This article will discuss financial services and general financial sales trends for 2022.

As we go through this topic, we will cover:

• What is financial services
• What trends are occurring in the financial services sector?
• How are these trends impacting financial sales?
• What tools and processes should financial sales implement now.

Note: Always use Grammarly to ensure your emails are rock solid.

 

What are financial services?

Financial services are products and services that help individuals and companies manage their finances. Services include banking, investment, and insurance.

 

Financial services trends to watch in 2022

According to an article in Forbes on “The 5 Biggest Financial Services Tech Trends In 2022“, the five tech trends are:

• Mobile banking — we would broaden this to mobile finances overall.
• Banking in the cloud
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Blockchain
• Improving customer experience with technology

Others, like Deloitte, note similar trends such in their research.

How are these challenges impacting the sales process in financial services companies?

 

Trends in financial sales

Financial services firms are dealing with consumers who are growing more sophisticated, increasing competition, and, above all else, a growing risk for knowledge loss in their workforce. 

Much like other industries outside of high tech.

Sales processes, human resources, sales teams themselves must change to support growing complexity and challenge.

• The buying journey is now (primarily digital). While some buyers will want a return to in-person conversations, many have grown comfortable getting advice, purchasing policies and investements and doing banking over the phone or via Zoom meetings.
• At the micro-level, buyer conversations, deal updates, and the sharing of resources are flowing through mobile devices via SMS, custom, and off-the-shelf platforms. Even in face-to-face situations, expect to see tablets and mobile phones sharing information using side-by-side selling techniques to further supplement conversations between advisors and clients.
• At the macro-level, you need to ensure all of your systems are integrated, from your central financial systems, third party data, and through your Sales content delivery and document automation platforms. And you need all of that data informing you how to improve your go-to-market efforts.
• Data collection and analysis are everywhere, ensuring efficiency based upon real-time market data — we are moving faster than ever.
• Laws and regulations are growing in size and complexity daily, and changing across borders, making it hard for advisors and the firms they work for to stay in compliance.

Financial sales teams have to move faster, and with more care, than ever before.

 

Tools and processes that financial sellers should implement now

What tools and processes should your financial sales teams implement in 2022?

 

Build organization alignment via OKRs

It would help if you used a goal-setting methodology that creates alignment across the teams. Please read our article on Trust Enablement about creating OKRs and also check out this article on Dunbar’s Number and how companies like Gore-Tex are using this insight to drive impressive results.

There are a number of tools to consider in this area, our current favorite?  Profit.co.

 

Map your buyer and customer journeys

It’s essential to understand your goals and your prospects and existing customers.

As you map this journey, you will find friction points in the processes and opportunities to improve the overall sales process.

 

Employ Enablement and Operations

You know where you and your customers want to go, now leverage Sales/Revenue Enablement and Revenue operations to get your sales teams ready and map progress.

 

Check out our recommendations for Sales Enablement tools for financial services for guidance.

 

Capture and distribute knowledge with an LMS or Sales learning platform

Clients are often confused when meeting with their financial advisors.  While some are well educated, the complexity of financial markets make it difficult for anyone, including the advisors, to keep up.

They often know the industry, and even your solutions, as well or better than you do.

To be successful, you have to invest time in training your sales teams on all of that, of course, and give them the tools they need to find information at the moment of need (as there is too much information for any of us to retain without out).

To meet the challenges sellers have around staying ahead of buyers, you need solutions that:

• Deliver scheduled micro-learning solutions to sellers to reinforce areas you know they need.
• Deliver access to training and insights when they need it (from the CRM, email, mobile device, or other tools they are working within).

There are tons of excellent tools available in this space to help with these needs, here are our current favorites.

 

Your sales process

We just discussed that your buyers likely know as much, or more, than you — this raises the bar on how well you must execute.

A key factor to consider for excellent execution is running a flawless sales process, lead qualification, and in-depth discovery.

Learn more about, and implement methodologies like MEDDIC, BANT, or Command of the Message.

And if you are already a Salesforce CRM user, consider checking out iSEEit as their solution runs right inside the CRM and helps you, monitor, enforce, and manage the MEDDIC sales methodology where your managers already work.

Summary

The financial sales team of 2022 will need to be aware of all these challenges and trends and be prepared to implement the necessary changes.