wealtharticles-the_death_of_sales

The Death of Sales (Part 1) - by Calvin Yeo

Back in 2006 I registered a domain name called, "DeathofSales.com". My intention at that time was to share with the world how businesses of today will fail because of too much emphasis on the sales structure. In fact I wrote a book of the above title but resisted the opportunity to published it because at that time when economies of the world were all thriving, who would want to read that kind of a book.

Now, and I mean "Now" is the perfect opportunity, given what corporate America has done and what the financial institutions in Singapore has created itself into.

I feel businesses of today relies too much on having a "sales" mentality, neglecting the one most crucial and most important element of any business cycle. "it's Customers". I think if all businesses focus is on that, we do not have to reply on selling, selling and selling. Rather sales should be position in a way that it is leading, leading and leading the customers to purchase the product or service.

Of course businesses will argue that how can you sell a product or service without selling it. You have to sell it - that's their argument.

On the contrary. I feel that if a business knows how to "lead" a customer to buy, you do not need to "sell" in the first place. That is my argument. If a business is skillful enough to be able to "lead" a customer to buy their products, a product is easily sold. And people would rather buy, than be sold a product or service.

Now how do you do that?

Simple really, businesses just needs to engage me. Honestly and I am serious, it takes a separate set of skills to actually indentify and position a company's product or service in line with a customer's objective.

That has been the problem of the financial industry. Too many, if not all the financial companies in Singapore or around the world are still adopting the "sales" mentality. A "sales" mentality revolves around performance reward. By that it usually means making more newer acquisition.

Let's be honest, most financial institution are aggressively and always trying to acquire new customers. And though they have financial advisers and relationship managers to keep customers happy, many are ill-equipped and not very knowledgeable in helping their customer's trying to accumulate and grow their wealth. And during bad times even fewer of these experts will know of any strategies to help customer's protect their wealth.

You can experience by the number of law-suits that are happening around the world today. Individuals are suing financial institutions for losing their monies.

These are skill-set that the financial adviser of today need to have. Because once you are more knowledgeable and updated, you become more confident and then you are able to transfer that energy to the customer and in return, your customer will believe you and the company you are working in.

Lastly, the financial industry has been recruiting aggressively more than ever, even after the horror show they have provided for consumers after the structured products debacle.

They are still trying to recruit more financial advisers with little knowledge, train them enough and go out and continuing what they have been doing all this while. The pay structure of these sales people are still predominantly commissions base and I for one disagree with businesses who uses commissions to entice people in the industry.

I honestly think it is suicidal. Why?

Very simply and it has happened in the past and will also happen in the future. Commissions always attracts greed. Greed leads to a psychological effect which leads to fear. And it is the fear of losing out on the greedy things in life that leads to mis-selling.

Rather, I would like to challenge businesses to consolidate, recruit less inept sales people and recruit more well-skilled and knowledgeable people to lead the advisory of customers into making the right financial decisions.

That way we sell more, have lesser staff count and more effective quality advice and control and finally, profitable wealth management business.

It is not only logical in theory but also practically possible as well.

By Calvin Yeo, CFP, MBA, CPT
Author of the book: Death of Sales. This book is to be launch soon. Go to www.deathofsales.com and find out more. Email: yeo.calvin@yahoo.com