When I got my Series 7 securities license, mutual funds were just becoming popular. There were no variable annuities or insurance products, like variable life and all that. Retirement, after all, is the best 90-day vacation you'll ever take. Ever since I started in selling, at age 19, every great sales manager, sales person, or sales trainer, has said that all sales are made with emotion and justified with logic. And yet, as I searched bookstores, the Internet, the training companies, I could find absolutely no emotion-based training programs.
Planners can improve their ability to sell by first of all improving their people skills.
Their people skills can be improved by understanding, as I talk about in Chapter 11 of my book, that there are virtually three separate languages happening all around you, and two separate dialects. The planner that is reading this article may indeed be a visual brain-language thinker. If his or her secondary language is auditory, they probably have good communication skills as well as significant intellectual attributes. On the other hand, if the financial planner is a kinesthetic with a secondary language of visual, they are typically uncomfortable with their own communications abilities. They must find a way to market their services that doesn't require the use of their verbal communication skills.