About Pat Sherlock

My financial services career started at GE Capital under the leadership of Jack Welch. Welch was responsible for the financial side of the business before becoming CEO of GE. Like many former GE executives, he was deeply committed to developing employees and investing in training – upholding GE’s core value that a company is only as good as its employees.

Throughout my 35 years in financial services, I wholeheartedly share this conviction: the right talent and training determine whether a company will be successful or not. Product and technological advances are important, but the quality of your customer interactions dictates whether you’ll capture repeat and referral business to ensure longterm success.

That’s why I started my training company – to help lenders and their staff master selling and deliver an extraordinary customer experience with every transaction. As Thomas Watson Sr. famously said, “nothing happens until a sale is made. Without sales you have no revenue, you have no business.”
After starting out as a collector at GE, I later managed secondary marketing departments and sales at mortgage firms and investors. I have experienced first-hand good and bad markets and yet some individuals are successful no matter what the business environment. What fascinated me is how top performers persevere and excel in both types of markets.

In 2001, I authored a book for the MBA detailing the best sales practices of top producers nationwide. When conducting research for the book, I found that two factors influenced sales success: innate talent (not everyone is wired to be a salesperson) and a growth mindset of always learning and developing. Great salespeople are action-oriented lifelong learners, even in difficult markets.

In 2002, I partnered with industrial psychologists and together, we identified the 14 behaviors that top producers exhibit. From that dataset, we developed pre-hire assessments to identify the candidates with the right attributes to succeed in commission sales.

Since my career at GE, training and development have changed dramatically. Scientists have determined how to teach adults so they not only retain new information but are able to apply it to real-world scenarios. Teaching adults as if they were children by lecturing and requiring them to memorize new material does not work. Whether conducted by a branch manager or a vendor, training must be matched to how adults learn. Outdated training methods don’t deliver what managers are looking for in improved sales results. 

So, what works in training sales professionals?

There are five strategies essential for learning new material:

Make training relevant. Can students use the information today?

Give feedback in the moment.

Focus on students’ life experiences and strengths.

Encourage questions and discussion.

Provide opportunities to practice new skills to boost students’ confidence. Repetition matters.

These strategies are foundational to impactful training and are incorporated into every sales training program I develop and deliver. Adults need to have personal interaction. Previously recorded training programs have their place in certain situations, but mature students who need to change their current selling behaviors must have live instruction and be relevant. Additionally, my training programs encompass multiple days to reinforce key learnings. One-off training does not enable students to internalize the new information and incorporate it into their sales process and thus, fails to change selling behaviors.

Our results speak for themselves: two-thirds of our students have closed loans during the training program. One hundred percent of students scheduled meetings with new referral sources they had not done business with previously. When given a modern selling blueprint, students are able to generate volume because they learned sales techniques that match to the new world of selling.

I look forward to helping your sales team deliver an excellent selling experience to your ideal customers. Book a call
to discuss your sales training needs.

P.S. My passions in life are my family, my students, reading, animals, Broadway musicals, Philly sports teams and the beach. My golden retriever, Noelle, is shown in the photo above.