recognise its strong and weak points.

Increase the number of winners

Winners need to be rewarded and with more than just money. Yes, money is very important but is usually not enough on it’s own. Winners like recognition; they like to be celebrated, both inside and outside your company. They also like to be listened to – properly. They’re successful for a reason so their views and insights should be heeded and where appropriate, acted upon. Winners also like to see where their success is going to take them over the longer term. So think about their career paths and future opportunities – before they take this decision out of your hands….

There will be quite a large group of people “in the middle” who are doing a competent job but probably not consistently shooting the lights out. These are the people that you need to challenge to move into the top tier. A mixture of setting appropriate goals for them, creating personal development plans that will increase their skills and driving the team harder in some cases will achieve this! Also let your stars demonstrate to these people how they are getting their great results. Your stars may help you raise the performance of some of these middle tier players.

Unfortunately you’ve got to be equally assertive in dealing with the serial under-performers who are also lacking in the attributes and competencies that you require. Remember when it comes to sales, “bad breath is worse than no breath” as these people run the risk of irreparably damaging relationships with some of your clients. So find new roles for these people or move them on. Get them out of your sales team. You’ll also gain more respect from the wider sales team for your willingness to act in relation to underperformance.

What happens when a rock star leaves the band?

That dreaded moment. Your best sales person comes to you saying, “Can I just have a minute” and you know what’s coming… So what do you do?

Do you try and stop them leaving? Yes unless the price is too high, you’re going to be a hostage to them in the future, their head is already gone out the door or by clinging on to them, you will completely unsettle the rest of the team to try a similar move!

You then need to consider how replaceable they actually are – internally or externally. If you have a strong “bench” of support people waiting for a sales opportunity, then maybe you just wish your star performer well. Also if you have a clear external recruitment plan for this very scenario ready to go, well then maybe it’s time to implement this now.

And of course, don’t forget your clients in all of this. Make sure you reassure them completely that your organisation will continue to meet and exceed their needs going forwards, even without this important sales person.

So, get really clear on the strengths and weaknesses of your team, have different approaches for your different players and remember, when the star leaves, it’s not necessarily the end of the world!

 

Have you any more thoughts on how to build an excellent sales team… or even what’s your favourite ACDC song! All comments welcome below.

How can you secure your ongoing revenue stream?

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Many of the advisers that I talk to regularly speak of the dual challenges of earning enough revenue today from new business to pay the bills (while hopefully having a bit left over), and also moving their business model towards building up a growing, recurring revenue stream. While there is a plethora of articles written that look at the new business challenges, this post is focused on the latter challenge, moving towards building up a stable and secure ongoing revenue stream.

The products…
Indeed, when it comes to protection products, a number of the product providers are helping advisers in this regard with the emergence and growing acceptance of new commission models that offer attractive spread commission options without the dreaded commission clawback in the event of policy lapses. This allows advisers to build up their ongoing revenue stream. Once the client continues to require (and can afford) the cover, and the adviser ensures that the cover in place continues to be the best available, the adviser stands every chance of this revenue continuing.

The situation in relation to pensions and investment is a bit more complex. Historically ongoing income only came from regular premium products in the form of renewal commission. However this situation has changed significantly in recent years with many advisers moving away from large upfront commission payments on both regular and single premium business, towards lower upfront payments (by commission or fee) and a share of the ongoing annual management charge (AMC) by a trail commission.

While building up revenue through trail is challenging in the early years while asset amounts are lower, this basis is obviously more attractive in the long run as the adviser’s funds under management grow. Trail also removes the dependence on future premiums for future remuneration. Trail is also easier to explain to a client as it aligns the interest of the adviser with that of the client. Both gain from growth in the funds.

Observations from abroad
While the UK market certainly doesn’t dictate what happens in Ireland, there are often changes in this market that are worth observing. It’s interesting to note that trail commission is outlawed on business written since the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) came into effect on 1st January this year. While this was done as part of breaking the link between products and adviser remuneration, time will tell over the next few years whether this was taking a hammer to crack a nut.

However a lesson that I believe we can certainly take from the UK is that to justify ongoing remuneration, be it by adviser charging in the UK or by trail or fees in Ireland, the client will rightly expect something back in return. In short, trail commission will have to be earned. In fact (with my final reference to the UK, I promise!), there was a case taken by a client against a wealth manager who had been paid £10K in trail, but who the client claimed had provided no value. Could this happen in Ireland? The answer is, why not. So you need to ensure this doesn’t happen to you by delivering and showing your ongoing value to the client.

A clear ongoing advice proposition
To do this, you need to have a clear ongoing value proposition for your clients. Ongoing work needs to be a core part of your proposition, not a “by the way” 10 second conversation at the end of the initial product implementation. Clients do not want to feel “sold to”. This is exactly how they will feel if you don’t have a strong ongoing advice proposition to offer them. Delivering this is a natural move for those advisers who are shifting their focus from a product sale approach to an advice based offering.

Apart from obviously reviewing a client’s financial plan and product portfolio to ensure they are still on track to achieve their objectives, a structured and well thought out review approach offers you a great opportunity to remind your clients where you’ve added value to them over the year. This is where you can remind them of the growth they’ve achieved in their investment portfolio that you put together for them, the tax they saved as a result of the retirement plan you designed for them, the money they saved by you restructuring their protection portfolio and health insurance etc. Indeed one of the great benefits for those advisers who provide future cash flow modelling for their clients is it creates a natural and very valuable engagement with the client every year.

Benefits for you!
You as an adviser also benefit as a structured and well thought out review will surface any cross-selling opportunities that may exist. However the critical benefit to you is the strengthening of your relationship with your client, increasing your chances of retaining the client as their assets under management, and in turn your trail commission, increase. Surely this is a better approach than just hoping the client won’t be tempted away by another adviser who simply undercuts your trail commission amount?

And of course one of the main aims of many advisers is to build up value in your business. This is best achieved by being able to demonstrate a strong, stable revenue stream. Now is the time to develop your ongoing advice proposition to help you build up this valuable revenue stream.

What do you believe are the critical factors to help you build up your ongoing revenue stream? All your comments are very welcome below.

Good data = more sales for financial advisers

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Financial brokers and advisers today are becoming very aware of the role good customer data plays in generating sales. It provides excellent insights into their customers, enables robust decision making and provides the necessary foundation for successful marketing activities.

Good data of course is central to your service and ongoing advice to clients. You need to have access to the information contained in the customer fact find and also your client’s existing policy information to enable you to provide robust financial advice. However I’m going to focus here on how having good data will really help your marketing efforts.

I’ll start with an obvious one. Do you have email addresses for all of your clients? Many advisers don’t and this is quite understandable. Email has only emerged as the default communication method in the last decade or so and many client relationships go back much further than that. However most clients have email addresses today and email offers a no-cost means of communicating with your clients on an ongoing basis. So what should you do? Well obviously you can write to all clients asking them for their email addresses – this may yield some results but if you’ve lots of clients, it may be an expensive exercise. At a minimum though, I would suggest that you introduce a business process that ensures that before anyone in your company finishes a conversation with a client, they check with the client have you got their current email address. Everyone has a role here, every single time, every conversation. This will refresh and enrich your data, allowing you regularly reach your clients at no cost.

The second area is in relation to the source of leads and customers. If you capture this religiously, it can provide excellent insights when deciding where to apply your (usually limited) marketing budget in the future. This will tell you which activities worked in the past and should be carried out again or maybe tweaked, and which ones bombed and shouldn’t be repeated!

Data also provides the foundation for successful client segmentation. While this can be quite a complex area and will be covered in detail in a future article, there are many ways that you can segment your clients and then target them with specific campaigns or offerings. Examples of segmentation dimensions at a client level include;

  • policy type
  • income levels
  • earnings per client
  • premiums being paid
  • funds under management
  • age
  • occupation etc.

There are many potential dimensions and indeed as businesses become more comfortable with segmenting their clients, they begin to use multiple dimensions.  This enables you to focus your offerings to make them as relevant as possible to your target clients. Good data helps you to make better decisions in relation to your marketing activities and can really enhance those activities through enabling you to provide relevant campaigns aimed at carefully identified groups of clients. The quality of your data is key – remember the old saying; “Garbage in, garbage out!”

As a result of more targeted marketing efforts, greater confidence and expectations can be placed in relation to your sales return as you move from a scattergun approach to carefully crafted and targeted campaigns.

Managing your data however comes with real responsibilities, both in relation to how you use this data and also in relation to keeping this data secure. You need to understand your requirements under the Consumer Protection Code and also your data protection obligations; how and when you can contact your clients and also the permission you need to send further sales messages to them. In relation to security, I’m sometimes concerned about how lax some businesses are particularly in relation to the easy access to data on smartphones and tablets. Is access to confidential data within some of your emails only a 4 digit iPhone password away from someone who could make trouble for you? This is also exacerbated now with the explosive growth of cloud computing. If you use cloud computing on your phone or tablet, is your data constantly accessible on your device, potentially giving someone full access to all of your client files?

Your data is hugely valuable. It is central to your planning, your decision making in relation to your activities and can really enhance your sales effort. Give your data the attention it deserves, make sure that your whole organisation is constantly focused on improving your data. And finally, manage your data securely.

I hope this article was of interest. If you’ve any comments or further observations, I’d love to hear them!

Use expertise to build stronger client relationships

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It’s a competitive world out there. New clients are very thin on the ground and holding on to existing clients is a big challenge with other advisers and banks nipping at your heels. So how do you stay one step ahead of the competition?

Well obviously your client proposition has to be very strong, this is a given. Today, not only to remain compliant but also to remain competitive, the quality of your advice has to be first-rate. You have to fully understand your clients’ needs and recommend the right solutions for them. This is critical, but to my mind not the complete answer, as there are many other excellent independent advisers who can also do this.

In a previous lifetime, the way to gain access to clients was to beg, bug or buy your way in, to constantly hit people over the head with sales messages. However people today are becoming immune to these messages, they expect more from businesses than just being sold to all of the time. They expect more than a simple, transactional relationship with you and they expect you to add more value to them. How do you do this? It’s not easy for financial advisers to stand out, but one way you can significantly add additional value to your audience is through engaging them with your views and useful observations in all matters relating to financial services. The opportunity is there to successfully position yourself as a thought leader in the eyes of your clients, both prospective and existing and to create influence among your audience.

The plus side of this is that the days of having a limited set of tools available to you and having to spend vast sums of money through expensive advertising or direct mail campaigns to get in front of clients are over. However on the flip side of the coin, while potentially not costing a red cent, this engagement of your customers will eat into an entirely different scarce resource; your time. Know this before you start down the road of creating influence or you will almost definitely fail and as a result, you may even damage yourself in the eyes of your clients.

So what are the keys to building a successful engagement campaign with your prospective and existing clients by sharing your views and observations with them?

First of all, develop a structured content schedule. Avoid the headache of every month trying to dream up content ideas by instead investing some time up front in developing out a list of potential topics. I promise you that once you develop an initial schedule of content, your schedule will constantly grow and the days of last minute brain freezes will be over!

Then think about where you’re going to host your content. Are you going to post the content to your website each time? Or are you going to complete a blog or email newsletter? Maybe you’re going to post your content in a few places? Develop your strategy and then put time in your diary each month to both write and post the content.

I’m often asked how long a blog post or newsletter article should be. The optimal length is probably between 750 and 1,000 words, so it’s not particularly taxing.

The next area is to identify your channels through which you are going to actively share your content. It’s not enough to just post content to your website and hope that your audience will pay a visit to read it… Are you going to email your content too? Are you using social media? As some of you will have picked up from previous articles, I’m a big fan of the power of LinkedIn (in particular) and Twitter for financial advisers. They offer great opportunities to engage a wide network of both potential and existing clients.

When you then start to share your content, it’s really important to measure the success or otherwise of it. The beauty of online communication is that unlike the “snail mail” communications of old, there are so many metrics available to you. Spend some time thinking about the most relevant measures for you and then set some targets for yourself. Will you measure website hits, newsletter open / click rates, new subscribers to your content or the amount of “likes” and “shares” that your content attracts?

Finally, be committed to your engagement efforts. You won’t see immediate benefits, but if you stick with it and really try hard to produce content that’s interesting to your audience, your efforts will be rewarded.

What will the benefits be? Well first of all, influence helps you to build credibility among your audience. It also helps you to build trust through the constancy of your presence in front of your audience. Your audience want to have favoured leaders – this is your chance to become one of them! If done well, you can also expect that this engagement with clients will reawaken some relationships that may have been dormant. The end game is that your audience will start to seek out your views, not only in relation to general financial services topics, but also in relation hopefully to the advice that you can offer them in relation to their own financial affairs.

What are the biggest challenges for you in creating influence? Is it knowing what to write about or finding the time? All comments are welcome!

Email Marketing

Email Marketing by Financial Advisers

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I’ve been really impressed over the last few months by the excellent use of email as a marketing tool by some financial advisers. While some “digital experts” suggest that email has been replaced by social media, I’m not an advocate of that point of view. I firmly believe that email should play a leading role in the marketing mix employed by financial advisers. This blog post sets out a few general observations and thoughts to enhance your email marketing activities.

 Data Quality

To start, for the purpose of this article I’m going to assume you have a valid email database under data protection rules. The next important point is to ensure that every opportunity is taken to improve this list. Every customer contact should include a quick check to ensure you have the client’s correct email address. Email offers a low cost and effective route for financial advisers to reach their customers, so maximise the opportunity! Good data will help you do this.

However email is not for everyone so ensure you respect your clients’ wishes. If someone wants to unsubscribe, make sure you have a robust process to manage this. Otherwise you risk really undermining your relationship with these clients.

You’re Ready to Start…..

Get organised and get going! Otherwise you run the risk of what has been described as “The Bad Relative Strategy”. This is where you seek permission from your audience to send them great content……and then do nothing. For ages. Until you’re looking for something – for example to make them aware of a really great product opportunity. This is compared to the distant uncle who only turns up at Christmas looking to be fed and watered! If you say you’re going to email your clients, be ready to do so. Have a plan.

When you’re ready to go,  launch your email campaign. Tell your audience what to expect in terms of how you want to add value to them, the type of content they can expect and the frequency of your communications. And then have a plan to deliver as you promised.

I’m always asked how frequently you need to be communicating to be effective. Personally I think you need to be communicating at least monthly with original content. You can then supplement this with interesting content that you curate from the web. That is, interesting to your audience! And don’t fall into the trap of only sharing other people’s content from the web. Your audience want to read your views and opinions too!

Some financial advisers easily achieve this. I receive a brilliant email blog from one financial adviser every Friday. Very well written, interesting to me, a bit quirky and I always read it!

It’s all about the Content

As mentioned in the last paragraph, it’s the quality of the content that will engage your audience. And this is what it’s primarily all about; engagement, not selling. If you start just pushing product sales messages out there, expect your unsubscribes rates to soar. No-one wants to be constantly sold to. If you over-sell, you’ll lose your audience forever.

However you want a return from your email marketing. Your best chance of achieving this is by engaging your audience, making them aware of your expertise and how you add value, with a view to ultimately positioning yourself  for when those sales opportunities arise.

So what’s the secret to developing engaging content? Well it starts by putting in the hard yards at the outset. And this means spending time at the outset planning out your content for the next couple of months at least. This will take the pressure away of trying to dream up a new topic each month. When this happens, inevitably you’ll struggle and eventually your communications will stop happening.

Having a schedule of content takes this pressure away each month. You’ll find then that your problem is finding room in the schedule for your latest, interesting topic. A nice problem to have.

More good news in relation to email marketing is that less is more! Links to blog posts or short newsletters with one or two articles are best. Frequent & short content rather than seldom & long content is the way to go.

And finally, read your content a few times before you send it. Tweak it, make sure there’s no typos and best of luck. Give it a year and then survey your audience to get a feel for whether  you actually are engaging them or not. I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

Why is MY client talking to him?

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How many financial advisers have bumped into an existing protection client to be told that the client recently put in place his pension / investment with another adviser or a bank? Why would your client go elsewhere? Could it be because your client doesn’t know the breadth of your product proposition or maybe would just not think about you at the time? Or possibly does the client feel a bit unloved by you?

There’s an old acronym for a customer buying cycle called AIDA. This stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. The problem I have with this is that the final step (Action) is sometimes viewed as the end of the process by advisers as they move on to the next client. It’s not, it simply all starts again. Your job after your client reaches the Action phase (a product purchase) is to begin to make your client aware of other needs they may have and to start moving them through the buying cycle again. If you don’t, someone else will and this leads us to one of today’s biggest challenges; client retention.

What’s the typical client base profile of financial advisers that I meet today? Well client bases vary widely in terms of size, but typically the adviser will say that they have close relationships with only about 20% of their clients. The rest of the clients were simply transactions of single products over the years. Of course you can’t deal with every client equally, both because it’s not profitable to do so and also you don’t have the time. However there’s no excuse today for any client not being fully aware of your proposition.

The first opportunity you have to make your client aware of the breadth of your offering is as they complete the initial transaction with you. Build time into your advice / sales process to walk your client through all areas of your proposition. They’re warm to you at this stage and will listen. Make sure you have a high quality marketing take-away for them that sets out all that you can offer them.

However brochures get lost and anyway, the real opportunity to cement your relationship with all clients only begins now. The first step is to open up as many no-cost communication channels as possible with your clients. These primarily are through ensuring you have their email addresses and also through using social media; definitely connecting with any of your clients on LinkedIn, and also Twitter offers great potential.

Your challenge then is to regularly share useful content with your clients that will portray your financial services expertise and that will also keep you firmly on your clients’ radars. Don’t bang them over the head by trying to sell all the time; instead your aim should be to interest and engage them. Do this and there’s a good chance they’ll pay the odd visit to your website to see what else you have to say. Now your clients will become more AWARE of your offering, you might even raise their INTEREST! Now they’re halfway through the buying cycle again!

A question I’m often asked is how best to measure success, as the sales cycle can be very long for future sales and therefore hard to measure in revenue terms. A method I recommend is using the “Net Promoter Score” (NPS). This is a very simple process in which you ask your clients a single question on a scale of 1 – 10, “How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” You then measure the results and track your score over time to see if you’re successfully engaging your clients or not. You’ll find loads of information about the NPS on the web.

We’ve all heard the old rule of thumb that it costs 5 times more to secure a new customer than it does to drive new business from an existing customer. Many of you are also very dependent on referrals from your existing customers. So look after them, engage them and you’ll increase your ratio of relationship clients.

Best of luck with engaging your existing clients! I’d love to hear from you if you would like to learn how I could help you in this area or indeed for you to share any successful approaches that you use yourself.