I come from a long line of business owners. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all built businesses selling everything from bricks and glass to machinery. In my family, the ability to sell wasn’t seen as a personality trait. It was a core life skill.
It showed up everywhere. Negotiating purchases. Conversing with waiters. Holding a poker face deep into late-night card games.
Somewhere around the turn of the century, “sales” became a dirty word.
Many industries, including financial advice, shifted heavily toward technical capability instead. And to be fair, that mattered. Standards needed to lift. Compliance needed to improve. Our industry needed to become a profession.
But there was an unintended consequence too: many firms stopped teaching the commercial and communication skills that sit underneath good client relationships.
My early career included some fairly traditional sales roles with global companies and highly structured sales training programs. Different products. Different coloured PowerPoint decks. But the training was largely a rinse-and-repeat version of the same core principles:
- Build rapport.
- Understand what people actually value.
- Lead them toward the right solution with the least friction possible.
- Ensure all parties feel good about the outcome.
- Confidently ask for their business.
Simple in theory…. harder in practice.
Car dealerships are the purest example. Get the process right, and Tom at City Mazda has you driving away in the perfect car within hours. Get it wrong, and you’re halfway to the next dealership before he’s sat back down at his tiny showroom desk.
Financial advice isn’t that different.
By the time someone has researched an adviser, booked a meeting, driven to your office and sat down across the table from you, they want help. They’re not there for the Nespresso coffee and a good time.
So help them.
Lead the conversation. Simplify the process. Make their decisions feel easy.
That’s sales.
Call it soft skills, relationship skills or people skills, whatever helps you sleep at night. The foundations are largely the same.
The good news is these skills can absolutely be developed - but they won’t develop by accident. They require deliberate exposure, repetition, mentorship and feedback.
Expose.
I’m a big advocate of PY’s and newer advisers sitting in on meetings with senior advisers. But not just a handful of times. Many times. For many months.
Observation is still one of the best training grounds there is. There’s a reason pilots spend hundreds of hours in the cockpit before flying solo. Confidence and judgement are built through repetition and exposure to experienced operators handling real situations.
Yet in financial advice, we often do the opposite. A newer adviser gets technically competent, ticks the compliance boxes, then suddenly finds themselves sitting alone in a room with clients expected to lead difficult conversations, build trust and confidently ask for a fee. Preferably without visibly sweating through their RM Williams shirt.
Let them observe how experienced advisers navigate emotion, handle objections and respond appropriately when a client casually mentions they’ve moved half their super into crypto.
Over time, they’ll naturally start developing a style that feels authentic to them.
Practice.
Many advisers would rather explain a superannuation contribution cap for 14 minutes than directly ask a client whether they’d like to proceed.
Run client conversation drills. Rehearse scenarios. Practise delivering fees until they sound calm, confident and natural.
Don’t just rehearse technical conversations either. Practise follow-up calls. Asking for referrals. Handling silence after delivering a fee. Commercial confidence is built in the uncomfortable moments, not just the polished ones.
In our consulting work, we spend a lot of time helping advisers become better at “speaking fees”. It can make an enormous difference to their conversion rates.
Here’s the quick-and-dirty version.
Speaking Fees 101
- Be completely sure of the value you bring and confident the fee represents good value. If you don’t believe in the value, your client never will.
- Break the initial fee into an Advice fee and Implementation fee. There’s value in both services, so make sure to educate the client on this.
- Present the fee verbally and visually. Write it on a whiteboard while you explain it.
- Speak confidently and without apology. It’s not a question. Your fee is not up for debate.
- Gain the client’s agreement to proceed verbally and in writing.
Mentor.
Mentorship needs to be far more deliberate than a quick check-in every few months or hoping newer advisers will simply “pick things up” as they go.
Debrief client meetings together. Review difficult conversations. Give feedback in real time. Let newer advisers gradually lead parts of meetings while still having support around them.
Where older generations may have tolerated more of a “sink or swim” environment, younger employees will disengage when they feel unsupported or unclear on expectations.
That doesn’t mean they need hand-holding forever. But it does mean mentorship today needs to be more consistent, practical and accessible. Our younger advisers expect more than being thrown a laptop, a login and a “good luck”.
And if you don’t have the time, desire or skillset to develop this internally, don’t skip it altogether. Outsource it to a partner who can help you build these skills properly.
Measure.
Practices used to spend far more time training on communication, conversion and business development skills. But as commercial incentive structures for advisers fell out of favour, many firms became cautious of anything that felt too sales-driven.
And it seems that the commercial training disappeared along with the incentives.
If you want commercially capable advisers, you need to measure and develop commercial behaviours. Not just file quality and compliance outcomes, but things like client conversion rates, referral activity, implementation rates and new business generation.
What gets measured, gets improved.
Advice is still a people business. And that means teaching advisers how to confidently sit across the table from another human being, guide decisions well and contribute commercially to the business around them.
These skills can absolutely be learned.
We just need to start teaching them again.
