True Help InterNetwork Corp.

If finding new prospects and making new sales is the most important element in your financial practice, you are in the correct place. The True Canadian Financial Advisor Resource Center is dedicated to helping Financial Advisors and Life Agents to improve their prospecting and marketing skills and to facilitate in building a secure book of business for long-term success.

This is not another financial website full of "market news" and "industry information". This site is dedicated to the "art of selling", or as we like to call it, the "lost" art of selling, because never before have proper sales skills and sales training been so obviously lost!

Subscribe to this program - it's completely free, and you will have unfettered access to all of our current materials, information, useful links, and our complete set of publications that we call, “The True Selling Skills for Financial Advisors Collection", which are being rolled out over the next few months. These eBooks, which will also be available in audio format for your hand-held device, will be introduced one at a time beginning very soon, and all registered advisors will receive email notice when each publication is available for download.

Learn about, or improve your skills with, prospecting, appointment making, using the phone, dealing with the DNCL, using email as an acceptable sales tool, making effective presentations, answering objections, and closing sales.

Register now, and you will be entered into a draw for a three-month prepaid subscription to Canada's premier financial lead-generation program - The Canadian Financial Security Program, valued at over $900.00, and be among the first to take advantage of our new sales tools and publications as they become available.

Registering will place you in our subscriber database, and we will only use this contact information to keep you informed on topics and information that we believe are pertinent to your business. We will NEVER divulge any personal information to any other party or entity. We make it very simple to withdraw your subscription at any time, and we honour all unsubscribe requests within hours of receiving them. You will be pleasantly surprised at how little personal information we ask as you register.

Our full contact information, address and phone numbers are available on the main website. We are a completely Canadian organization, serving only the Canadian marketplace at this time.

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The Lost Art of Selling
Michael F. Murphy

It amazes me to see the tremendous void that exists today in the profession of selling in every industry, and especially in the industries that were built by true salespeople such as life insurance and investment funds. When it comes to the financial industries, it seems that almost all media and training offered today is focused on the "financial markets", and the need and ability of the advisor to understand many complex equations, characteristics, and workings of the financial world. Compliance, although a very necessary element of the business, has become time-consuming and overwhelming. These facts lead to an advisor providing an overload of data and information that the average client does not understand and really does not want to learn about.

Training for financial professionals is strong on the workings of financial vehicles, markets, compliance, a degree of self-motivation and self-fulfillment, and very short on sales technique and skills. Everywhere I look today, whether when buying a home, a financial product, or at a retail store, it is so obvious - the "art" of selling is dying. The profession itself - and the word "selling" has become associated with "manipulation" as the would-be sales professional attempts to present himself or herself as an "advisor" - more like an accountant or a lawyer. And, like so many things that evolve and transition with great intentions, this one has gone too far.

Education, knowledge, training, and understanding your product or service to a degree that will take you to the highest level of your profession is a good thing, but, in this case it reminds me of one of my favourite childhood stories.

Back in the days of the Wild West, a young cowboy was fascinated with seeing men do gun tricks with their six-shooters. He devoted years to learning how to disassemble and re-assemble his firearms in record time. He would clean, polish, and make his guns look amazing. He learned how to spin them on his fingers, throw them in the air and catch them, and do all kinds of show-off tricks. He entertained many with his skills. One day, while riding his horse along a mountain path, he was confronted by a mountain lion. With lightening speed he drew his two pistols, spun them without even thinking, threw them in the air and caught them perfectly. While he handled his pistols with lightning speed, his preoccupation and deeply ingrained habit of “doing show tricks” gave the lion enough time to jump him before he had a chance to shoot. His preoccupation with the “just for show” elements of his skill led him to a “bad outcome”.

The industry is filled with educated, trained, and competent financial advisors, but statistics tell us - most experience too many “bad outcomes” when it comes to making sales. The very reason they became financial advisors or life agents in the first place was to earn an above average income, instead, most financial advisors live in a world of extreme stress, not enjoying most of their daily tasks, and with constant fear of not being able to find the next sale.

To be successful in the “sales business”, (and that is the business you are in) you must know how to find a prospect with a need, make an appointment using the phone, and make a presentation that demonstrates that you know what you are doing. A true professional operates his or her business with honour and always has the best interest of his or her client (or potential client) in mind, and knows how to guide a prospect through the five steps that every purchaser must pass through before he or she is ready to buy.

Not everyone has the personality and characteristics to be in the top five or ten percent of professional salespersons, however, “making a sale”, like any other skill, follows a logical set of events and requires skills and techniques that can be learned, and that can turn just about anyone who possesses basic communication skills into a successful salesperson. Next to entertainers, if you are in one of the correct fields (like financial products), selling is the highest paying profession in the world relative to education. The problem is that something like seventy-five to eighty percent of the income, is earned by twenty to twenty-five percent of the salespeople. If you are lacking in any ONE of the basic sales topics covered in this series of publications, you have little chance of ever making an above average income from selling financial products.

Become a “professional salesperson” and embrace the true elements of this occupation. Do not let those old ideas that portray “selling” in the context of convincing someone to buy something they don’t need or want, lead you to shun the skills of selling. Selling things that people do not have a true need for is not selling, that's manipulation. That is not what we do. We all know that the majority of Canadians are underinsured, poorly invested, do not have their financial future properly planned for, and most will not make changes until a sales professional is in front of them. They need you.

True “professional sales” embraces honourable principles where the salesperson is a “guide” who helps the prospect identify that he or she does have a “need” or a “want”, then helps him or her clarify what that need or want is. The salesperson can then perform his or her job of identifying options that can satisfy the need or want, and guide the prospect through the five step process that we all go through before we purchase something - concluding with the obvious “good outcome” – the order or close.

One of the big problems with making a living in this industry today is that these selling skills seem to have been lost, twisted, and become shunned. Yet, many of these skills are used in our everyday lives without even thinking. This set of publications that we call, “The True Selling Skills for Financial Advisors Collection”, is created in a logical, modularized format, with each publication surprisingly short and yet very effective. Whether you are a seasoned advisor who has heard it all before or reasonably new to the industry, this presentation style of basic facts, principles, and skills is sure to offer a new and reorganized perspective on the lost art of selling, and could be just what you need to join the salespeople at the top.