Forex Sales Managers | Do they “know” and what are we doing about it?


 

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.

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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.compartners@allfx-consult.com. We specialise in training sales teams and forex corporate structures for individuals that want to Start a Forex Brokerage.