And so it begins… you pick up that phone, you dial a number and YES, you get an answer… at the other end of the line an angry, tired from a difficult morning at work individual, who registered on your website because he saw a promotional banner that he doesn’t remember, doesn’t know what it is that you do and has no interest whatsoever in spending any European, American or Japanese currency on your offering.

On the other hand, online and offline campaigns, a massive pool of media buying options, countless possibilities for lead generation… With online marketing going nuke and the cost of acquiring more precious forex leads hovering above your rise or fall, I ask “is canvassing for prospects still an option?”

The general trend is that you still have the option to canvas for prospects. But then the dreaded report comes only to show that a massive percentage of your forex leads are indeed irrelevant. I named these leads irrelevant, since the term is synonymous with not here nor there, non material and unrelated. Since they have no idea what they’ve done, why they approached you, don’t know who you are, what you do or what you are offering, the term seemed appropriate.

While some people would argue that time well spent is time that makes money which reflects time spent where interested prospects rule, I will tend to disagree. With those irrelevant leads, Sales Reps differentiate themselves from the swarm.

 

Between these irrelevant forex leads and the goal of you making a paying customer out of them, lies a far thinner line than most Sales Reps think. This line includes:

 

Making yourself relevant to them before they become relevant to you
Spending the same amount of energy as you would on a prospect
Ask questions and understand the lead’s surroundings, work, interests to find a connection
Provide information and educate
Send material, links, videos, reading material to gain interest for further follow ups
and what do you know…? That report is not so dreaded anymore, is it?

We are living in the era of blaming each other and the same as in every civilized realization, we need to find someone to blame right? So if we’ve come to agree that canvassing for prospects is bad, who’s to blame for “it” happening? Definitely not the irrelevant forex leads that found a way to crawl into your report and surely not the Sales Rep that has not been educated about what sales are not about.

Sales are not just about knowledge and skills. Through time they evolved into a new-fangled monster called Attitude. So ask yourself and determine whether your attitude is to over think and canvass rather than closing one more sale.

 

Conclusion

 

To conclude, if you are a Director who promoted a Sales Manager just to fill a role, or a Sales Manager who accepted this role with not enough know how to carry out the task, or a Sales Rep that despite the aforementioned still canvasses to make a sale…

Can you now say “Guilty as charged”?

“Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can’t be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” Martin Heidegger.

Forex sales require knowledge and skills, attitude and habits, scripts and time management, team and personal ambition, motivation and hard work…

The question is which of the above do we possess? Some or maybe all of the above attributes must have already marked our career, shaken the foundations of who we were, shaped who we’re going to become in the future.

We often hear cases like “this guy can sell ice to an Eskimo” or “she can sell coals to Newcastle” or to go a step further, I read somewhere that there are individuals who can actually  “sell underwear to nudists…”

A closer look to the colossal collection of Sales Reps that the sales world collected since the need for trade was discovered only proves that using sales effort is a must where “need” is nowhere to be found. And since all monopoly roads closed, open markets dominate and vicious competition eliminated any possibilities for differentiation, I ask “Do you or your product still feel needed?” I guess you know the answer better than anyone and it possibly inclines towards no, unless you’re one of those who believe that your impeccable service is what characterizes you and yada yada…

 

What changed though and why does it have to be so unsettling?

 

• We can all agree that the buying end of selling changed
• Prospects can read between the lines; they see right through you and your product
• Repletion in everything nourished fierce competition, eliminated differentiation
• Social media being the number one influencer in the majority of decisions
• AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action) is 116 years old (1898). Driving customers through the purchase funnel, is well… kind of irrelevant
• Prospects might allow you to walk with them through their purchasing process; though they have no need, but no need whatsoever to walk with you through the selling process.

So if we agree that all of the above are painting the true picture, does this render sales obsolete? How is it even remotely possible for someone to perform under such conditions?

 

Food for thought

 

Forex sales reps continuously search for their identity. So let’s see… If you’re one to have excellent time management, you probably waste half the day, creating follow ups, writing CRM entries, categorizing your database, read like there’s no tomorrow before you decide to make a call. On the other hand if you’re one to have excellent number of calls, you probably have low if non existent time management efficiency, so you basically cross all your fingers and toes and hope for the best (other wise known as a call center operation).

You reached your targets by the middle of the month. Now what? Do you continue with a bigger end goal or do you call it a day? Where do you draw the line between what you say and how much of it you believe? To what length will you go to make a sale? Will you be pushy and make one hundred and thirty two follow ups or will you give up after your prospect said “don’t call me again”?

So many questions in one’s attempt to evaluate a sales person’s psychology. But do they really matter? Educating yourself on your environment, believing in your product, understanding your competitors, embracing the love/hate relationship for the sales role and most importantly respecting that there is a human being at the other end of the line are but a small sample of weapons in your armory to make you a great sales person.

And if somewhere in the process, you realize you’re one of those.. those charismatic individuals that can sell underwear to nudists (with a proven track record of sales), then what can a man say other than send an email at info@allfx-consult.com… we suddenly have a job opening..

---

 

If you’ve worked with as many forex sales managers as we did for over a decade, you must have realised by now that there are only two types that are worth looking into – the knowledgeable and the oblivious.

• Before we continue, ponder these:
• For every deal you lose, someone else is getting richer.
• If you lose a sale only because of your price, then you haven’t sold a thing.

 

What makes winning forex sales managers?

Selling in the forex industry (in any industry for that matter) is like a two sided coin. One side includes the variety of techniques used to sell the product; the other side includes the few types of people who know how to use them.

Good sales people know “stuff”; they know themselves, the company they work for, competition, the customers, substitutes of their offerings and more. You ask them a question and there is nothing they can’t match it with. You don’t ask them a question and there’s always a way to kick start a conversation.

 

Where do winning forex sales managers, acquire such knowledge?

Is it from their daily work, interacting with people, maybe from social media, possibly the countless calls and success/failures while they undergo the sales funnel? Or is it from the company and their direct managers?

Steps towards improving the knowledge and skill set of forex sales managers is more or less considered unnecessary for some, because the notion that “if a sales rep is good, he/she can sell ice to an Eskimo”, is still alive. How many sales reps did you come across that are like that? Especially in an industry as saturated as the forex industry, with no training and no support?

Irrefutably every company wants and needs trained personnel but they are limited by their experience, as well as how much the “head of the sales department” actually knows. At what level can he/she add value to the team, by strengthening their knowledge before deciding that he/she might not be enough?

 

So what’s next? What do we do now?

In the battle to keep overhead low, companies lean towards low costs instead of quality, superficial attitudes rather than substance, oversold backgrounds (with 5 page CVs) rather than filling in the gaps and wholes that are slowly sinking the Sales Department.

If we agree to act on this issue and admit our personnel is not trained properly, larger questions creep up like “what did we do wrong all this time?” “Why is the sales team not trained properly and who was supposed to train them?” We take a quick look back into the department’s history and realise our decision to hire a “cheap boss” who was mostly shouting and blaming rather than coaching and training, cost us a lot more than just money. We lost good people, we forgot the culture of the company, we forfeited our values, and we lost our department’s respect. Better late than never… now it’s time to do something about it.

On the other hand, if we don’t act on this issue it’s inevitable that employee attitudes will start to change, skills will continue to be underdeveloped, human resource will be underutilised (if you don’t train people, you will never know their full potential), expensive leads will be burned and money will be flushed down the drain. Another great quote asks “but what if we train our employees and they leave?” followed by the comeback “what if we don’t train them, and they stay”? I’ll leave this thought with you to analyse.

 

Conclusion

With over a decade in the industry, we can attest to the fact that if we don’t add value to our forex sales managers work, they will leave to find a better work environment and the vicious cycle will just continue to grow. Despite what might seem a healthy sales department, it’s always good to go back and evaluate the processes, the policies and procedures, the interdepartmental communication and most importantly each of our soldiers individually in order to have a more complete profile of the department’s function, rather than a report with numbers and in most cases over-exaggerated results (inflated numbers, more like excel numbers rather than money in a bank account).

Each team member’s full potential is not reached by pushing their own knowledge/experience but by adding to it through continuous development, support and training.

So if you’re reading this and you’re a forex sales manager, you should demand this from your boss. If you’re the boss and you don’t know what to do next, you need to reach out to someone who can.

 

---

 

About allFX-Consult:

allFX-Consult is a boutique forex consulting agency, catering to quality rather than quantity. For over a decade, we’ve been supporting Sales Teams with training methods that aim to create proactive thinkers, rather than reacting customer support.

We don’t compete with in-house Sales Managers. On the contrary we add value to their work by working closely and efficiently towards the same goal.

We’re chosen for being discreet, detail oriented and deadline driven.

You might be interested to take a look at:

How we setup a Sales Department

NEW | Remote Sales Management program

Contact us for a private conversation to discuss any forex related topic through the contact form or one of our emails at info@allfx–consult.com, partners@allfx-consult.com. We specialise in training sales teams and forex corporate structures for individuals that want to Start a Forex Brokerage.

---

 

Here’s to another day of calls, sales funnels and reports. You want to stay ahead of prospects but today’s vast array of information renders it impossible. Prospects are way ahead, much like those marathon runners who flash by you as you try to compete, gasping for air with each pace being more painful than the other… I know… a bit much but you get the point…

Throughout the years sales reps tend to accumulate a huge list of leads that are sitting in the forex database of a CRM system. And if the marketing strategy of the broker is strong, this list increases by the end of each day. Part of the forex sales process, requires a sales rep to know what’s in this forex database, in order to support the workflow via a focused, more targeted way of working.

 

How can a sales rep keep up with the ever increasing forex database?

Right or wrong, to simplify this question, we took the example of the ocean… Can we really know all the fish that are swimming in the ocean given the number of species, unlimited colour variations, size differences and so on? Don’t we have better chances knowing what’s in a smaller body of water, like a lake or an even smaller one, say a pond?

Point is, we cannot know all the leads that sit in our forex database unless we separate them in smaller pools of data, according to our dealings with them. Articles around the “era of Big Data” exploded and as a result of keeping up to date with today’s standards, customer relation management (CRM) systems do this for us and separate our forex database with categories and filters, more like those Matryoshka dolls that are nesting one inside the other. The idea; divide and conquer…

Other than providing segmentation and categorisation, CRM systems also act as business intelligence, analysing the information and providing input on the broker’s next steps, campaign ideas rendering the human creativity/experience/decision making obsolete.

 

What does separating the forex database mean for the sales rep’s role?

To answer that, maybe we should ask a different question first. In our quest for optimisation, automation, success, is it possible that we completely missed the point? And as a result, did we allow this quest to become a valid “excuse” for not doing what we’re supposed to do?

Let’s face it, most sales reps canvass for prospects, lose half the day reading past comments and scanning through categories rather than proactively picking up the phone and just, sell.

Truth is that there aren’t as many new/relevant leads coming on a daily basis, in contrast with a few years back. So from the broker’s perspective, how can we be sure that this tool we are providing to our sales department is working for… or against us? What happened to knowing and believing in our product, understanding and crashing our competitors, loving and hating the sales role? Correct me if I’m wrong but classifications like “not interested” or “potential” or “archive” or “active” matter very little when one’s determined to actually close a sale.

Not to level everything, having some knowledge of the prospect’s history is equally important and let’s face it; he who has knowledge spares his words and in the forex sales world, less (talking) is more, so having some of that precious history to work with definitely helps.

 

So what are we supposed to do with our forex database? I’m so confused…

To make a long story short, the sales job requires you to make the call and ultimately use your skills to get interest, not make yourself lose interest by the categorisations or comments of your forex database and ultimately lose any skills left to motivate you to make that call…

See what just happened?

Call – use skills – get interest   Vs   lose interest – doubt skills – no call.

 

Here’s what this article is trying to say:

– Brushing through the conversation history to gain perspective on how to proceed in a call is important.

– Don’t let overthinking and your emotions get the best of you. You will miss the point of why that history was given to you in the first place.

– Trust your sales training – if your training was adequate, nothing in the history you’re reading can change the outcome of the call. You will prevail.

– NOT always does a sale call equal closing business. A good sales call can be part of a series of calls, targeting a future outcome. As long as you proactively direct the calls, the target will be achieved.

 

Lastly, remember this:

A glass can be half full or half empty depending on how you look at it. In the forex sales world, everything relevant to our work, from an operation (backoffice, compliance, accounting etc) to a software like a CRM or a platform, if used efficiently and proactively can yield great results. If taken for what it is (just a system, just a platform, just compliance), it can actually make things worse both for our psychology and of course our results.

We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.Oscar Wilde

---

About allFX-Consult:

allFX-Consult is a boutique forex consulting agency, catering to quality rather than quantity. For over a decade, we’ve been supporting Sales Teams with training methods that aim to create proactive thinkers, rather than reacting customer support.

We don’t compete with in-house Sales Managers. On the contrary we add value to their work by working closely and efficiently towards the same goal.

We’re chosen for being discreet, detail oriented and deadline driven.

You might be interested to take a look at:

How we setup a Sales Department

NEW | Remote Sales Management program

Contact us for a private conversation to discuss any forex related topic through the contact form or one of our emails at info@allfx–consult.com, partners@allfx-consult.com. We specialise in training sales teams and forex corporate structures for individuals that want to Start a Forex Brokerage.

 

---

 

If you’re a sales rep and you’re reading this, how many times did you give proposals to your management about needs of your portfolio relevant to the forex product you sell and how many of those times, did they actually listen?

If you’re the management of a broker and you’re reading this, how do you know that your corporate decisions on your forex product are really what the market needs? How many times did you reject ideas deriving off your sales people, just because you think you know better?

It is an unfortunate fact – management tends to think that “smarts” or knowing how to put down a flashy business plan, are enough to create a saleable product and tend to forget that, what eyes and ears see and hear, in most cases are far more important. Who better to contribute to this plan, than the ones who actually interact with the potential customers, the already existing customers, the industry itself?

 

Why Sales Rep’s suggestions might build a better forex product?

Decisions made out of “we will be the leaders because we’re different only served a few back when differentiation was still an option. Especially in the forex industry with such fierce competition, unless we feel it’s pulse we are most definitely not getting anywhere.

In the past Sales Reps had a list of leads to call and it was all straight forward. Today the rise of social media platforms changed everything. We can’t wait for the lead to come to us anymore. We go out there and like and comment and clap and post and qualify our own leads. No argument here; if it’s a tactic that works, who are we to say no to numbers or the era of whatever it is that exceeds quotas? “Good old cold calls” replaced by “good new cold commenting” in the Social vortex.

Adding to the argument, not only Sales Reps know what prospects that looked into the product already (leads from the website) need, but they also know what prospects that didn’t look into the product (cold leads from social media or elsewhere) want.

 

How bad can interdepartmental communication be when building a forex product

We might be biased since we train sales people and spent most of our career managing sales departments, but honestly the next point does not intent to choose sides.

Take the communication between departments of a forex broker as an example. Due to the nature of this business, sales people are mostly treated harshly and unfairly. Their opinions are side-lined because notions like “they’re in it only for the money” or “they would do or say anything for money” are still clouding any effort to combine forces towards a common goal. In the constant battle to keep up with the trends and competition, how can you honestly think that allowing departments to operate as enemies can yield any positive outcome?

It’s a strategy for many “bosses” to want their departments to bud heads because friction means people are actually doing something, they become territorial and dominant (most of the times this relates to ownership of clients or overemphasising the importance of their work), which in result increases the chances of a profitable outcome for the mothership. If the “bosses” put more effort in supporting the departments with forex product and policies that matter, people wouldn’t blame each other so much for failures, the forex product would sell easier keeping everyone happy and workflow would be more efficient.

 

A good forex product is formed by the sweat and tears of the people who sell it

Successful forex brokers are empowering all their employees by giving them a voice, embracing their intentions (even if they don’t make the best suggestions), accepting them as important links to a bigger picture and most importantly, respect their work. No one’s arguing that management is the “brains” behind operations but imagine combining that with the eyes and ears of their soldiers; the market has a voice and it moves in directions. We would be foolish not to keep eyes/ears open and listen.

Finally if we can agree that sales equals income while everything else is an expense, I’m sure we can also agree that “everything else” includes management and “bosses”. So in the end we’re all working to support the sales function in its core, clear the paths towards a successful sale, administer, amend, add, remove anything needed to help the sales role.

So ask yourself, would you rather be the “boss” of a poor, under-performing forex brokerage? or a wealthy sales administrator?

What will you do the next time one of your Sales Reps comes to you with an idea?

---

 

About allFX-Consult:

allFX-Consult is a boutique forex consulting agency, catering to quality rather than quantity. For over a decade, we’ve been supporting Sales Teams with training methods that aim to create proactive thinkers, rather than reacting customer support.

We don’t compete with in-house Sales Managers. On the contrary we add value to their work by working closely and efficiently towards the same goal.

We’re chosen for being discreet, detail oriented and deadline driven.

You might be interested to take a look at:

How we setup a Sales Department

NEW | Remote Sales Management program

Contact us for a private conversation to discuss any forex related topic through the contact form or one of our emails at info@allfx–consult.com, partners@allfx-consult.com. We specialise in training sales teams and forex corporate structures for individuals that want to Start a Forex Brokerage.