ACTG Sales Management Blog | Mark Trinkle

ACTG Sales Management Blog

Mark Trinkle

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How Good is Your Team at Relationship Selling?

Posted by Mark Trinkle on Thu, Jan 08, 2026

Your salespeople have about seven seconds to make a strong first impression. Trust starts right away. That might sound overwhelming to you and to them, but as a sales leader, it is your role to help them master these skills to build long-lasting relationships through relationship selling.

Relationship Selling Key #1: Building Trust

Trust is the foundation of any great relationship, whether it is with family, friends, or a spouse. But in sales, building trust is a different ballgame.

When we work with salespeople, the first thing we tackle is mindset. If they believe it takes a long time to build a relationship, then it probably will. If they believe they need to be liked to win business, they will focus all their energy on being likable. But here is the truth: what they do drives their results.

If prospects are not setting appointments after a call, or if your salespeople are not converting those appointments into opportunities, do not just assume the prospect was not qualified. Instead, take a deeper look at your salesperson’s relationship-building behaviors. This is where coaching can help.

What are your people doing to nurture and develop strong relationships? Are they proactively and consistently talking with a prospect and offering industry-related and value-added information? If they are only focused on making the sale, they may turn off a possible prospect. There is a direct link between how your salespeople build trust and the results they are getting.

Relationship Selling Key #2: Being Consultative

Trust matters, but so does the ability to be consultative. Take some time to think about how skilled your salespeople are at:

Staying present in the conversation
Uncovering compelling reasons for the prospect to buy
Asking strong, thoughtful questions
Truly listening to their answers and asking additional questions
Understanding how they will make their decision
Presenting solutions at the right time
Maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism

If your salespeople take this approach, prospects feel heard. That builds the kind of trust that leads to real opportunities.

Relationship Selling Key #3: Making a Commitment

Your salespeople can do everything right, build trust, and follow a consultative process, but they can still hit a wall. Why? Because forces are working against them:

Prospects are distracted
They think they already know the answers
They have had negative past experiences with salespeople

That is why delivery matters. If your people can communicate in a way that captures the prospect’s attention and creates a compelling conversation, the prospect will give them a chance. Your salespeople also need the confidence to believe they are the professional in the room. They must break the mold by not looking, acting, or sounding like every other salesperson.

Relationship selling is a commitment to making a conscious, daily decision to do it well. It requires always working on and improving relationship-building skills. It takes practice, focus, and the belief that relationship-building is critical to success. Your role as a coach is to ensure that this is happening with your team.

Want to keep reading?

Download our free eBook, The Relationship Selling Guide, HERE!

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Topics: relationship selling

Happy Holidays from Anthony Cole Training Group

Posted by Mark Trinkle on Fri, Dec 26, 2025

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

The gratifying work we are able to do
The dedicated team we have that works together
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!

FREE 7-PAGE WORK PLAN! Personal & Business Work Plan What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail? Take your planning to the next level with this 7-page work plan. It will give you the tools to take your sales team from good to great.

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Sales Fear and Timidity: Obstacles to Sales Success

Posted by Mark Trinkle on Fri, Nov 28, 2025

As a sales coach, I have lots of experience helping salespeople dig into their inner beliefs that are getting in the way of them having greater sales success. And without question, the top two issues within those beliefs are:

Fear
Timidity

At Anthony Cole Training Group we teach our clients to have bold and assertive (not aggressive) conversations with their prospects. We teach our clients to ask lots of questions and to make sure that those questions are tough questions. In our training and coaching sessions, we talk about challenging the norms of conventional conversations by pushing the edges of the conversation all the way to the ultimate boundary of clarity. That way the salesperson will leave the sales call with beautiful clarity in terms of whether their prospect is really a prospect, instead of letting sales fear cloud the conversation.

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:

False Expectations Appearing to be Real
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.

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Topics: sales fear

Improving the Customer Experience in Banking

Posted by Mark Trinkle on Thu, Jul 03, 2025

Focus on the customer experience is not new. Secret shoppers and client surveys with NPS (net promoter scores) have helped build an entire industry because all banks, like all companies, want to continually improve the customer experience and ratings. Research validates that high ratings on the customer experience in banking correlate to more repeat business, more profitable and longer-lasting relationships, as well as recommendations to others. In most cases, it is also true that it costs more to replace a relationship than to grow existing clients, and of course, a strong experience is the best way for most bankers to earn additional relationships.

The Experience – Are Your Clients Satisfied or Engaged in the Customer Experience in Banking?

Many companies have a team of people that are held accountable for measuring and ensuring a positive client experience. For example, have you talked to a service company recently that didn’t ask you to take a 3-question survey at the end of the call? In the past, the focus was on gauging customer satisfaction. But in recent years, in light of direct and non-bank competitors, the focus has evolved to discovering clients’ engagement levels as a score for the customer experience in banking.

In fact, a recent Gallup survey discovered that:

48% of consumers who were satisfied with their banking relationship also said they would consider their institution for their next product or service.
When they said they were both “satisfied and fully engaged,” the ratio rose to 83%.

Engagement can occur across all the various channels in banking: online, chat, customer service, in-branch, and social media. At times, these impersonal, multi-step digital avenues can work against the bank as well. So how does a bank turn a satisfied banking client into a more engaged client?

Meaningful Engagement Involves People-Powered Conversations

Equipping and training your customer-facing people is the silver bullet to creating and increasing customer engagement in banking. Consumers and business managers alike have been emailed, texted, pinged, and surveyed to the point of apathy. But when a need arises or a financial goal must be attained, there is no greater opportunity to drive engagement than when the phone rings or the customer walks into the bank.

When that happens, are your people prepared to ask enough of the right questions to truly understand and consult with the client? Are they capable of creating a conversation so impactful that the client is not only satisfied but wowed — ready to tell their family and friends about the experience and looking forward to the next one? That’s engagement. And when clients are that engaged, they have no interest in talking to other financial providers because their needs have been met and exceeded. Only adept, people-powered conversations can achieve that.

Helping Your Team Have More Powerful Conversations

Our sales evaluation partner, Objective Management Group (OMG), has identified 21 Core Sales Competencies that are critical for success in sales, business development, and relationship building. These competencies fall into three categories:

Tactical Competencies
Mindset Competencies (Sales DNA)
Grit Competencies (Will to Sell)

Want to improve conversations? Evaluating your bankers’ competencies is fundamental to predicting a team’s overall success. In fact, bankers with high competency scores on the 21 Core skills are 50% more likely to be top performers. Bankers and sellers with higher competency scores perform better on win rate, new opportunity finding, and relationship building. By identifying and training the right competencies, bank leaders can give their teams the tools and training they need to succeed in their specific roles and to drive more engaged and enduring relationships.

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Topics: Sales Training, customer experience in banking

Stories & Villains: Storytelling in Sales

Posted by Mark Trinkle on Fri, Jun 27, 2025

This week I was rewatching the Steve Jobs presentation from 2007 where Apple released a piece of technology that perhaps you have heard of. They called it the iPhone. Maybe you are like me and wonder how it is possible that 18 years have passed since then. I still remember having dinner in Philadelphia with a work colleague who had just bought the first version of the iPhone. I remember looking at it and saying, “I don’t think this is something that people are going to buy.” I might have been off base with that prediction.

Steve Jobs was a masterful storyteller. Just go back and watch any of his presentations where Apple was releasing a new product. Storytelling in sales is a trait great salespeople have mastered. Peter Guber said this in his book Tell to Win: “stories provide emotional transportation.” The key takeaway from that quote is that stories are capable of moving people. Stories are capable of inspiring people. If you are good at storytelling, you can move people from where they are today (presumably dealing with a problem or a villain) to where they might be in the future after they have overcome that problem or villain. And when that happens, your prospect becomes their own hero.

The Power of Emotion in Storytelling in Sales

The key to storytelling in sales is to harness the power of emotion. At Anthony Cole Training Group, we have known for quite some time that people buy emotionally and justify with logic. I completely agree that your technical skills need to be excellent and that you need to be a subject matter expert. But that is not what moves people to the point of taking action to solve their problems. What makes that happen is when emotion enters the equation and your prospect self-discovers that they must act. Fear, disappointment, and frustration are examples of just a few of the more powerful emotions that your prospect might be facing.

Probably the most powerful emotion in life (after the emotion of love) is the emotion of hate. And to be clear, there is too much hate in the world. For my money, I believe there are only three things that are okay to hate:

Cancer
Racism
Alzheimer’s

These are villains that everyone is against and for good reasons. Steve Jobs was a believer that the best storytellers always give their prospect a villain to root against or a problem to hate so much that the prospect feels compelled to fight for a better future.

Stop talking about things your prospects don’t care about. Give them a villain to conquer. Some prospects are just waiting to become a hero. They just need something to root against. That is a conversation worth having.

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Topics: Sales Training, Storytelling in Sales

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