Huthwaite has over 30 years experience of conducting research to identify the skills and strategies needed to succeed in specific market environments. Within the financial services sector we have conducted research for a range of organisations including:

• Identifying ethical selling skills for a London- based trader in futures and options.
• Exploring both counter skills and telephone selling skills for a mid-sized building society.
• Identifying the skills used by successful mortgage advisers for a major UK bank
• One of the largest research projects ever conducted in the insurance sector, to identify the skills to enable a direct salesforce to penetrate a higher value client base.

Research for a major UK insurance company showed that adopting a selling skills approach such as the Huthwaite SPIN^® Selling model, where the emphasis is placed on using questions to explore and develop the customer's problems and needs, resulted in 38% higher premium rates.

We used our researched sales model to help the bank more than double its order rate. This was achieved and sustained, when measured over an eight year period, whilst maintaining 'quality of service' as rated by their customers as 'high'.

In our work for the Capital Markets Division of a major UK bank we implemented a training project, which not only won a National Training Award and moved the division from 25th to 7th place in sales of Forex products, but also improved customer ratings for understanding their needs, the depth of the relationship, credibility, reputation, skills and after-sales service.

The training project we implemented for a major UK bank produced a rise in new customer acquisition, compared with an untrained control group in the same bank. This same project also produced an increase in overall sales income compared to the same control group.

The client salesforce at the centre of this project was receiving an average of 25 complaints a month from clients concerned about the high-pressure nature of their sales approach. Some complaints were so severe that the clients were threatening legal action. After the training intervention complaints had fallen to an average of one per month. At the same time there was no reduction in success rates and a marked improvement in customer relationships.

In this SPIN^® Selling training project for a major Swedish bank an additional objective was to train the salesforce to explore their competitive position. At the start of the project competitor information was collected in only 25% of calls. At the end of the training project competitor information was being collected in over 90% of calls to allow an evaluation of competitive strengths to be conducted.

Huthwaite conducted a series of training projects for a major international insurance company including SPIN^® Selling to explore and develop customer needs, Account Strategy for Major Sales to develop accounts and Negotiation Skills to win tighter deals. As a result the client's internal evaluation showed that price was less of an issue for clients and they were more focused on the value of the product.

For over 30 years we have been tracking and measuring the results of coaching projects where managers have been trained to coach their team's selling skills. Many of these projects have been published including the one we conducted for a major Swedish bank, where we were able to track the increase in questioning skills produced by the coaching, the reduction in objections, and the increase in Benefit statements being made which linked to a 15% increase in sales success.