Life as a Commissioned Salesperson

Let's talk a little bit more about this commission issue. Imagine if you're a commissioned based sales person and you had a great month last month and you made a lot of money, but now you're starting over this month. What do you do? Well, you come in and you got a whole file cabinet full of clients. Do you call those clients? Or, do you spend 95% of your time trying to find new clients, new money to make new commissions on. That's the problem with commissioned basis. Contrast that with someone who works with you on a fee basis. A fee based person may spend only 5 or 10% of their time doing anything that's even anywhere remotely marketing oriented and they spend 90% of their time taking care of the people that they already have as clients because that's the way they get compensated, and they get compensated every quarter for continuing to do what they're supposed to do. So if you're a commissioned salesperson and you have a slow month, now you start looking at, okay, where do I start generating commission? Because I don't have any other way to generate revenue, I have to make commissions. I have to sell something. So in that sale, you may be compensated to a dramatic degree just for filling out the form to tell somebody where to put their money. You don't necessarily get paid for taking care of that client and nurturing that relationship for years and years and years to come. You get paid for making a sale. We don't want to work that way. We want this to be an advisory process. We don't want to sell you anything. I don't want to be such a good salesperson that I can get you to buy things that you neither want nor need. We want to advise you on your asset management. That's our job. If we do that on a fee basis, then it's an ongoing process where you continually hold our feet to the fire. We have to do what we're supposed to do every quarter, quarter in and quarter out or you can take your account and go someplace else and there's absolutely no downside to doing that.

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