There is a tension at the heart of most conventional approaches to financial advisory sales, and it is worth naming directly because it explains a great deal about why resistance appears in sales conversations that were not designed to produce resistance.
Most traditional sales approaches are built around moving a prospect toward a decision.
The techniques are varied. Some are subtle. Some are sophisticated enough that they are genuinely difficult to recognize as techniques at all. But the underlying architecture is the same: one party is attempting to do something to the other party.
And the problem with that architecture is not that the techniques fail. Many of them work, at least in the narrow sense of producing a decision.
The problem is what they produce in the prospect while they are working.
The moment someone senses that a conversation is trying to move them somewhere, something protective activates. Not dramatically. Not always consciously. But unmistakably.
The answers become shorter. The questions become tests rather than genuine inquiries. The warmth of the conversation becomes a surface beneath which evaluation is running continuously.
This is what most sales conversations are working against, and what most sales techniques are designed to manage.
But the resistance was produced by the approach itself. And managing it, however skillfully, does not address what created it.
The alternative is not a better technique. It is a different orientation entirely.
When the goal of a sales conversation is genuinely to understand whether there is a real problem worth solving together, rather than to advance toward a particular outcome, the prospect's nervous system receives information that does not match its prediction.
The conversation it was braced for never materializes.
Instead, there is something much rarer: a professional conversation in which the other person seems genuinely more interested in understanding the situation than in arriving at any particular conclusion from it.
That quality of genuine interest is disarming in a way that no technique can replicate.
Because it is not a technique. It is a genuine absence of the thing that was producing the resistance.
When selling, as it is conventionally practiced, is set aside in favor of honest inquiry into whether a problem is serious enough to address together, the dynamic of the sales conversation changes completely.
The prospect stops protecting themselves because there is nothing to protect themselves from.
And in the space that opens, a real conversation becomes possible. One where both people are genuinely trying to find out whether working together makes sense, rather than one where one person is trying to move the other toward a decision they have already decided should happen.
Trust is the new skill worth learning. And the first step toward it is recognizing what in the current approach is making trust difficult to build.
Related: Why Non-Attachment Is the Most Underrated Skill in Financial Advisory Sales
Ari Galper is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling and is the most sought-after high-net worth/lead generation expert for financial advisors. His newest book, “Trust In A Split Second” has become an instant best-seller among financial advisors worldwide – you can get a Free copy of Ari’s book here and, when you click the “YES” button in the order form, you’ll also receive a complimentary “plug up the holes” lead generation consultation. Ari has been featured in CEO Magazine, Forbes, INC Magazine and the Financial Review. He is considered a contrarian in the financial services industry and in his book, everything you learned about selling will be turned upside down. No more chasing, no pressure, no closing.