The single most important part in selling is listening. I am always flabbergasted how many people in top positions don't understand that. It doesn't matter what you're selling - a couch, a car, financial services, a recruit on where he should go to school. The single most important thing for a salesman to do is listen.
A dozen years ago, I was a new partner in a company. I would have meetings with execs at the headquarters of big companies including Gannett/USA Today, Marriott, Mars Inc., Hilton, etc. for what would possibly be contracts for multi-years and multi-millions of dollars. The majority owner always wanted to go with me, and the meetings would quickly turn to shit as he dominated them by simply talking about our company and what we provide. Being new there, it was a tough issue to bring up, so I had to go to another partner who had been there a decade to have him run interference when I would have big meetings.
The majority owner took no time to find common ground/break the ice. He took no time to probe or ask questions as to why the company was interested in looking at a new vendor. Clearly, they took the meeting for some reason: their vendor was too expensive, wasn't fulfilling their obligation, didn't have the best technology, simply wanting to have a backup vendor in emergencies, etc. This is all pertinent information you have to discover in order to properly sell. That majority owner would simply ramble on about all of the things we provide, many times the customer's current vendor already provided or they had no interest in.
I've watched the same thing happen with coaches recruiting kids. They entirely skip the part about listening and finding out what the recruit deems most important. The coach tries being best friends with the recruit, joking with him, and then telling him about everything the school/program can offer that recruit. But all of that is meaningless if you haven't listened to what is important to the recruit - selling a kid on warm weather year round means shit if the kid loves skiing; selling the kid on the school having a huge enrollment and tons of diversity if the kid is from a small high school and is sure he wants a small campus; selling a kid on how hot the girls on campus are if he doesn't have much of a desire to date or has a serious, long-term girlfriend who is coming to school with him. I see it every damn year, multiple times, and I always question how head coaches aren't wise enough to understand this and have a course for his coaches (but many times, the head coaches are just as guilty of doing it).
1) Find a common interest/break the ice: If you're selling financial services and a guy walks in with a Marshall shirt, start talking to him about the Herd. Let him know about the last game you went to or give him some good-natured ribbing if you're a wvu fan.
2) Find out why the customer is looking for financial services. Listen to what they are looking for. Find out why they are looking. At first, most people won't completely open up about why they are looking. They have a current bank but will claim to just want to see what else is out there or if they can get a lower interest rate. In reality, it's usually far more than that. After listening and asking some probing questions, they start to open up. They will tell you about how their bank takes two days to get their direct deposit into their account. Since they get paid on Mondays, that means they don't get their money in their account until Wednesdays. Since their mortgage is automatically drafted from their account every other Wednesday, it means sometimes it is debited hours before their direct deposit hits, which means they end up getting insufficient funds fees. Even at this point, you still mostly stay quiet. Knowing the bank takes two days to get the direct deposit in the guy's account, you realize that bank probably doesn't have great technology, so you ask about their app and if they offer mobile check deposits, etc. The guy states they don't offer online check deposits, so he has to take them to the bank to deposit them. He then opens up about how one time, he put the check in the deposit slot while the bank was closed, and the check ended up getting suck in the after hours deposit box. Quickly, the guy who claimed that he was just shopping around or looking for a better interest rate has revealed some issues with his current bank.
3) At this point, you see that he has "wounds" that his bank has caused. Without making it obvious, you start to poke these wounds to make them bigger. His direct deposit takes two days to hit his account? "Ouch, that shouldn't happen like that." Show empathy by talking about how getting hit with just one insufficient fee per month due to the bank taking so long adds up to $400/year and over $7000 over a decade if he were to simply take that lost money and invest it properly (in a service you coincidentally have, which you will reveal later). Show understanding how you would be annoyed if you had to drive to/from the bank each time just to deposit a check. After a long day at work, the last thing you want to do is have to drive ten minutes in traffic to the bank, get out of your car in the cold weather, then fight traffic again to get back to where you were going. Poke the wound. The amount of time and gas going to the bank is a pain in the ass, not to mention the chance the check gets lost/stuck in the drawer. The customer will frequently then to begin more issues with his bank after you start to show empathy for his situation. You've poked the wounds enough that they are now bleeding, gaping holes.
4) At this time, you take the opportunity to tell him how much you love working at your bank, because it's such an easy job. Your bank has invested $15 million in new technology over the last two years. As a result, your system makes direct deposits available within 24 hours for the first six months of that direct deposit. Then, after that, the direct deposits are available immediately. "It's your money, why should you have to wait for it, right?" Instead of losing $400/year in insufficient funds fees, he'd do much better putting that $400 in XYZ funds. Explain that you've done that with 20% of your wife's paychecks, and it has yielded X% of returns.
Part of that technology investment also allows customers to deposit checks from the free mobile app. No more wasted trips to the bank after hours just to make a deposit. Go straight home to your family after work - don't spend 20+ minutes going to the bank just to deposit a check.
Even though you can't offer him a better interest rate than he is getting, you will still save him $400/year in insufficient funds, earn him $7000 by taking that throwaway money and investing it just like you do with your wife's money, and save him a lot of time by providing free mobile banking that his current bank doesn't have.
Even if his first priority for coming to your bank was to get a lower interest rate, you still saved him time and money without being able to fulfill his original goal.
5) Ask for his business, and tell him why starting immediately is beneficial to him ("Don't risk another insufficient fee, I can do your direct deposit paperwork right here in less than 90 seconds"; "If you sign up by the close of business tomorrow, we also have a promotion for a free $100 into your account").
1) Break the ice/build the relationship/find common ground
2) Listen and ask questions to find out why the person is really there; probe without probing
3) Use that information to be able to poke the wound
4) Come full circle by telling him how you/your company can resolve those issues for him and provide benefits that he doesn't currently get
5) Ask for his business.
It's a tried-and-true sales cycle that anyone who comes in contact with customers should be trained on.
