How Do You Become Great? You Practice!

It’s always interesting that the world of sports is studied often to learn how to improve businesses. What makes it so interesting is that in sports a lot of time is spent practicing for the big games. Football is a great example. Typically, there is one game a week and all other days are focused on improvement. 

That improvement takes the shape of many activities including drills to focus on specific skills, watching film of the last game to see where improvements can be made, watching film of the opponent you will be facing to understand their strengths and weaknesses, conditioning, strength building, etc. However, the majority of the time the focus is on being ready to play on game day.

Business is the opposite, especially in the financial services industry. Almost all time is spent on activities that are considered “game day.” Very little time is spent on practice. And when there is practice, it’s often with actual clients or “on the job.”

The problem with this is that practice is important. When you practice with real clients it’s hard to give immediate feedback, which hinders learning. Without proper practice, it’s easy to fall back into bad habits which simply strengthens those habits and skills you don’t want. And it means clients don’t always get the best experience.

Successful businesses understand that practice is important, and they create time for practice. The good news is that practice doesn’t have to be long or even complicated to work. There are easy and quick elements that you can implement within your agency that will allow your team to grow fast. Today we want to focus on just one technique that works well in this industry, but that is often overlooked:

Flashcards! This is an easy-to-implement way to have your team take even 5 minutes a day to refocus and practice. Flashcards are great because once done they can be used by individuals within short time frames. It’s not a group activity. They can be easy to update and refresh so the learning material doesn’t grow stale. Consider flashcards that teach:

• Common questions clients have and the language you want your team to use when answering those questions
• What life events to listen for and how to cross-sell to solve those needs
• Product knowledge
• Common objections clients have, and the language used to overcome those objections
• Common problems clients may not know they have and how to tackle those topics
• Powerful questions your team can use to open conversations
• Points of views that you want your team to adapt
  • Your Culture Value Statement
  • Your Customer Service Promise
  • What makes a productive working relationship with vendors
• Quotes that inspire you and your team
• What to do if a client….
  • Has a claim
  • Has a billing question
  • Has a complaint
  • Leaves a bad review
• How to deal with upset clients
  • We like to use Take the H.E.A.T which is a team training that provides an easy-to-use method to interact with difficult clients

The list of what could be on a flashcard is endless, but what we know is that they are easy ways to fit practice into an agency that is already busy.