"To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do these every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three: you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be joy or sorrow. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week; you're going to have something special."

- Jimmy Valvano, March 4, 1993,  Acceptance Speech at the ESPY Awards for the Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian Award

So, here you are mid-year 2026. Are you having fun? Do you find yourself in a position to laugh on a regular basis, or do you take this business so seriously that you've lost your passion in sales and forgotten why you decided to get into professional selling? I've said this often over the last 14 years: "If you aren't having fun, get out and do something else." Life is too short not to have fun doing what you spend over 25% of your day doing.

Have Fun or Get Out

If you start having fun, you won't worry so much about selling, and the people you meet won't worry so much about being sold. It's kind of funny that way. Sure, you do serious things for your clients, but we're not going to remember the sale you made or didn't make. What your client will remember is you, and how you were there for them when they needed you the most. And if it isn't you, it will be someone else, so you might as well be memorable by having fun. Find a way to laugh when faced with difficulty. Find a way to smile and say something light when dealt a difficult situation. Find a way to ease someone else's burden with a smile and a laugh.

Money Isn't the Point

How much time do you spend thinking? Not only thinking about your next sale, or the coverage, or the terms of the contract, or the features and benefits of what you are selling, but also about you, where you are going, and what you will do once you get there. Certainly, most salespeople get into sales for the money. But then what? If you get reasonably good at what you do (selling), then money problems will go away. And by the way, if you really enjoy what you do, have fun at it, your money problems will go away too. So once you've decided that it isn't about chasing the money, what is it about?

I have a good friend, Tim Mackey. We've known each other now for over 30 years, and in our very first meeting we talked about money. Tim's perspective, which has become my perspective as well, is that money is a resource: a resource that buys you freedom, freedom of time and freedom of choice. Once you have all the money you need, what next? What goals do you have that are bigger than you? What goals do you have that would be beneficial to others? What goals do you have that are a testament that you did, in fact, make the world a better place for having been here?

What Passion in Sales Really Means

Is selling your passion? Or better yet, do you have passion for what you do and what it does for others? Selling the right things to the right people changes lives. It certainly changes your life, and if you've approached your prospect or client the right way and focused on them, not yourself, you change their life too. You bring something to the table that maybe, just maybe, buys them freedom: freedom of time and freedom to make choices. Choices like expanding a business, taking more time with family, retiring early from work, and following the passions of their heart.

Passion Is Non-Negotiable in Insurance

If you are in the insurance business, then you may be the most important person in someone's life when they need someone like you the most. When people face the tragedy of loss, they suffer emotionally, and many times physically and almost always financially. If you've done your job, you can eliminate the financial burdens they may be facing, which in turn will help them emotionally. But the key here is that you must be passionate about what you do. You must decide that your calling is to help as many people as possible.

You must decide that you are the one who will have the greatest impact on their life or business. That defines passion in selling.

Evolving technology, digital banking, and the rapid rise of AI have pushed one question to the top of every financial institution's list: what do customers actually want?

How individuals and companies find and access their banking and insurance solutions is shifting fast, making it harder than ever for FIs to keep pace. According to Maze Research, six trends are shaping customer experience in banking right now:

• Increased desire for high-quality mobile and digital banking

• Balance between self-service and in-person solutions

• Omnichannel strategies for seamless customer journeys

• Personalized experiences are key for retention

• Artificial intelligence for improved customer relationships

• Adoption of blockchain solutions

Understand Your Customer's Journey

A potential or current customer wants their bank or insurance company to understand their journey. Not just their buying journey, but how their current relationships, goals, and transactions build into their entire financial landscape. Because prospects come to the table with more information at their fingertips than ever before, here is what the banker or insurance agent must be prepared to do:

• Stop thinking about your products and services

• Ask enough questions to identify the buying stage and process of your prospect and match your approach to working with them in that buying process

• Understand that to move someone from the assessment stage to the decision stage, you must be more informative — about things the buyer doesn't already know and about things that matter to them

• This does not mean pitching them on the features and benefits of products or solutions offered

• This does mean you must be better at providing useful information, becoming a resource for business solutions, and guiding prospects through their buying stages

• To do that, you must have the skills to curiously and courageously ask enough of the right questions, which are ultimately the building blocks of the relationship

Offer Personalized Experiences for Building and Retaining Clients

It might seem redundant to suggest that the way to offer personalized experiences is also through asking enough of the right questions, but that is the case. Consultative selling is more than just putting the customer first; it's about centering everything around them. It's not "the customer is always right," but rather "the customer is always the focus."

At its core, consultative selling in banking is about understanding your prospect's challenges so thoroughly that your solution naturally becomes the right fit. When done well, it shifts the conversation away from pitching and toward partnering.

Attributes of a Consultative Seller

According to Objective Management Group (OMG), the pioneer and industry leader in sales team evaluations and sales candidate screening, consultative sellers share some core attributes. Use these as a checklist to sharpen your skills:

Aim to Develop Strong Relationships

Real trust doesn't come from surface-level rapport. It comes from deeper conversations. Move beyond small talk and get curious about your prospect's goals, frustrations, and motivations. It won't happen overnight. It's a process.

Ask Great Questions and More of Them

Great questions uncover pain points, highlight opportunities, and open doors. Avoid questions that lead you straight into presentation mode. The best questions help your prospect reflect and reveal what matters most to them. Don't stop when you think you have enough to build a proposal. Probe further. How is this problem impacting their team, their goals, or even them personally? Beneath every issue is a deeper reason to act. Find it.

Listen and Ask with Ease to Uncover Real Issues

Listening isn't about waiting for your turn to speak. It's about truly understanding what the prospect is saying, and what they're not. When they pause, ask clarifying questions. Don't assume you know what they mean. Confirm it. Your product alone isn't the solution. Understanding the true business challenge is. Consultative sellers uncover, and sometimes even help prospects discover, problems they weren't fully aware of.

Understand How They Buy

Forget your sales process. What matters is their buying process. Your job is to guide them through it, not force them into yours. Ask the right questions to help them recognize and gain clarity around their own urgency to address a problem or an opportunity.

Take Nothing for Granted

Even when things are going well, stay alert. Deals can fall apart quickly. The best sellers maintain healthy skepticism, stay curious, and continue to nurture the relationship at every stage.

The world of buying has changed dramatically. It's time to change the world of selling. That is what customers want from their financial institution.

There is one skill that can help you become a better leader, producer, parent, spouse, friend, and communicator. It is one of the most important skills you can develop, but many people do not work on it. In fact, many people really do not like it.

That skill is silence.

Most people are uncomfortable with silence. Even a few seconds can feel awkward. You may wonder if something is wrong, if you should jump in, or if the conversation has stalled. But in sales, leadership, negotiation, and conflict resolution, silence can do a lot of heavy lifting.

Why Silence Matters in Sales

When you are in a conversation with a prospect, client, employee, or team member, silence gives the other person room to think and respond. If you are willing to sit in the quiet instead of rushing to fill it, the person across from you may keep talking.

And when they talk, you learn.

That is where silence becomes powerful. You uncover more information. You hear what is really going on. You gain insight into the issue, the objection, the emotion, or the opportunity in front of you.

Salespeople often feel pressure to respond quickly, explain more, or keep the conversation moving. But you do not learn when you are talking. You learn when you listen.

Silence Can Help You Handle Difficult Conversations

Silence is especially useful when conversations become emotional or tense. In those moments, your instinct may be to defend, explain, or respond right away. But sometimes the best thing you can do is pause.

Jefferson Fisher, a well-known communicator, offers this advice: let your first word be a breath.

That pause can help you stay calm, avoid reacting emotionally, and respond with more intention. It also gives the other person space to finish their thought instead of feeling interrupted or dismissed.

Let People Finish Their Sentences

Another way to get better at silence is to practice letting people finish their sentences.

Many people struggle with this because they think they already know where the conversation is going. They want to jump in, respond, or move the discussion forward. But interrupting too soon can cause you to miss important information.

If you want to become a better listener, a better salesperson, and a better leader, practice waiting. Let the other person finish. Then pause before you respond.

That small habit can change the entire tone of a conversation.

Practice Silence Before High-Stakes Conversations

Like any other skill, silence takes practice.

Chris Voss refers to this as low-stakes practice for high-stakes results. In other words, do not wait until you are in front of a major prospect, a frustrated client, or an employee in a difficult conversation to try it for the first time.

Practice in everyday conversations. Try it with the barista at your local coffee shop. Try it with your mechanic. Try it with friends or family. Notice how often you want to jump in, and work on becoming more comfortable with the pause.

The more you practice, the less uncomfortable it becomes.

Your Best Sales Skill Might Be Being Quiet

People are not born naturally great listeners. Most people are not naturally comfortable with silence either. These are skills, and skills have to be practiced.

If you want to improve your conversations, your negotiations, your coaching, and your sales results, start by getting better at being quiet.

Ask a good question. Let the person answer. Let the silence sit. Listen to what they say next.

You may be surprised by how much you learn.

Sales organizations typically have plenty of sales data due to the growth and usage of CRM systems, which have become critical to capturing the activities occurring with the sales team. But using sales performance data to run effective sales meetings is often the greater challenge for sales managers and leaders. In our coaching platform, we offer several tools to help in this area, and one of the most effective, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-use tools is the sales data insights that come from holding regular Sales Huddles.

Why Huddles Help Coaches Run Effective Sales Meetings

Huddles, as defined by Verne Harnish, founder and president of Gazelles, are:

1. A communication process or system that allows for the sharing of real-time information
2. An opportunity to focus on "burning platform" issues for a team or company
3. A way to bring sharp focus and attention to a critical business driver
4. The most important 15 minutes in any company meeting

Each company should start by determining the most important sales activity data points to capture in their huddle regularly each week or month, such as contacts, appointments, proposals, COIs, sales, etc. If a sales manager does not schedule a regular means to monitor what is going on in the field in real time, they cannot coach, adjust the play, or get in front of any client issues or trends.

Huddles provide real-time information so that sales managers can make real-time decisions and provide real-time feedback or coaching. This is vastly different than waiting for month-end or quarter-end reporting on results because huddles capture what is happening now, this week. The sales performance metrics that are captured in Huddles are a means to run effective sales meetings and can then be used to coach salespeople to impact current deals.

Coaching with Sales Data Insights from Where’s Walter

We suggest a technique that we call “Where’s Walter,” pictured and explained below.

Coaching a salesperson’s activities can be simplified into two areas: their effort vs. their execution. Effort is described as evaluating if they are doing whatever it takes in the area of outreach and working hard to attain their goals. Execution evaluates their effectiveness in the sales process. Are they doing the right things to take a prospect through an effective sales process, or do they have a problem?

Using Where’s Walter for Coaching

As a coaching approach, we recommend sales leaders place their people into one of the four boxes noted above and then have the conversations below with the salespeople in each quadrant. These are guidelines, of course, and can be adjusted. One word of caution: do not soften too much. Leaders must be tough and direct at times to identify real areas of concern and development.

Execution Results & Effort

“Bob, thank you for the results you are generating. You must be thrilled, as this will help you achieve your personal goals and objectives. Just as important, though, I also want to thank you for your consistent effort. You may not realize this, but others on the team look to you and follow your lead. The way that you execute on sales skills week in and week out sets a great example for the rest of the team. Thank you. Now, Bob, what else can I do for you?”

Execution Results but Lacks Effort

“Bob, I want to thank you for the results you are generating. You must be thrilled, as this will help you achieve the personal goals and objectives you have for your family. I am worried about one thing, though; can we talk about that? Bob, how long is our sales cycle? (120 days).

Okay, so based on that and looking at our success formula, then the results you are getting today are a result of what? (The activity I did a while back).

That’s what I was thinking, and that is why I am concerned. Based on the activity here (show them the data), you are headed for a slump. Is that where you want to be?”

Effort Is There but Poor Execution Results

“Bob, obviously, based on the numbers you see here, you are not on schedule to achieve the extraordinary year you committed to managing yourself toward. But this is where I’m confused. The data I have, which tells me about your effort, indicates that you should be at or above your goals, but that isn’t the case.

My experience tells me that it can only be because of one of two things: either the data you are entering is not accurate, or you are failing to execute properly. Which one do you think it is?”

Lack of Effort and Results

“Bob, I have to tell you that I cannot figure this out. Your effort and results are a total surprise to me. If several months ago, someone said to me that you would be failing, I would have said, ‘No way.’ (Show Bob the job posting you used for the position he is in and his resume, then show him his current sales activity and results.)

Bob, I take a look at this (job info) and I think, ‘This is what I hired.’ I look at this (the results), and I’m thinking, ‘This is what I got.’ Bob, did I make a mistake?”

Collecting the right data utilizing Huddles can help leaders run more effective sales meetings. Then, using the Where’s Walter platform gives sales coaches a framework to use performance metrics from Huddles to generate conversations, identify areas for salespeople to focus on, and gain insights for immediate coaching. This helps improve skills, performance, and results.

One of the competencies of top salespeople is the ability to get to the decision-maker. When this is a strength, producers find a way to reach the person responsible for deciding to purchase the products or services offered, even at the risk of seeming pushy. Of course, it is key to be in front of the decision maker before you can begin to help your prospect make a decision.

We have come to recognize how essential it is to understand the buyer’s journey and how a prospect recognizes that they have a problem, how they search for a solution, and how they evaluate those solutions to make a resource choice and a decision. Salespeople have a great deal of influence on this entire process, and they must be adept at helping their prospect make a decision, whether it means they gain the business or not.

The customer’s decision-making process may be the most important step in the buyer’s journey. Salespeople can gain a great deal of information from CRMs, lead-nurturing data, and best practices from industry research systems like RelPro and IBISWorld. However, these tools will not give them insights into a prospect’s specific decision-making process.

There are nuances in every company as to how they approach an important purchase. Elite salespeople are skilled at asking the right questions in order to help their prospect make a decision.

Questions to Ask About Your Customer’s Decision-Making Process

One best practice is to be direct and ask the question simply. We coach salespeople in the commitment step of the sales process to ask:

“When you’ve made a decision like this in the past, what was your process?”

The question is simple enough, but the prospect may give a surface answer, making it seem less complex than it really is. There is rarely just one person deciding on a complex buying decision. Usually, the decision impacts others whom they will want to gain input from.

Salespeople who are skilled at helping their prospects make decisions help them think through this by drilling down from their surface answer and asking further questions such as:

• “Will that be the same process you follow this time?”

• “How long does that normally take?”

• “Who will this change impact in the organization?”

• “Who all needs to fall in love with this solution to gain approval?”

• “Can I go with you to present to the committee?”

• “How will you tell your current provider?”

It may not matter how much your direct contact likes the solution you have recommended. If the customer’s decision-making process is unknown, you risk losing the deal.

Those important questions need to be asked, and salespeople who master them close more sales. It takes courage, yes, and finesse as well, to ask these questions in a helpful, guiding manner.

Coaching Your People to Help Prospects Make a Decision

One of the findings from our partners at Objective Management Group is this: Managers who are effective at helping their salespeople get prospects to commit to a decision have 40% more top performers than managers who are ineffective at coaching on decision-making.

Why is this so predictive of success?

If managers are helping their team regularly uncover the decision-making process and gain commitment, then they are probably coaching to an effective selling system. Helping your prospect make a decision means you have uncovered a compelling reason for them to buy, thoroughly qualified the opportunity, and presented a need- and cost-appropriate solution at the right time.

This takes active listening, many insightful and challenging questions, and the ability to push back appropriately on potential stall tactics.