As 2025 winds to a close, the team at Anthony Cole Training Group is enjoying the holiday season and deeply grateful for 3 things:

1. The gratifying work we are able to do
2. The dedicated team we have that works together
3. Our amazing clients whom we get to work with

Our passion for unleashing greatness in salespeople is greatly enhanced by the wonderful relationships with companies and individuals all over the country. As we count our blessings, please know how much you mean to us and that we will continue to be invested in your team’s success in the coming years. Regardless of whether or not you are a client, or a friend, or if you simply follow our content online, we are here for you and stand ready to help you unleash your greatness!

December is such a special time of year as it reminds us all of the power of hope. In the movie The Shawshank Redemption, Andy says to Red, “Hope is a good thing…maybe the best of things.” From our company to yours, we hope your 2026 is filled with joyful hope for an even better tomorrow and an abundance of success building and growing your business! 

Value selling in financial services is a powerful differentiator because, when done well, financial services salespeople help customers navigate some of their most important life decisions, such as buying a home or investing for retirement. 

Value-based selling is client-centered. Once you become masterful in this approach, you will know who to help and how your guidance will benefit them. Value-based selling also provides insight into why prospects and clients want and need your products, services, and advice.

Value-Based Selling Is Rooted in Motivation

In your role as a financial services salesperson, your customer often needs to make a change, and change is difficult. Statistics around diet and exercise are proof of that. Unfortunately, many things people are supposed to do simply do not happen.

Value selling in financial services is no different. Change is not easy for those you meet and advise. The equation for change has two forces working against each other: escaping how things are now and resisting change itself. Value-based selling requires motivating your client to change, and in some cases, motivating yourself to change your approach as well.

The Importance of Value-Based Selling

Inevitably, customers will have reservations about a product or service. That is why an effective value-based selling approach first centers on the client and their needs, while secondarily demonstrating your company’s value and guiding them through the sales process.

The measure of value you provide depends entirely on the client. You can offer the same solution to two different people and receive two very different reactions.

For example, imagine discussing an inheritance a prospect has recently received. They may or may not share everything you need to know to advise them properly. Through strong questioning and listening skills, you must uncover what matters most to them. It could be rate of return, safety, or liquidity. You should also understand how this asset fits into their broader financial picture.

Once you identify their needs and goals, you can make a value-based recommendation. Too often, salespeople begin the conversation by discussing their solutions. A value-based seller starts with the prospect, asks thoughtful questions, uncovers priorities, and then makes a recommendation. Helping the client understand the benefits of working with you and your firm comes last.

When you help customers clearly see the best solution for their situation, you earn the business nine times out of ten.

Value-based selling is the proven path to becoming a trusted advisor. Your greatest value is often revealed through the depth and quality of the questions you ask. Strong value-based sellers remain curious and strive to add value in every interaction, whether through insight, resources, stories, or even appropriate humor.

Tips for Practicing Value-Based Selling

Giving Instead of Selling

The most important principle of value-based selling is focusing on giving to clients, not selling to them. The book Go-Givers Sell More reinforces this mindset. Unlike other methodologies, value-based selling focuses on what the client wants and how you can help them achieve their goals.

Value-based selling in financial services is a relationship-building process that is often personal. A key part of your value is the process you guide clients through as you provide advice and solutions.

Giving a Listening Ear

You may have experienced someone asking you a question and interrupting before you finish answering. It does not feel good. Unfortunately, financial services salespeople are often guilty of this behavior.

You might ask a client what they plan to use funds for and then immediately jump to a product recommendation without further exploration. Using a value-based selling approach means diving deeper into discovery, asking better questions, and truly listening.

Skilled salespeople know that trust is built through listening. Challenge yourself to ask as many questions as possible before proposing a solution. This skill improves with practice.

Spend Time Getting to Know Your Client

Every client is different. The early stages of the relationship should be focused on learning as much as possible about them. Understanding how similar clients have been helped and sharing relevant examples builds credibility.

Your products may be available elsewhere, but your experience uncovering issues and solving similar challenges is what highlights your value.

Follow Through with a Consistent Process

Value selling in financial services is not easy. Becoming proficient requires consistent focus, effort, and discipline. Through thousands of evaluations, we know that elite salespeople follow a consistent sales process because it works.

Strong value-based sellers care just as much about the benefits their clients receive as they do about the sale itself.

A value-based selling strategy is essential to improving your sales plan and results. This approach positions you as a trusted business advisor and helps build strong, long-term client relationships.

Below are the value-based selling competencies identified by our partner, Objective Management Group, the number one sales evaluation and assessment tool in the industry.

Find Out if Your Salespeople Can Sell Value with a Free Evaluation!

Why This Competency Group Is the Hardest to Improve 

When you think about improving your sales team’s performance, you probably start with skills: questioning techniques, qualifying, closing, or navigating the buyer’s process. Skills matter. They are visible, coachable, and measurable. But skills alone do not determine whether a salesperson succeeds. 

At the foundation of your team’s performance lies something more intrinsic and far harder to shape: their Will to Sell. 

Our partners frequently tell us that leaders can train skills, implement processes, and improve coaching. But they cannot easily teach the internal drive that fuels sustained sales effort. That is why Will to Sell consistently emerges as the most difficult competency group to develop or change. You can train skills, implement processes, and refine coaching. But you cannot easily teach the internal drive that fuels sustained sales effort. 

Will to Sell is the engine behind behaviors you see every day: effort, resilience, follow-through, accountability, and the willingness to do the difficult work on a consistent basis. Understanding it gives you the clearest, most accurate picture of how your team will perform in real-world selling situations. 

What Exactly Is “Will to Sell”? 

OMG’s Will to Sell competency group includes five core competencies that sit at the heart of drive and effort: 

1. Desire – How badly a salesperson wants to achieve sales success 
2. Commitment – Their willingness to do the necessary, often uncomfortable work to reach their goals
3. Motivation – Whether they have a compelling “Why” and a path to achieve it 
4. Responsibility – Whether they take ownership for outcomes or fall back on excuses
5. Outlook – Their mindset, optimism, and emotional response to adversity 

Together, these competencies reveal who each person on your team is at their core. They influence everything from activity levels to resilience, long before any selling skill comes into play. 

Why Will to Sell Is the Hardest Part of Sales Performance to Improve 

You can train a salesperson to ask better questions or follow a qualification process. You can coach objection handling or help them navigate a complex deal. 

But you cannot directly teach someone to want success more. You cannot force resilience. You cannot coach genuine accountability into someone who prefers excuses. 

There are three primary reasons why improving Will to Sell is uniquely challenging: 

1. These competencies come from deeply rooted beliefs and habits.

Accountability, commitment, and optimism are built over years. Training alone for 6 to 9 months is not enough to replace long-standing patterns of behavior. 

2. Motivation is personal and often misunderstood.

Many leaders assume compensation drives performance. OMG data shows that the majority of salespeople actually have an intrinsic motivation style. Only about a quarter  of salespeople are extrinsically motivated. If you coach or reward your team in ways that conflict with how they are wired, motivation will decline rather than increase. 

3. Will to Sell influences behavior before skill ever shows up. 

Low commitment, a negative outlook, or weak responsibility typically results in: 

• inconsistent activity 

• lack of follow-through 

• missed pipeline milestones 

• avoidance of difficult conversations 

• difficulty bouncing back from setbacks 

Training cannot compensate for the absence of effort. This is why many teams struggle to see lasting improvement, even after investing heavily in training programs. 

What Shapes Your Team’s Will to Sell? 

OMG’s decades of research show several key factors that significantly influence Will to Sell. 

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation 

Salespeople perform best when their environment aligns with their dominant motivational style. Coaching against this natural wiring can quickly reduce motivation. 

Mindset and Beliefs 

A salesperson with a limited outlook or negative mindset will struggle with rejection, adversity, and uncertainty. These internal beliefs shape how consistently they pursue opportunities. 

Commitment to Do the Hard Things 

Commitment is not about intensity. It is about consistency. A committed salesperson does the difficult work even when they do not feel like it. Someone who is merely “interested” in success will only do the work when it feels convenient. 

Accountability 

Excuse-makers rarely perform at a high level because they attribute problems to external circumstances rather than actions they can control. 

Understanding these influences helps you see why Will to Sell matters so deeply and why it is such a powerful predictor of performance. 

Desire and Commitment Are Important, but They Do Not Tell the Whole Story 

Desire and Commitment are strong leading indicators. Salespeople who score high in these competencies typically: 

• ramp faster 

• adopt coaching more readily 

• embrace new processes 

• stay consistent when pressure increases 

However, Desire and Commitment alone do not determine whether a sales candidate is recommended on OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessment. 

Your candidates and team members must be evaluated against all 21 Core Sales Competencies, including: 

• Qualifying 

• Consultative Selling Capabilities 

• Overcoming a Desire for Approval 

• Reaching Decision Makers 

• Efficient Use of Sales Technology  

• Staying in the Moment During a Sales 

A salesperson with strong internal drive, but major skill gaps, may struggle to perform in certain roles. Likewise, someone with strong skills but weak will often fails to execute consistently. This is why OMG’s recommendation algorithm evaluates the entire competency profile, role requirements, and predictive performance DNA. 

The Bottom Line: Do Your Salespeople Have the Will to Sell? 

Will to Sell is the foundation that determines whether your people will execute, improve, and perform under pressure. It shapes resilience, accountability, and effort, and it is the single hardest competency group to improve once someone is already in the role. 

If you want to build a high-performing team, you need to understand who has the internal drive to succeed, who needs development, and where the risk areas lie. 

Evaluating your team’s Will to Sell—alongside all 21 Core Sales Competencies—gives you the clearest path to hiring stronger salespeople, developing your current team, and building a sales organization designed to win. 

Football, fantasy or reality, is in season right now, and it is true that all year long I often think and talk like a football player or coach in my role as a sales coach.
• “You’re out of bounds.”
• “That’s a Hail Mary!”
• “That’s a long shot.”
• “What do we have to do to win?”

Understanding the game and coordinating a successful football team requires consistent study, planning and practice. Like a high-performing sales team, a winning football team requires a high level of desire and commitment to:

1. Teammates

2. Skill development

3. Disciplined practice

4. Courage, motivation and respect for one another

Working with the team and coaching staff at Moeller, I saw firsthand how much the “sports” of sales and football have in common. The following sales productivity tools are inspired by the practices and systems that improve players and overall performance. Selling is a competition, and just like in football, the right team, perfect practice and smart planning win the game and increase sales.

9 Sales Productivity Tools

1. Practice Schedule

All professionals need practice. Every team has a detailed practice schedule that breaks the game into units: offensive line, defensive line, running backs, linebackers, special teams, two-minute drill and punt return.

Create a practice schedule for your sales team that focuses on key sales skills such as asking for introductions, qualifying a prospect, the initial call, developing the relationship and delivering a presentation.

2. Sales Prospect Scorecard

A Scorecard is like yard markers on a football field. They tell you how far you need to go to score and how much ground you must defend.

The Sales Prospect Scorecard gives you an accurate read on the likelihood of winning or losing a deal and clarifies exactly where you are in your sales process.

3. Sales Huddles

Just like football huddles, sales huddles create a real-time communication system so leaders can make real-time decisions.

Set a consistent sales huddle schedule and stick to it. Use this time to gather current information and coach to what is happening now.

4. Personal Goal Setting to Business Plan

Football programs evaluate objectives based on past performance, expected competition and the talent available. Do the same with your sales organization. Have each salesperson identify personal goals and translate them into a personal business plan they are committed to executing to increase sales. Then after meeting with them and establishing their ‘extraordinary’ year goals, agree to annual goals based on their personal goals, previous performance and market expectations.

Download our 7-page Personal & Business Work Plan!

5. Sales Success Formula

Every football team knows what metrics they must hit to win: required yards on first down, completion percentage, yards per play and more. Your Sales Success Formula should clarify the critical steps in your sales process, conversion ratios and common choke points, giving you a targeted coaching roadmap. Get specific.

6. Ideal Week

Each team enters a game with a clear plan. They know which plays to run in specific situations and which defenses to call based on field position and tendencies. Flexibility is understood, but the plan guides the game.

Create an Ideal Week for your salespeople. Define what a productive sales week looks like. This is one of the most important sales productivity tools you can implement.

7. Pre-Call Checklist

During practice, offensive coordinators review pre-snap situations so players can adjust quickly depending on the defense.

Use a Pre-Call Checklist to help salespeople prepare for important appointments. Coach them to execute required steps and Q3 (Qualify, Qualify, Qualify) the prospect. Role-play to help them adjust based on the prospect’s responses.

8. Post-Call Debrief

Football coaches review film to measure performance against planned execution. The Post-Call Debrief allows sales managers to evaluate the call, provide corrective action, suggest follow-up steps and coach for skill improvement.

9. Performance Recording

Football teams rely on digital recordings for immediate performance feedback. Reviewing film is more impactful than relying on memory or data alone.

Record sales role-plays during training sessions. Your salespeople will benefit greatly from observing themselves, allowing their performance to be coached, refined and improved.

FAQ: Sales Productivity Tools

How do sales productivity tools help increase sales?
Sales productivity tools give sales teams structure, clarity and consistency. When managers and salespeople follow tools like scorecards, huddles, practice schedules and debriefs, they improve daily behaviors and make more effective sales decisions, which directly helps increase sales.

What is the most important sales productivity tool?
While every tool has value, the Sales Success Formula and the Sales Probability Scorecard are foundational. They help sales teams understand where they are in the sales process, what must improve and what actions drive wins.

Why are football concepts used to explain sales productivity?
Football and selling share core elements: preparation, practice, discipline and execution. Using football analogies makes it easier to understand how structured systems and consistent coaching help salespeople improve skills and increase sales.

How often should sales teams use these tools?
Daily and weekly. Practice schedules, huddles and activity plans should be used every week. Pre-call checklists and post-call debriefs should be used on every meaningful sales opportunity.

Can new salespeople benefit from these tools?
Yes. These sales productivity tools help new salespeople build strong habits early, shorten their learning curve and develop the skills needed to increase sales with confidence.

We encourage them to make sure they are in front of all the decision-makers and to make sure that they know exactly what the decision-making process looks like. We even coach our clients to inquire about the decision-making criteria so they know for sure how their proposal is going to be compared against other options. When sales fear takes over, these important questions often get skipped.

How Sales Fear Limits the Conversation

In short, we teach salespeople to ask about everything.

But that rarely happens. Sometimes salespeople don’t even ask about anything.

Why, you ask? Why would a salesperson know the right thing to do and then not do it?

If you guessed fear as the reason, you are correct. While they have been coached on the right things to do, they succumb to their fear of either asking the question or their fear of hearing the answer. In essence, they are afraid. And yes, that could be due to a weak pipeline. As my colleague Jack Kasel is fond of saying, weak pipelines make cowards of us all. A weak pipeline only amplifies sales fear.

But here is what they should fear more than the fears listed above. They should be very afraid of not being bold and assertive. Specifically, they should fear the outcomes that are typically the result of not getting to the decision-makers or not getting all the truth in terms of whether or not the prospect is really compelled to change an existing relationship. Afterall, you can either lose, or you can be afraid.  Just don’t be both.

Fear has two acronyms:

1. False Expectations Appearing to be Real

2. Face Everything And Rise.

The choice is yours.

FAQ: Sales Fear and Timidity

What is sales fear?
Sales fear is the hesitation or anxiety salespeople feel when asking tough questions, confronting decision-makers, or seeking clarity during the sales process.

How does sales fear impact sales performance?
Sales fear often leads to incomplete conversations, missed questions, weak qualification, and an overreliance on hope instead of clarity. This results in stalled deals and poor outcomes.

Why do salespeople avoid asking tough questions?
Many salespeople know what to ask but fear hearing the answer. A weak pipeline also increases sales fear, making reps more timid and less assertive.

How can sales fear be reduced?
Building a strong pipeline, practicing assertive conversations, and learning structured questioning techniques help reduce sales fear and increase confidence.

What role does clarity play in overcoming sales fear?
Clarity allows salespeople to understand whether a prospect is truly qualified. When clarity becomes the goal, fear loses its power over the conversation.