By Shabri Lakhani, CEO of SalesWorks
With fintech being one of the fastest growing sectors, the industry attracts a large number of early-career sales professionals. However, sales in the fintech industry can be particularly difficult due to the nature of the product being sold. With no physical item involved, it can be hard to know how to sell a fintech product to a potential buyer. This means sales teams within fintech businesses must invest heavily in sales training, particularly at the onboarding stage of a salesperson’s lifecycle within the company.
Oftentimes, fintech represents a ‘nice to have’ not a ‘need to have’ product solution for businesses. Many fintech companies’ offerings are not absolutely necessary components of a team’s tech stack but are a luxury that can ease burdens and refine processes, making it easier for firms to serve their clients. The nature of what fintechs are explains why sales training is so critical to fintech companies. When selling a ‘nice to have’, extremely skilled sales representatives are necessary to show the true value of products to build a powerful use case.
Why training fails
The primary reason most sales leaders stop training their representatives is that they don’t see the value in it, probably because in the past when they’ve tried it, it’s failed. However, the real reason training fails is because they don’t do it correctly.
Leaders often don’t devote the amount of time necessary to training their representatives. Training isn’t something that can be done once a week, it needs to be a recurrent process. Normally, leaders don’t attach any ROI (return on investment) to their training. If the impact of training is not measured, teams will never fully understand its value.
The first thing to do is to start measuring the impact of training. Define the objectives, set expectations, and share them with the team. An example of this could be training representatives on cold calling with the objective of increasing the conversion rate by a specific percentage
Next, be sure to give training the time it needs and deserves. Although leaders may prefer to see representatives on the phone with customers, they should consider how even the smallest amount of training could maximise the potential of those interactions with prospects.
Perhaps most importantly, leaders need to get involved in the training themselves. When leaders engage in training it shows they recognise the value and are genuinely interested in what their team is getting trained on. This has an impact on the representatives too, as they recognise that their manager is spending valuable time with them.
More growth, more problems
The fintech industry is rapidly growing, and it’s critical that firms stand out from the ever-growing competition. In many instances, like for that of a payments company, sales experience can be what differentiates between competition. If the marketplace is flooded with solutions that are all relatively similar, a great sales team is how to cut through the noise.
Ultimately, people remember how sales representatives make them feel, and that’s done through the sales experience. Teams must be able to build rapport, connect with prospects, and offer value- a poorly trained sales team will not be able to do this. Sales training enables teams to deliver engaging, differentiated pitches and demos that leave a lasting impression.
Fintech is a very competitive market, meaning creating value is paramount to sales. The best way to do this is by understanding who the clients are, what they want, what problems they face, and how the product could potentially fix them. Value comes from the product, service, and the businesses itself when making fintech sales. This makes it critical for all sales representatives to understand value during training.
A technical sale
As fintech products are often complex, representatives might instantly default to feature and function when selling, which ultimately isn’t a very compelling sales conversion. Potential clients care about their business rather than the software. Sales representatives need to make sure they are ‘problem-finding’, not ‘problem-solving’. By understanding the problems facing a potential client, it is far easier to communicate how the features and functionality of a fintech offering can be helpful, and proper sales training is how fintechs ensure their representatives are selling with empathy.
Representatives should be speaking with confidence about the product being sold. Before the client makes the decision to buy a product, they need to be reassured that it’s worth the investment and that it’s something of use for their business. Sales leaders need to make sure that sales representatives fully understand the features of the product and the most attractive aspects for each client, alongside being confident and enthusiastic enough to complete a sale.
To maximise growth and revenue, fintechs need to invest in robust sales training to ensure they have a sales team well equipped to sell the often-complex products. Getting in touch with a sales training provider will help sales leaders design and deploy effective sales training programmes.
To learn more about how to effectively train sales teams please visit: https://www.salesworks.io/
