Sooner or later, being a sales-driven organisation is going to bite you in the rear. If the regulators or courts don’t get you, customers will. They will complain, leave nasty reviews, talk to their friends and most importantly, not spend their money with you. There are businesses where the sales department should be the number one priority, financial services shouldn’t be one of them.

Financial services are complex, trust driven products. Customers do not always take the time to understand the finer points, and closing is usually not as simple as getting credit card details. For these reasons and others, some participants in the financial services industry have adopted a sales culture, above all else. They use it as a crutch, to help with the short comings of their product and the industry. I am arguing that in the age of instant, always on communication, organisations should be about ‘pull’ sales, not ‘push’ sales.