Everyone hates a pushy, aggressive sales person. We are successful because we teach service people in the financial services industry to be effective at spotting new opportunities and completing the sale, without being pushy and aggressive.
One mistaken belief we have consistently noticed that many staff have in financial institutions is that they hold an attitude that suggests that in order to be successful in selling they have to talk clients into a product or service. We refer to this as the “product dump” method of selling whereby you remind clients that there are options available, give them your best “spiel”, “plant seeds” and hope for the best. They feel they are “needs based selling” because they would never sell a product a client doesn’t need. We have learned that what this really means is that while they would never actually try to talk them into buying something they don’t need they would be willing to suggest a product that they may or may not need just to find out if they need it! Unfortunately, in the mind of the client, as soon as the product is mentioned they already think the Credit Union or Bank representative is trying to sell to them.
In our philosophy, this is not needs based selling. Our approach is to train sales people in a common sense process that focuses on spotting opportunities, qualifying with the Client (and having them agree) that there is a potential need (opportunity), getting permission to explore how we could possibly solve that need, and then going to work with the client on possible alternatives that would solve their problem. We believe that good selling = good service. We also believe the converse of that is true: that bad sales skill = bad service.