Personality disappears from planning

The financial planning industry has been selling too far to the right in terms of compliance, and personality has disappeared from the process, according to Warrick Pleash of Executive Central Group.

Speaking at the Financial Planning Association National Conference on the Gold Coast, Pleash said that in many instances getting the client to fill out a 30-page compliance document seemed to have become more important than the clients.

In discussing the value of sales in the financial planning process, Pleash said: “We don’t want to pull the business completely back to the sales side of the process — planners should find some balance [between compliance and sales].”

Pleash said while the industry had lost the art of sales, the focus should not be on learning some ‘method’ of making a sale. Rather, he said that advisers needed to focus on their identity, values and beliefs, which should come before learning a new skill set.

The challenge for the industry at the moment was that previously it did not have to account for the price of anything and yet fee-for-service had changed things, he said.

“We have to confront the fact that we have to look clients in the face and say ‘I am worth it’. One of the biggest secrets to being a good adviser is owning your identity,” Pleash said, adding that doctors are good at this because they have faith in their abilities. “Do you think they ever need to go to a sales course? No, they don’t need it, because they have such a strong identity.”

Pleash’s colleague, Rob Balmer said financial planners needed to get rid of their own negative perception of a ‘sales person’.

“If you have a negative perception of a salesman, would you be comfortable going down that path?” he asked.

Balmer said the biggest secret weapon for a salesperson was themselves, that and no ‘1001 Tips on making a sale’ guide could make a financial adviser successful in this area.

“You are probably already doing 90 per cent of what it takes to be successful, but there is a perception that there is some method to selling — that is not what we do,” he said.

Balmer said that the fundamental values of professional selling did not involve exerting pressure on a client and ‘closing a sale’.

“The only person that can close a sale is a client,” said Blamer.

Rather, he said, fundamentals values of professional selling included things such as a two-way exchange of values between the client and adviser; identifying an explicit client need; building trust and rapport; and seeing that ethics and values contributed more to any professional engagement than techniques or strategies.