Roger Moore’s James Bond was a gentleman spy.
Daniel Craig’s is an assassin.
He may have a licence to kill but he’s got nothing on bankers.
I spend time around SEALs and other trained killers.
None talk about killing more than bankers.
She’s a total killer.
A commercial killer.
Some are ’00s, commercial assassins.
Unfortunately, however, many bankers only ever kill trees making useless books.
They’ll never earn their licence to kill because nobody teaches them how.
Kids in Africa.
India.
Half the damn world.
They are TRYING to survive.
It was 2001.
The Internet bubble had burst.
Goldman’s Silicon Valley office I’d relocated to was being slashed.
It didn’t make sense to me.
Is this as good as it gets?
All these people who’ve given their life to this business just trying to survive?
If benefits are the meat of a sale.
Objections are the veggies.
They’re perhaps the most important part of the meal.
But they’re most often avoided.
Us humans hate hearing no.
No man wants to be “rejected” by a woman.
No person wants to be told they can’t have what they want.
And too novice salespeople most want to avoid hearing no.
So they do everything they can to dance around it.
Like those banker meetings, consuming all the oxygen in the room, leaving no space to hear no…
Also means leaving with no idea what stands in the way of yes.
“Too many junior bankers see their job as minutia,” a bank CEO said.
“But I keep grooming my entire team to see their job is revenues.”
The most junior server at McDonald’s doesn’t just take your order, do they?
They upsell you to buy more.
Would you like fries with that?
How about a drink?
In their most seductive voice…
Hot fudge sundae… Mmmmm
You’re meeting with a potential client.
They love the team.
Are really into what you’re talking about.
You’re delivering them massive value but something stands in the way.
What do you say?
How do you blow out that “objection?”
There’s lots of ways to get it wrong.
You start talking about how much Morgan sucks…
When everyone knows they’re great and your not-client is already invested in them.
You talk up yourself and how much better you are…
When your not-client already thinks they work with the best.
So, what do you do?
How do you blow out the objection?
And perhaps Morgan too?
Top bankers are born, not made…
He didn’t use those words, but that’s what one of Goldman’s top execs implied.
We talked about if Tiger was born to play.
Or did honing his craft from 6 months old make him a champion of the game?
That said, he was right, Goldman doesn’t need this.
When you’re the market leader.
The business card pulls the sale.
You attract top talent.
Long, deep relationships.
Enormous resources.
Market dominance.
Some celebrity execs.
Talking up recent deals.
It’s a winning formula, but no top franchise endures that way.
Back in San Francisco I worked with a rockstar associate.
This guy would crank all night.
Be in all the details.
Leave rapid fire, all over it sounding voicemails.
15 years later he’s a middling senior-ish banker.
When I was the Business Unit Manager (yes, BUM, aka staffer) at Goldman…
I got the inside scoop on what the business is really about.
In that one year by far I learned more about the banking business than the rest combined.
Stepping back from the day-to-day of being a banker…
I was responsible for managing bankers seeing clearly what was valued.
At Goldman it’s called the Junior Banker Problem.
Specifically, junior bankers lives get destroyed.
Banks have tried plenty things to solve it.
It’s all pig lipstick…
Because the root cause of the Junior Banker Problem is…
Because few senior bankers get their job is selling.
They fail to build winning processes and skills.
The best they know is to wind up the printing press producing those awfully big, boring banker books.
Burning down forests and junior banker lives…
They run around having “Great Meetings.”
Mostly failing to drive results.
They produce too little value for the firm.
Too little success for themselves.
And after all those years in the business, still fail to succeed.
I didn’t get it.
For years at Goldman I still didn’t get the job.
I was good at doing it.
But I still didn’t get what the business was really about.
In some ways I’m naive.
And I may have been a total dimwit starting at Goldman.
But my sense from 20+ years around the business is that many bankers still fail to get their job is selling.
A great aspect of working at Goldman and some shops is it’s a team culture.
At least up until the senior ranks, it’s all about what we’re doing together in best serving our clients.
That’s a powerful mindset for delivering your best service…
But it leaves many bankers confused what the business is actually about.
After the credit crisis there was lots of noise about banker compensation.
For good reason, people questioned bankers’ role and how much they’d been paid.
There’s certainly lots wrong with compensation in our society, including…
Fact is…
Most bankers didn’t join the industry expecting little reward.
If you’d told them decades ago, give your life to this and one day you’ll be making 0.25X, many would have chosen a different path.
Of course relative to the average worker bankers are ridiculously paid.
But relative to others providing such massive value to our society as reading lines or catching balls, not so much.
Nor relative to what bankers give to get paid.