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Bill Walton

A Recognized Authority on Creating Greater Value in the Seller/Customer Interaction

Look to Us For How to Make Value Creation Real

Bill Walton is an amazon best selling sales author and Quilly Award® Winner. He’s been working with Wall Street firms for over 20 years working directly with top producing Financial and Private Wealth Advisors and the asset managers to support their growth goals. He adds value to advisors in a way that un-blurs the lines of differentiation among them and their fiercest competitors.

Bill helps financial advisors to not just prospect, but to find the time for more meaningful market outreach. His dual focus on time management and prospecting is driving a more dedicated effort to growth among the firms he supports.

Low on theory, high on application, Walton’s clients target the best prospects for them with messaging that they and their COI’s can speak with confidence.

As a result of working with Bill, his clients can more easily:

  • Identify the ideal client types that are best for them
  • Shape an approach strategy that uses all of their individual and firm resources
  • Create messaging that they love to tell and clients enjoy hearing
  • Design great meetings that always lead to “next”
  • Diagnose opportunities to truly know where they are in the sales cycle
  • Provide intelligent recommendations that are steeped in the clients real issues

 

  • The Value Creation Training Workshop
  • Value Proposition Workshop™: Articulate the results you’re delivering
  • Value Creating Finals Process Workshop™
  • Insight Selling™
  • The 90-Day Dash™: Landing the Impossible Meeting
  • The Art of the Close™:  Workshop for Financial Professionals
  • The Sales Management Forum™
  • Cultivating Centers of Influence – A Giving Hand is Always Full

As a seasoned financial planning professional I recognize the necessity of having a professional coach. Bill provides immediate strategies for financial advisors to increase their income. Engage him, implement the strategies, and see your production increase!
Kevin Patrick Saia, CFP, CRPC, S2 Investment Advisors

Walton has a way of crafting a practical blend of psychology, strategy, and tactics that work! Walton masterfully outlines the “what and how” of selling in the twenty-first century as an FA while incorporating the “why” from the perspective of both advisor and client.
Bill Borton, CLU, RHU, REBC, long-term care specialist

Amid the clutter of “list tactics”—four ways to improve your sales, nine steps to this or that—comes Bill Walton. Logical, profound, and intense, Bill acts as a guide for already-good advisors who need to become great.
Paul Bombard, private banker

My coaching time with Bill was filled with clear, actionable steps to bring focus and clarity to drive more effective interactions with clients and prospects. Bill will help improve your practice.
Rich S., managing director, sales and financial services

As Bill shares in his books and his teaching, in our rapid-paced environment, the most successful financial advisors have become incredibly disciplined in their processes and activities through focus and execution of a well-crafted plan.
John C., financial services CEO

Bill’s Partial Financial Services Client List

  • American Century Investments
  • Ameriprise Financial
  • Bank of America
  • Guggenheim
  • Legg Mason
  • Merrill Lynch
  • Nationwide
  • Prudential Financial
  • State Steet
  • UBS
Travels From:  New Jersey
City:
$5,001 to $10,000

Biography

Bill Walton is the founder of ProDirect LLC and Chief Sales Officer of Bill Walton Sales Training, a Greater New York-based authority on creating greater value in the customer interaction.

Bill has more than twenty-five years of experience in helping sales organizations add value to customers in a way that’s un-blurring the lines of differentiation among their fiercest competitors. He is a sought-after keynote speaker on value creation and messaging and is most often hired by firms looking for more meaningful access to key stakeholders.

Bill is known for his cutting-edge sales training and value creation work with prominent Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Avis Budget Rental Car, and Direct Energy to name a few.

As an author, Bill recently published Taming the Four-Headed Dragon, a growth manifesto to help financial professionals get the sales growth they need and attract the clients they want, all on a limited time budget. Bill was recently acknowledged by America’s Premier Experts® as one of the leading experts in his field and recently won the prestigious Quilly Award® from the National Academy of Best Selling Authors for his collaboration with Brian Tracy on their book The Winning Way. He is also an Amazon.com best-selling author. As for speaking, Bill is asked to deliver engaging talks on such topics as Meaning More to Clients, Creating Value for Time and Mastering Team Based Finals Presentations.

Presentations

ProDirect supports sales and relationship management teams with training that helps them add value to their most important stakeholders. In the business-to-business space, more contacts are getting involved in “the decision”.  What’s required is more than just sales training.  It’s a combination of business acumen, a value proposition that resonates, and an ability to trade on role- and industry-specific insights that help clients make their best decisions. This program focuses on access to key stakeholders and support for the conversations once they’re on the calendar. value creation training programs are tailored to your specific industry and feature an in depth case study, BWST’s Procurement Think Tank and 90 days of live deal coaching via our web-based learning platform.

Key Focus Areas:

  • Tools, strategies and messaging to execute a sales approach that leads with the insights
  • Learning to avoid a commodity trap for your products and solutions
  • Crafting hypotheses of value for target accounts and relevant stakeholders
  • Uncovering reliable paths of influence and support in your client organizations
  • Creating insight-driven messaging for executives, consultants, and procurement
  • Stimulating dialogue and fostering the “second” meeting
  • Managing clients ongoing to grow the relationship and avoid costly RFPs

Any competitor still standing in your space deserves to be there. They weathered the recent economic downturn and have enhanced their capability. What’s needed now is entire organizations that can articulate the value proposition of their firm, their solution, and themselves. Without a compelling value proposition your product or service may become a commodity where all you can do is reduce price or sell more than the next firm.

Bill Walton Sales Training’s Value Proposition Workshop™ is a step-by-step plan to create sales-related messaging. Participants create 3 levels of messaging: A tagline, an elevator pitch and your value proposition. It’s a collaborative process that makes prospecting easier and meetings more effective by creating messaging your customers and clients can relate to.

Key areas of focus:

  • Three levels of messaging: tagine, elevator pitch and four-section value proposition.
  • Cultural agreement on your solution’s “value” factors that matter most to customers.
  • Prioritization of key factors and attributes relevant to your solution.
  • A customer feedback loop for use in augmenting or improving your solution.
  • Collaborative section-by-section creation of your firm’s value proposition.
  • Group review of final draft with authoring support from Bill Walton Sales Training.

alue Creating Finals Process Workshop™ (VCF) does more than just teach presentation skills. Our approach is designed to help organizations whose sales process culminates in a final prospect meeting to create a memorable experience. Incorporate your organization’s core value proposition and maximize the talents of your sales and support teams. The workshop also works to align key product messages with the needs of the prospect and the requirements of the RFP. The program also speaks to the variety of consultants that play a key role in finals process and how to best work with them.

More and more corporate benefits are going out to bid. Whether public or private, compliance demands and fiduciary responsibility have clients and prospects looking for incremental value to drive costs out of their plan while increasing participation. Couple that with the involvement of more and more consultants, and sales teams need to communicate greater value in the finals process. Lastly, a successful finals process starts long before the presentation.

Key Focus Areas:

  • The finals mindset – sharing and helping vs. telling and selling
  • Effectively opening, advancing & concluding the finals presentations
  • Profiling prospects’ key decision makers and the consultants advising them
  • Running effective Sales finals prep meetings with limited time and resources
  • Boosting your personal impact with effective gestures, vocal quality, eye contact, and supporting material
  • Adopting active and authentic listening skills to stay involved in the conversation when not even speaking
  • Handling spontaneous objections and questions with credibility and poise

Your competition has a product as good as yours, customers are harder to reach, and more stakeholders are getting involved in the “decision”. What should you do? Learn what the top 5 executives in the top 5 industries care about and how to connect with them. You’ll also learn how to move beyond your functional buyer to reach influential stakeholders that want to know how the value you bring transcends your product.

Clients have radically departed from their old ways of assessing the value in their relationship with salespeople. They’re armed to the gills with rich data on the impact of your solution and compliance demands are driving floods of well-scoped RFPs for even the most revered suppliers.

Key Focus Areas:

  • Tools, strategies and messaging to execute a sales approach that leads with the insights
  • Learning to avoid a commodity trap for your products and solutions
  • Crafting hypotheses of value for target accounts and relevant stakeholders
  • Uncovering reliable paths of influence and support in your client organizations
  • Creating insight-driven messaging for executives, consultants, and procurement
  • Stimulating dialogue and fostering the “second” meeting
  • Managing clients ongoing to grow the relationship and avoid costly RFPs

The 90-Day Dash is for those who need to fill a pipeline FAST. This program provides a 90-day system to target and connect with ideal prospects to get you that all important first meeting. Features Bill Walton Sales Training’s 7-touch Strategy and messaging and social media mini modules to create more purpose in your prospecting. You’ll never make a cold call again after going through this program.

Business leaders are bombarded by calls from salespeople. Most have assistants screening their email and they rarely pick up the phone. In fact, over 90% of voicemails never get returned. Salespeople need an easy to execute a process for generating qualified new relationships – one that cuts through the clutter and makes the salesperson stand out over time.

Key Focus Areas:

  • Developing Your 7-Touch Strategy™
  • Crafting a Social Media “stream of consciousness” with prospects
  • Developing Your Unique Elevator Pitch
  • Referral Strategies that Generate Qualified New Relationships
  • Personal Time and Opportunity Management Strategies
  • The 90-Day Dash™ Business Development Dashboard
  • Prioritizing your prospects for maximum penetration
  • The ProDirect Relationship Building Tool

The Art of the Close teaches you what makes customers comfortable to commit. Using a customer type – problems – solution framework, the program will help you better tee up your product recommendation based on the real issues your customer faces. Rather than you doing all the selling, the program helps you get the customer to articulate the value of taking action.

An informal Bill Walton Sales Training survey of Sales Managers revealed that in over 75% of occasions, advisors were not closing on an outcome. What’s more important – 90% of opportunities aren’t closing as forecasted. The reasons they give are many but a few themes ring out: “Fear of damaging the relationship if I push too hard”, “Lack of clarity around a client solution”, and “Not enough engagement on the part of the prospect”. As a result, advisors find themselves in a state of continuance vs. one of advancement with prospects and clients.

Key Focus Areas:

  • The Bill Walton Sales Training Sales Call Effectiveness Process
  • Identifying client types, aligning associated needs, and matching product solutions
  • Practical tools for opening, advancing and closing calls with clients and prospects
  • Earning the right to solicit client and prospect commitment
  • Real-play practice of live client scenarios and opportunities
  • Proven closing language and a framework for shaping mutually-beneficial outcomes
  • The inspiration and confidence to master the “Ask” process

Sales Managers today are finding themselves in the midst of a paradox; the need to satisfy a “results now” mandate while developing people over time. Charged with squeezing every last dollar out of the pipeline to stay competitive, sales managers must have real-time visibility into the talent on their teams to ensure the full value from every opportunity. In addition to coaching specific skills, sales executives will learn to manage their time to ensure they apply the right time to the right talent band on their team.

The Sales Management Forum™ is designed to help leaders better manage the talent and processes on their teams. Sales leaders learn to maximize the productivity and overall effectiveness of their human capital while fostering a self-managed high performance culture.

The Sales Management Forum focuses on the need to support salespeople uniquely through all stages of the sales process.

Participants learn that what they say is not half as important as when they say it.

Four sales management disciplines are introduced: The Enabler, The Business Manager, The Visionary, and The Expert.

Key Content

  • Managing through a validated sales process
  • Understanding the individual needs and motivations of all levels of sales talent
  • Creating a sales performance and career management bond
  • Setting performance objectives and coaching for goal attainment using score cards and pipeline tools
  • Giving and receiving performance feedback
  • Coaching salespeople through a pipeline process Outcomes By participating in the Sales Management Forum™
  • participants will be able to: Achieve sales targets more consistently
  • Create a more compelling relationship with salespeople and distribution partners
  • Engage the total organization beyond Sales
  • Recruit, train, and retain the best sales talent
  • Field a sales team that is an extension of the brand

Most advisors drive most of their new business via referrals from existing clients. But when asked where their best clients come from, it’s COIs by a factor of four. The conversations COIs have every day with clients make them much more likely to uncover a need you can address. The problem: cultivating COIs takes time and a dedicated approach. Plus, a qualified center of influence is not looking at you for your direct skill. Rather they are looking to make a valuable impact on their contacts by providing a resource that can help their network uniquely.

Bill Walton Sales Training helps advisors and those who serve them move relationships with COIs from occasional consideration, to one that regularly engages and refers. Our program: A Giving Hand is Always Full™ helps financial professionals expand their idea of who can be a center of influence and how to approach them. This program provides the strategy, messaging and meeting management tips to move COIs from “acquaintance” to strategic partner.

Key Content

  • Adopting a COI mindset – A Giving Hand is Always Full
  • Sleuthing skills to qualify the right COI
  • Thinking with and beyond CPAs and Attorneys
  • Contact management strategies
  • COIs and sources of value
  • Seeing the client through the lens of the COI
  • Referrals vs. Introductions – knowing what you’re asking for
  • Keeping balance in the relationship
  • Communicating your value prop to COIs

Outcomes

By participating in A Giving Hand is Always Full™, participants will be more able to:

  • Assess fit and balance in a COI relationship
  • Adopt proven tools for COI outreach
  • Shape messaging that helps COIs understand your value
  • Grow referral sources beyond CPAs and Attorneys
  • Manage initial COI interactions to mutual benefit
  • Leverage tools and tactics to help your COIs grow
  • Balance the relationship to an equitable give and take
© 2023 Ro Morrison & Assoc.