Your value must be bought, not sold.

When it comes to client acquisition and business development, the most enlightened philosophy is that of stewardship, not salesmanship. Salesmanship asks a client to buy something, chasing them with closing techniques and trying to convince them to take action. Stewardship asks a client to buy into something, attracting them with a process-driven, win-win approach, and letting them come to their own conclusions – convincing themselves with reason and self-motivation.

Why is this so important? In the world of transactional one-off encounters, salesmanship is used to drive business and capture a buyer’s fleeting enthusiasm before their intent diminishes, but you’re not selling a car. This is not a transaction. Your value must be bought, not sold. Salesmanship seeped into the F4S world as a way to drive business. At conferences, language like “You eat what you kill,” “You’re a hunter gathering assets,” “Squeeze more juice out of the orange to gain more wallet share,” “Increase your net-new households,” “Open up new accounts” and “You have to drive production,” became common. The problem is, that kind of jargon is from the lexicon of the coin-operated brokers of the world.

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