Welcome to Marks & Associates Bank Sales Training!

We offer a full curriculum of on-site training seminars for banks of all sizes ranging from community and middle market to large corporate prospects. Reaching across your target industries, our sessions are based on consultative techniques and have a long and distinguished history of success. Whether you want to increase your revenue by selling more deeply into existing clients, penetrate new groups or classes of prospects, introduce new products or have your managers master sales management skills, our sessions will get you there quickly and pragmatically. Theories are great for graduate school, our sessions are designed to get results immediately.

There is a reason that many sales courses do not achieve long-term desired effects. They are often designed by people that have not worked in the real world of banking, or their classes were designed 20 years ago and have not changed with the times. Almost any sales training is better than nothing. Acquisition of even the most basic sales skills can lead to improvement. However, with the investment in time and opportunity cost that you must make in your people for selling, it is imperative that you receive the very best training that is available. Many courses are designed to give short-term motivation or to educate. That is really off the mark. Training is not education; training is designed to change behavior patterns! That is what Marks & Associates consultative classes achieve. Your results will be immediate and long-term.

> Philosophy of Selling
> What is Consultative Selling?
> The Customer is Always Right?

Philosophy of Selling

Selling is about the prospect’s needs not about you or your products. A good salesperson’s job is to focus on the changes within a company that cause those needs and to find ways that you can satisfy them. Unfortunately, no matter how well intentioned your staff might be, without the right diagnostic skills to uncover changes, translate those into recommendations and present solutions that satisfy those needs, your people will fail more often than not. The hard truth is that discovering the right product to sell is trivial.Almost anyone can do that. The real challenge lies in discovering the exact benefits that excite the prospect, and making him or her feel the pain of not having those benefits. When the prospect feels the pain, they will want the solution.

While most sales people can list a service or product’s potential benefits, they may not be sufficiently adept in questioning technique to discover what those benefits mean to the prospect company. They don’t translate words into real life. And, they generally try to close a sale as soon as they identify a product opportunity. In truth, their real sales work should just be beginning. The result of trying to close too soon is a lot of revenue left on the table and companies left without the best solutions to their problems.

The place to start working with a prospect is to identify the changes they are experiencing, then move through the potential impacts noting opportunities and thinking about product linkages.

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What is Consultative Selling?

A consultant's primary job is problem solving. So, rather than selling like a vendor (see the differentiation below) the consultative sales person uses diagnostics, inductive and deductive reasoning to really understand the prospect's needs. The baseline is understanding the prospect, their business and their problems. The role for the consultative sales person is to offer solutions that are based on what is best for the client/prospect it is not based on selling "our products." The result should be a prospect that feels a sense of added value from the salesperson and the view that they are more aligned with the goals and issues of the prospect firm.

Think of the consultative sales person as being like a doctor. They have two primary functions, diagnosis and then treatment. The "vendor" type sales person focuses on the treatment exclusively. That is why they have to rely so heavily on pricing issues since they don't add value, but rather depend on the product to influence the prospect. They don’t have the diagnostic skills and hence can't ally themselves with the prospect's view. Any doctor can write any prescription. The key is not the ability to write the prescription, it is to determine the CORRECT prescription.

Vendor vs. Consultative Selling

In summary, the vendor or product sales person goes into a call with the goal in mind of selling products. If that helps the customer in some way, that is fine, but it is not the primary goal. The consultative salesperson goes into the call with the goal of helping the customer/prospect. If that results in a sale of a product, that is great. It is, of course, one of our primary goals. However, the foremost goal is to help the customer. It is through this approach that the consultative salesperson realizes full potential as a resource the company can trust over the long and short run. In addition, because the consultative salesperson pays attention to product linkages and selling full ranges of products to solve the complete problem, they sell more products than the product salesperson.

If you do not understand your customer's or your prospect's business, you cannot execute consultative selling. You must gain a good understanding of the company's operations, goals and constraints to be able to use this approach.

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The Customer is Always Right?

The old saying, “The customer is always right” does not mean they don't make bad decisions, it means their needs come first. A better way to look at this is, “The customer is always the customer!”

Our job as consultative sales staff, is diagnostics. We need to find out what is best for the client and to make sure they understand how that solution can benefit them. This is a process of discovery and it is unreasonable to expect the client to always know what they want. They often ask for the wrong things or object to the correct solutions.

You don't gain a customer’s respect or trust by focusing all your energy on explaining why you are right and they should follow your advice. They must understand the advantages your suggestions create in terms which are comfortable for them. That is how you convert product advantages to customer recognized benefits.

Sell Benefits, not Features, but what does that mean?

Only the prospect can identify a benefit. You must test each of the product advantages by questioning them to find out what they value.

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