OpinionFeb 27 2013

Advisers have not moved away from sales, and why should we?

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A few weeks ago I attended my local Institute of Financial Planning meeting. There was nothing unusual about that but the number of other people who turned up was unusual. It was one of the best-attended meetings I had been to, and only people such as George Kinder and Maria Nemeth have pulled in bigger audiences.

I did not know the speaker, Lee Warren, and I suspect he was unknown to almost everyone else. But he still managed to attract a record crowd and I guess the topic had a lot to do with it – the talk was entitled How to Persuade Anyone to do Anything. As he had already attracted such a large crowd I suppose his point had already been made.

But more than anything else, what struck me was the dichotomy between advisers saying they were no longer in sales, and a room full of the same people keen to discover how to persuade anyone to do anything. Something is not ringing true. Actually on the night the presenter qualified the title of the presentation, by adding the word ‘almost’ – How to Persuade Anyone to do Almost Anything. But even then what he was really talking about was selling, and the audience was lapping it up.

And why should they not? I have long argued that the ‘front end’ of our businesses is about sales and marketing. We are in business first and, to borrow a phrase from David Scarlett, we are in businesses where great financial planning is done. If we lose sight of that fact then it is easy to forget we might need to sell our services. And now that the cost of our services has become a prominent talking point with clients, we ought to know what we are selling, and how to sell it.

Persuasion is a process aimed at shifting a person’s behavior or attitude toward an idea or event. We can easily find that we need to persuade a client to pay as much attention to retirement planning as they might spend on planning this year’s holiday. We might need to persuade a prospective client that our service is better than the person we are being compared to. It is not manipulation, which aims to alter a person’s behavior through underhanded, deceptive or even aggressive tactics.

I suspect the reason that many people eschew the word ‘sales’ is that it has attracted a small number of manipulative salesmen who have altered people’s perceptions of what selling actually is, which is persuasion. Instinctively we probably know this, which is why the presentation was so popular. We recognise the need to persuade rather than needing to manipulate. While I am not quite ready to announce to the world that I am a salesman, I do recognise that selling skills are vital in my business.

People eschew the word “sales” as it has attracted a number of manipulative salespeople who have altered perceptions of what sales actually is

Dennis Hall is managing director of Yellowtail Financial Planning