My story IV

The most unforgettable case and also the milestone of my direct sales position was a VVIP client from Ningbo. I remember finding his contact information from a list of luxury car owners. He was quite busy and after 3 calls I finally got a chance to tell him about our services and products. He told me he was interested in what I said about Australian dollar, but he only had 50,000 left from the previous trip. He exchanged more and asked me how to do it. Usually our clients would use their personal yearly FX quota or add that of 1-3 direct relatives. This client thought it was far from enough for him. He wanted to spend 300 million AUD on our products. But it was against China’s foreign exchange rules. We discussed many times and I told him all about the regulations of FX I knew of. Then for quite a long time I could not contact him. Later I learned that the client was fishing on an uninhabited island during that period, as one of his hobbies, which is why I failed to get ahold of him. One day he suddenly called me and said he would come to Shanghai to open an account and make the deposits. He finally took 3 million AUD in cash with a bank withdrawal certificate. It was the largest amount of FX cash in the record of the bank since it opened in Shanghai. And it made me one of the top 3 performers in China. This client was one of the 100 clients that I developed. Only through hard work and good luck could one be successful. It is one of the most unforgettable memories in my life and my career. After becoming a relationship manager, my job was not as heavy as before, but it became more complex. At a position of direct sales, the only task was to invite target customers, but it was not easy. A relationship manager has several tasks: 1. Make cold calls to find customers and sell products to them. 2. Help the direct sales (DS) people to follow their potential clients and close deals. 3. Train the direct sales team on both sales skills and financial knowledge. 4. Maintain client relationship, offer professional services, and keep selling them new products. Actually, every single task would require many of your energies, but usually four tasks were waiting to be solved simultaneously. Everyday of that period was fully occupied. But I built solid knowledge of the financial market and sales system which are quite useful in the banking sector in the Chinese market.