Leverage: Your Driving Force

One of the most powerful forces in any business is leverage.

By applying leverage to the right activities, you can accelerate your growth exponentially. There is no place where leverage is more powerful in your business, financial services, than sales. 

There are several ways to use the power of leverage in a sales organization that will help you multiply yourself, and your success. Let’s look at a few.

Leveraging People

This is basic, I know, but the ability to leverage other people to multiply your results is the foundation of leverage in a sales organization. Let me share, in my opinion, the best way to leverage people to improve your results. 

First, I think advisors make the mistake of thinking the key is to just hire other advisors to join your team. Often, they will do this before they have the proper systems in place to train and lead other advisors, but I also see these hires made too early in a sales organization, before the owner/advisor has maximized their own calendar. 

I believe you should stay in the lead sales role for as long as your calendar will allow. Instead of hiring another lead advisor, hire a service advisor to free your calendar of reviews and service work. Hire a paraplanner to do all the case prep and planning. Hire an executive assistant to do all your administrative tasks. These hires can free you to do what you will always be best at: converting new prospects into clients. 

By staying in the lead sales role for as long as possible, not only do you maximize revenues by converting at higher levels, but you also maximize profits by not paying a percentage of revenue out to another advisor. 

Only when your calendar becomes overwhelmed with new prospect appointments, and after you’ve outsourced all other tasks, should you hire another lead advisor. 

Leveraging Sales Skills

The second opportunity to use the power of leverage lies within the sales skills and capabilities of your team. Investing in sales training and development not only enhances individual performance but also creates a collective force multiplier for your organization.

Empowering your sales team with the tools, knowledge and support they need enables them to leverage their expertise effectively. Whether it’s mastering persuasive communication, negotiation tactics or objection handling, each skill learned contributes to the overall leverage potential of your sales force.

Moreover, cultivating a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration fosters a dynamic environment where individuals can leverage each other’s strengths and experiences. This synergy drives innovation, resilience and adaptability — all critical elements for sustained sales success.

This year, we launched a partnership with Sandler Training to offer additional training opportunities for you and your advisors in lead sales roles. Contact your VP of Advisor Development for more information.

Leveraging Time and Systems

In this issue’s “True Icons” advisor feature, you will hear how Wes W. has leveraged Trainual and other systems to effectively train his lead advisors (read the article on page 22). Wes has done an incredible job of leveraging his time by investing in training the advisors on his team. He realized that if his firm was going to be successful, he had to invest the time and invest in the system to really train his advisors. Hiring and hoping is not a successful strategy. We’ve developed a lot of resources around Trainual that you can leverage in your practice to better develop your team, but you also have to invest the time in your team. 

The right leverage, applied in the right way, is transformational. As you build out your organization, never forget you are leading a sales organization, and applying leverage at the points mentioned will compound your results quickly.