How to Warm Up Your Prospects

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

by Shauna Trainor, The Covenant Group

March 13, 2013

To advance prospects through the mar­ket­ing pipeline and even­tu­ally guide them to the sales process, sales­peo­ple in any indus­try need to keep their tar­gets “warm.” Do you have a strat­egy for how you ensure you are at the top of prospects’ minds? What have you done to guar­an­tee that they asso­ciate your name with a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice or prod­uct? Main­tain­ing con­tact is only half of the sales process — you also need to con­stantly evolve what you are offer­ing the prospect, adapt­ing the pack­age as you learn more about him or her.Communication is a two-fold process. First, you must col­lab­o­rate with the mar­ket­ing func­tion in your orga­ni­za­tion to deter­mine the best sched­ule for con­tact­ing prospects. Decide if it is more effec­tive to send monthly newslet­ters, peri­od­i­cally call your prospects to check in, host edu­ca­tional sem­i­nars, or a mix of all these tac­tics and more.

Next, you must ana­lyze these con­ver­sa­tions and your prospects’ responses to iden­tify his or her goals, using that feed­back to tai­lor the way you com­mu­ni­cate in future inter­ac­tions. When you finally get to the stage of ask­ing for a prospects busi­ness, the strat­egy that you present will be the con­densed ver­sion of the months or years of interactions.

Take what you learn to heat up the sales cycle
In the finan­cial ser­vices world, this is known as goal-based finan­cial plan­ning, but the model is applic­a­ble in a vari­ety of indus­tries. There is no set model for meet­ing clients’ needs, so sales­peo­ple need to take the suite of prod­ucts or ser­vices that their com­pa­nies offer and then put those into the con­text of the prospects’ needs. Do not attempt to force a prospect into a pre-fabricated profile.

Start con­ver­sa­tions with your prospects that encom­pass their needs and desires. Ask ques­tions or present mate­ri­als that are thought-provoking and will inspire them to reflect on what it is they really want. Do not be sat­is­fied with vague answers — press for responses (and pro­vide more edu­ca­tional mate­r­ial if needed) that will give you insight into what prod­ucts or ser­vices you can rec­om­mend. View your prospects’ stated goals as the frame­work to which you will mar­ket, and even­tu­ally, around which you will build their indi­vid­ual ser­vice strategies.

Prospects and clients alike look for reflec­tions of their past feed­back in the ser­vice you deliver now and in the future. Prove to them that you are lis­ten­ing by using their com­ments and asserted needs to cre­ate a goals-based solution.

Shauna Trainor is The Covenant Group’s Mar­ket­ing Man­ager. She focuses on The Covenant Group’s own mar­ket­ing strat­egy and also helps entre­pre­neurs through finan­cial advi­sor train­ing to lever­age social media and other tech­nol­ogy to spread the word about their ser­vices and prac­tices and build relationships.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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Tags: Attempt, Business Strategy, Conversations, Covenant Group, Desires, Educational Seminars, Feedback, Financial Planning, Financial Services World, Guarantee, Marketing Function, Marketing Organization, Newsletters, Pipeline, Profile, Prospects, Salespeople, Shauna, Targets, Vague Answers
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Ten Minutes that Uncovers What’s REALLY Important to Prospects

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

by Dan Richards, Cli​entIn​sights​.ca

It can be incred­i­bly hard to get prospec­tive clients to let down their guard and talk openly about what really mat­ters to them.

And this isn’t just lim­ited to prospects – some par­tic­u­larly pri­vate clients can be slow to share the non-financial aspects of their lives.

That’s why a 10-minute Pri­or­i­ties Exer­cise can be an essen­tial tool in your con­ver­sa­tions with poten­tial clients.  Using a list of 20 pos­si­ble pri­or­i­ties as a start­ing point, the exer­cise quickly homes in on the most impor­tant issues in people’s lives in a com­fort­able, unob­tru­sive fashion

Note that this is not designed for the ini­tial con­ver­sa­tion with a prospect, but rather is some­thing to use on the sec­ond or third meet­ing. That’s because you’re ask­ing peo­ple to share very per­sonal infor­ma­tion – and you haven’t typ­i­cally earned the right to ask for that infor­ma­tion on the first meeting.

Set­ting up the conversation

The best way to intro­duce this is dur­ing the wrap-up to an ini­tial meet­ing with a poten­tial client. If they agree to a follow-up con­ver­sa­tion, whether in the imme­di­ate future or down the road, say some­thing like:

“I look for­ward to talk­ing fur­ther. When we meet, I’d like to spend 10 min­utes on a short exer­cise that will help me bet­ter under­stand your pri­or­i­ties and the most impor­tant things you want to achieve. I’ve done this myself and have con­ducted it with my clients and both they and I have found it useful.”  

Asked this way, there’s a high prob­a­bil­ity that when you call to set up a follow-up con­ver­sa­tion and remind the prospect of the exer­cise, they’ll read­ily agree to it include it in the meeting.

This exer­cise would fit well into the early part of  that follow-up meet­ing. First, give the prospect 20 cards with one pri­or­ity per card, explain­ing that they should define the pri­or­i­ties in any way they wish; the pri­or­i­ties are listed at the bot­tom of this arti­cle. Then ask them to put the cards  in order with the pri­or­ity that is most impor­tant to them first and the least impor­tant last.

Explain that this list can help bring clar­ity when faced with any impor­tant deci­sion, whether on a new job oppor­tu­nity or entre­pre­neur­ial ven­ture, buy­ing a vaca­tion prop­erty, relo­cat­ing to another city or decid­ing when or where to retire. It can also shed light on how their invest­ment deci­sions inter­act with  their key goals

Note that you can give prospects the pri­or­i­ties on a piece of paper, but the cards make it eas­ier to quickly rank the pri­or­i­ties. Give your prospect three min­utes to com­plete this rank­ing. If you’re doing this at your office, you can step out to get cof­fee for the two of you or excuse your­self to check with your assis­tant on some paper­work. While you want to avoid hav­ing prospects feel that you’re look­ing over their shoul­der, nei­ther do you want to be check­ing mes­sages on your IPhone while they do this.

Trans­lat­ing pri­or­i­ties into action

After your poten­tial client  has ranked their 20 pri­or­i­ties, divide  them into the four cat­e­gories below

Pri­or­i­ties 1 to 5                                    “Must-haves”

Pri­or­i­ties 6 to 10                                 “Important”

Pri­or­i­ties 11 to 15                              “Nice to have”

Pri­or­i­ties 16 to 20                              Not important

Then ask prospects to walk through their think­ing for at least the five “must-haves” at the top of the list, although the con­ver­sa­tion may often extend to the next five “impor­tant” pri­or­i­ties as well, start­ing with #1 and work­ing your way down the list. For each one, ask them to explain why that pri­or­ity is ranked where it is.  Be sure to make this a con­ver­sa­tion rather than an inqui­si­tion – you may men­tion how your pri­or­i­ties relate to theirs or ask if they were sur­prised by where any of the items ended up on the pri­or­ity list.

You don’t have to restrict this to prospects; this can be equally illu­mi­nat­ing with exist­ing clients, espe­cially if a cou­ple com­pletes this sep­a­rately and then com­pares their results. And don’t for­get to do this your­self and ask your team to com­plete this; you may be sur­prised by what you learn.

Every suc­cess­ful advi­sor knows the impor­tance of devel­op­ing a deep under­stand­ing of what really mat­ters to your clients and that get­ting a bet­ter sense of prospec­tive clients’ true pri­or­i­ties can be instru­men­tal in bring­ing them on board. As you think about your upcom­ing meet­ings with poten­tial clients, con­sider whether the 20 Pri­or­i­ties Exer­cise can help cre­ate the kind of open dia­logue that makes those con­ver­sa­tions pro­duc­tive ones.

And below are the 20 priorities:

The 20 Priorities

Con­tri­bu­tion to soci­ety / legacy                                                                                                                                                                          

Co-workers

Cur­rent income

Equity own­er­ship

Fam­ily

Friends

Finan­cial security

Future Income

Geo­graphic location

Health

Home envi­ron­ment

Influ­ence and Power

Intrin­sic nature of work

Leisure time

Per­sonal growth

Pres­tige and Status

Pro­fes­sional growth

Spir­i­tual development

Spouse / Sig­nif­i­cant Other

Work­place environment

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Tags: Cards, Conversations, Exercise, Financial Aspects, First Meeting, Immediate Future, Important Things, Initial Conversation, Limited, People, Personal, Priorities, Priority, Private Clients, Probability, Prospective Clients, Prospects, Unobtrusive Fashion
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Making 2013 Your Breakthrough Year for New Clients

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

With the first month of 2013 behind us, many of those res­o­lu­tions at the begin­ning of Jan­u­ary relat­ing to diet, weight or exer­cise are dis­tant mem­o­ries. That’s why this might be an oppor­tune time to con­sider a new res­o­lu­tion for 2013 relat­ing to your busi­ness – and that’s to make this the year that you get really seri­ous about bring­ing new clients on board.

I was reminded of this by two dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions last fall from two dif­fer­ent branch man­agers frus­trated by the lack of prospect­ing activ­ity among the advi­sors in their branches. There was a con­sis­tent theme to their com­ments: While the large major­ity of advi­sors do a rea­son­ably good job of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with exist­ing clients, other than hop­ing for refer­rals from their client base, most advi­sors in their branches dis­played lit­tle empha­sis on prospect­ing activ­ity and on attract­ing new clients.

In con­ver­sa­tions with advi­sors, there are four pri­mary rea­sons for the lack of prospect­ing focus: loss of con­fi­dence, lack of pri­or­ity, no clear prospect­ing plan and fail­ure to estab­lish a prospect­ing rou­tine. Let’s talk about what you can do in 2013 to address each of these.

Con­fi­dence

When talk­ing to poten­tial clients, you need to believe that prospects would be bet­ter off work­ing with you than where they are now or with other advi­sors. But for prospects to believe that, first you have feel that way.

I’ve talked to advi­sors who lack that fun­da­men­tal con­vic­tion and are ques­tion­ing the value they  pro­vide to their clients.  I recently spoke with an advi­sor who feels that over the past fif­teen years she’s let clients down, as tough mar­kets have meant that plans that clients had back then have had to be adjusted down­wards, with retire­ments post­poned, hol­i­days deferred and lifestyles scaled back.

The first nec­es­sary con­di­tion to be develop prospect­ing momen­tum is to have the gut feel­ing that prospects would be for­tu­nate to work with you. If you don’t have that con­fi­dence, then you’re unlikely to be suc­cess­ful in devel­op­ing prospect­ing momen­tum. Some­thing that helped one advi­sor was adding an agenda item to his Mon­day morn­ing team meet­ings, in which some­one shares an expe­ri­ence from the pre­vi­ous week where a client thanked them for the job they’d done or the dif­fer­ence they’d made. Alter­na­tively, they select a plan update they’ve reviewed the week before and talk about the how the client is bet­ter off as a result of the deci­sions that were made.

Pri­or­ity

When most advi­sors entered the busi­ness, prospect­ing was a sur­vival issue — if you weren’t suc­cess­ful in attract­ing new clients, your career in the indus­try would be a short one. This is a stark con­trast to today’s mind­set — while most advi­sors know they should prospect, many see this as a “nice to do” activ­ity rather than a crit­i­cal issue for the health of their businesses.

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Tags: Branch Managers, Breakthrough Year, Confidence, Consistent Theme, Conversations, Conviction, Distant Memories, Fifteen Years, Good Job, Gut Feeling, Lifestyles, Momentum, Necessary Condition, New Resolution, Opportune Time, Priority, Prospects, Referrals, Resolutions, Retirements
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A Lunch that Led to Three New Clients

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

by Dan Richards, Cli​entIn​sights​.ca

As things wind down for the hol­i­days, many advi­sors are using this week to put together plans for 2013. If you’re still final­iz­ing prospect­ing activ­ity for next year, you might be inter­ested in a recent con­ver­sa­tion with an advi­sor, let’s call him Bob, who helped orga­nize a low cost lunch this fall that led to three new clients.

Trans­lat­ing infor­mal rela­tion­ships into joint activity

Bob works in a mid-sized com­mu­nity in south-west Ontario. The ini­tia­tive started with two sep­a­rate Sep­tem­ber con­ver­sa­tions with an accoun­tant and lawyer who he’d come to know well. While they had been infor­mally refer­ring clients to each other for some time, there had been no for­mal joint marketing.

The three of them got together and decided to invite their top clients to a Fri­day lunch in mid Novem­ber at a local coun­try club. The lun­cheon was adver­tised as offer­ing “Prac­ti­cal strate­gies to reduce your taxes” and fea­tured pho­tos and short bios of each of the three par­tic­i­pants. Six weeks in advance of the lunch, the part­ners in this ini­tia­tive each mailed invi­ta­tions to 25 to 30 clients; any­one who hadn’t responded within two weeks got a fol­low up call. Out of 80 invi­ta­tions, they had had almost 40 pos­i­tive responses.

In the con­fir­ma­tion to every­one who RSVP’d, clients were invited to extend an invi­ta­tion to friends or col­leagues, lead­ing to a few addi­tional guests. Note that a 50% accep­tance rate is excep­tion­ally high – the coun­try club loca­tion undoubt­edly helped, but remem­ber that this was a mid-sized com­mu­nity. You wouldn’t see this kind of response in Mon­treal, Toronto, Cal­gary or Vancouver.

Deliv­er­ing value to attendees

The day of the lunch of the lunch dawned bright (weather is always a risk once you’re into Novem­ber). The invi­ta­tion said the lunch would be from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, with a recep­tion start­ing at 12:00 pm. By 12:05 pm the room was packed and they got under­way promptly at 12:30 pm with a full house.

To max­i­mize use of the time, salad, sand­wiches and dessert were already on each table. At 12:40 pm the three hosts wel­comed the guests and from 12:45 to 1:30 pm, each deliv­ered a 15 minute pre­sen­ta­tion. Note that the pre­sen­ters spent no time talk­ing about their busi­ness or approach or how great they were; rather they used their 15 min­utes to briefly describe tan­gi­ble, con­crete strate­gies revolv­ing around reduc­ing taxes.

Bob’s focus was on the advan­tages of invest­ments which offered return of prin­ci­ple. He explained the con­cept and then pro­vided spe­cific exam­ples such as mutual fund series that focused on return of prin­ci­ple and annu­ities; he used back to back annu­ities as an exam­ple of how return of prin­ci­ple reduces tax lia­bil­ity com­pared to GICs or gov­ern­ment bonds.

Con­vert­ing good will to new clients

At 1:30 pm, they opened the meet­ing up for a short ques­tion period. At 1:45 pm, they asked atten­dees to com­plete a feed­back form, which they col­lected and then did a draw from responses for gift cer­tifi­cates at a local restau­rant.  While there was no hard sell around next steps, the feed­back form con­tained a box for atten­dees to express inter­est in receiv­ing ongo­ing email newslet­ters from the three pre­sen­ters. As well, they were given the oppor­tu­nity to request a follow-up call; in addi­tion, the hand­out con­tained busi­ness cards and con­tact infor­ma­tion for the three partners.

Bob’s share of the cost for the lunch was about $1200. For this invest­ment, three pos­i­tive things emerged:

1.       He got great feed­back from the clients who attended.

2.       He deep­ened his top of mind aware­ness and rela­tion­ships with the accoun­tant and lawyer with whom he part­nered on this and has seen an accel­er­a­tion of refer­rals since they began work­ing on this.

3.       Each of the three part­ners got a num­ber of leads from the lunch from the clients of the other pre­sen­ters, which in all three cases have led to new clients. In Bob’s case, he can point to three new clients as a result of the lunch, with a num­ber of other prospects in the room who asked to be added to his newsletter.

When you think about what took place, we shouldn’t be sur­prised to see a pos­i­tive out­come. After all, Bob was effec­tively endors­ing the other two pre­sen­ters to his clients in the room and they were in turn endors­ing their clients to him. And the fact that clients were pro­vided with con­crete value and spe­cific ideas clearly helped also.

Bob and his part­ners have already planned to do two fol­low up lunches in 2013, one in the spring and another in the fall. As you think about your own plans for 2013, con­sider whether there are one, two or three pro­fes­sion­als with whom you have good rela­tion­ships and who you trust and respect, that it might make sense to dis­cuss an idea along these lines.

Note that this doesn’t have to be a joint event – I talked ear­lier this year to one advi­sor who part­nered with a lawyer to do two lunches, one in his board­room for his clients at which the accoun­tant was a guest speaker and then a rec­i­p­ro­cal lunch for the accountant’s clients at which the advi­sor spoke.  There are many mod­els for suc­cess – as you think about 2013, con­sider whether you can adapt Bob’s lunch to your own situation.

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Tags: Acceptance Rate, Accountant, Attendees, Bios, Calgary, Club Location, Colleagues, Confirmation, Conversations, Full House, Informal Relationships, Invitation, Invitations, Joint Marketing, Local Country, Lunch, Luncheon, Six Weeks, Three Participants, West Ontario
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Write Tweets That Will Solicit a Response

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

by Shauna Trainor, The Covenant Group

Using social media for mar­ket­ing pur­poses can often feel like you have arrived late and alone to a crowded event: There is no lack of peo­ple to talk to, but it may be dif­fi­cult to cut in on con­ver­sa­tions that began with­out you. Twit­ter is a main demon­stra­tion of this sce­nario. It can be con­fus­ing and over­whelm­ing to know who to fol­low, how to get oth­ers to fol­low you and what to say to your audi­ence once you have one.

Hash­tags and targeted tweets

To start get­ting a response to the short tweets you post on Twit­ter, con­sider chim­ing in on dis­cus­sions that have already started. Vis­it­ing Twitter’s search page makes it eas­ier to find out what peo­ple are talk­ing about. The page allows you to look up gen­eral trend­ing top­ics or use the advanced search oper­a­tors to find tweets spe­cific to your inter­ests or those of your client base. Search­ing for “life insur­ance,” for exam­ple, gen­er­ates a list of con­ver­sa­tions that include that phrase. This can pro­vide insight into what peo­ple are say­ing about the topic and may present you with the oppor­tu­nity to share your knowledge.

If you notice that many peo­ple are dis­cussing a cer­tain topic but have not addressed an angle you find impor­tant, write a new tweet that includes the phrase — with­out spaces — pre­ceded by a hash­tag (#lifein­sur­ance) that users will be able to eas­ily find. Be sure oth­ers are using the hash­tag for sim­i­lar pur­poses or at least know to search for it, oth­er­wise your tweets could go unread. Given the vol­ume and fre­quency of tweets, you may need to con­vey the same mes­sage in sev­eral dif­fer­ent ways to reach more people’s newsfeeds.

Respond­ing to other people’s comments

Con­tinue mon­i­tor­ing a few key phrases and hash­tags, and fol­low the users who are the most knowl­edge­able and vocal on those par­tic­u­lar issues — they may choose to do the same with you. As you build up a fol­low­ing on Twit­ter, you may find that other peo­ple are talk­ing about your busi­ness or are direct­ing their com­ments to you by includ­ing your han­dle (@yourusername) in their post.

Twit­ter is also a use­ful tool for dri­ving traf­fic to your other inter­net assets, such as your com­pany web­site, blog or other social media plat­forms. For exam­ple, if you recently posted an edi­to­r­ial but are dis­ap­pointed with the low response, con­sider shar­ing the link with your Twit­ter fol­low­ers and ask­ing for their feed­back. Did you just upload a fas­ci­nat­ing pod­cast to your web­site? Include a short­ened URL in your next tweet. This sets the tone for a two-way con­ver­sa­tion and can help you bridge the gap between your var­i­ous online mar­ket­ing activities.

Shauna Trainor is The Covenant Group’s Mar­ket­ing Man­ager. She focuses on The Covenant Group’s own mar­ket­ing strat­egy and also helps entre­pre­neurs through finan­cial advi­sor train­ing to lever­age social media and other tech­nol­ogy to spread the word about their ser­vices and prac­tices and build relationships.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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Tags: Audience, Conversations, Covenant Group, Demonstration, Find People, Insight, Insurance, Life Insurance, Many People, Marketing, Phrase, Phrases, Search Operators, Search Page, Several Different Ways, Shauna, Tweet, Tweets, Twitter
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Reach Out Through Social

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

by Anthony Lam, The Covenant Group

Finan­cial ser­vices pro­fes­sion­als and orga­ni­za­tions have been ret­i­cent to reach out to and engage their clients through social media plat­forms. This may be partly due to com­pli­ance fears, although a lack of famil­iar­ity with the chan­nel could also be to blame.The Covenant Group blog is work­ing to squash any fears that exist.

A dri­ving aspect of high-quality client ser­vice is doing what­ever it takes to sat­isfy your clients. Trends indi­cate that peo­ple of every age are start­ing to expect the com­pa­nies they do busi­ness with to be avail­able not only over the phone, via email and (when appro­pri­ate) face-to-face, but also on social net­works such as Twit­ter, Face­book and LinkedIn. Social media has already been tapped by many sec­tors as a means of mar­ket­ing, but it also presents sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­ni­ties for con­nect­ing with clients.

Have you con­sid­ered how social media can advance your busi­ness goals? Do you already use social media to con­nect with clients? Have you used the infor­ma­tion you’ve found on these net­works to inform client inter­views and interactions?

At The Covenant Group, we encour­age clients to learn more about these plat­forms and inte­grate them into the exist­ing client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment strat­egy given the increas­ing rel­e­vance of these com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels. Since most of these sites’ basic ser­vices cost lit­tle more than your time, it is wise to start think­ing about how you can work them into the daily sched­ules of your team.

For exam­ple, Twit­ter can be a great way to “lis­ten in” on con­ver­sa­tions about a vari­ety of top­ics, and may give you insight into what your clients want but have not yet artic­u­lated. Addi­tion­ally, it can enable you to stay up to date with the lat­est news and prod­uct offer­ings, help­ing you deter­mine the ways in which your busi­ness needs to evolve and grow. You man not find your clients are Twit­ter users, how­ever, all news sources and most finan­cial and busi­ness colum­nists are. They can pro­vide you with rel­e­vant con­tent that you can com­mu­ni­cate to clients via other social net­works or in a newslet­ter or email.

As Lorie Kon­ish writes for OnWall­Street, the net­works can also serve to build and deepen client rela­tion­ships. Face­book can reveal what prospects and clients are pas­sion­ate about — their fam­ily, a social issue, a busi­ness — and may be a means of show­ing the human side of your busi­ness through the back­sto­ries of your advi­sors and sup­port­ing staff.

On a more pro­fes­sional level, Kon­ish empha­sizes the net­work­ing and reputation-establishing poten­tial of LinkedIn. This can help you con­nect with oth­ers in your sec­tor, research clients before sales inter­views and expand aware­ness of your own areas of expertise.

Anthony Lam has spent more than 20 years hon­ing his cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment skills. He has demon­strated his com­mit­ment to high-quality cus­tomer ser­vice in the retail, bank­ing and air­line indus­tries. Anthony is the Man­ager of Pro­gram Deliv­ery and Client Rela­tion­ships at The Covenant Group and coaches finan­cial advi­sors on client ser­vices through The Covenant Group’s finan­cial ser­vices train­ing.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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Tags: Anthony Lam, Business Columnists, Business Goals, Client Interviews, Client Relationship Management, Communication Channels, Conversations, Covenant Group, Daily Schedules, Familiarity, Financial Services Professionals, Group Blog, Management Strategy, Media Platforms, News Sources, Product Offerings, Quality Client Service, Social Networks, Squash, Twitter
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New Schwab Study Shows Why Clients Have Been Moving

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

Clients weren’t get­ting what they wanted, and they want to address more than the portfolio.

Charles Schwab recently released its 2012 sur­vey Inde­pen­dent Advi­sor Outlook/High Net Worth Investors Study. Among the data was an update on why peo­ple have been chang­ing advi­sors and how they found their new advisor.

Refer­rals con­tinue to be the sin­gle most impor­tant way clients con­nected with their new advi­sors, account­ing for over half of the clients who moved.

When it came to the rea­sons peo­ple moved, 66% said they didn’t get the kind of atten­tion or ser­vice they wanted from their prior advi­sor and 51% indi­cated that they wanted some­one to take a more holis­tic approach to their finances and invest­ments. This rein­forces other stud­ies that have shown that con­ver­sa­tions beyond the port­fo­lio drive client engage­ment. We would expect this to be espe­cially true in dif­fi­cult invest­ment mar­kets, but this study was com­pleted on Feb­ru­ary 3, 2012 – a time when the mar­ket was par­tic­u­larly strong.

It also indi­cates the impor­tance of get­ting sys­tem­atic client feed­back. While two thirds of the clients who moved indi­cated they were not get­ting what they wanted from their prior advi­sor, I do not believe it can fully be explained sim­ply by poor ser­vice. Rather, I sus­pect the ser­vice they received was not what they had hoped for or expected as opposed to inad­e­quate for infre­quent. Given that this is by far the most com­mon rea­son for peo­ple to move, com­pounded by the fact that we are in a volatile or declin­ing mar­ket, it makes more sense than ever to make sure that part of your ser­vice model includes client sur­veys or an advi­sory board.

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Tags: Accounting, Advisory Board, Charles Schwab, Client Engagement, Client Feedback, Client Surveys, Conversations, Declining Market, Driven Practice, High Net Worth Investors, Holistic Approach, Independent Advisor, Investment Markets, Investments, Moving, People, Portfolio, Referrals, Service Model, Two Thirds
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Make Yourself Relatable

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

by Matthew Asser, The Covenant Group

It’s a com­mon theme in sales indus­tries: No one likes to be sold, but every­one likes to buy. As a finan­cial advi­sor, how can you be suc­cess­ful in acquir­ing clients with­out mak­ing meet­ings feel like a sales pitch? Make your­self relat­able, lis­ten to the prospect and strive to be gen­uine in every interaction.I recently came across a con­ver­sa­tion on LinkedIn dis­cussing the best prac­tices of sales, and I think a lot of what was dis­cussed can also apply to client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment. The dis­cus­sion kicked off with a note about the impor­tance of lis­ten­ing care­fully and ask­ing lots of ques­tions, two tac­tics that are cen­tral to what we teach finan­cial advi­sors at The Covenant Group.

Essen­tially, the con­ver­sants agreed that it was a salesperson’s duty to help their clients, not sim­ply sell to them. Keep­ing the client’s inter­est in mind and show­ing that you want the best for them will trans­form their per­cep­tion of you from that of another sales­per­son into a trusted advi­sor. Shar­ing details about your­self in con­ver­sa­tions can also allow clients to get to know you as a per­son, which can deepen the level of trust.

Whether you’re sit­ting in the ini­tial inter­view or catch­ing up with a long-time client, give your­self enough time so you can lis­ten and ask thought­ful ques­tions rather than jump­ing right into the busi­ness pur­pose of the meet­ing. Build con­nec­tions with the client, be they shared hob­bies or mutual inter­ests in a cer­tain sport.

While it’s impor­tant to main­tain a pro­fes­sional tone in your rela­tion­ship with clients, strive to be their friend and a source of help. Show them that you care about their over­all well-being, not just their finan­cial health. Be approach­able. Empha­size the fact that clients should not hes­i­tate to call you, and fol­low up on that promise by being avail­able when they need you most.

Facil­i­tat­ing that close­ness and trust can be a dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fac­tor. The major­ity of clients want an advi­sor who will con­tinue to give them just as much (if not more) atten­tion in the years fol­low­ing a sale as they did in the mar­ket­ing stage.

Anthony Lam has spent more than 20 years hon­ing his cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment skills. He has demon­strated his com­mit­ment to high-quality cus­tomer ser­vice in the retail, bank­ing and air­line indus­tries. Anthony is the Man­ager of Pro­gram Deliv­ery and Client Rela­tion­ships at The Covenant Group and coaches finan­cial advi­sors on client ser­vices through The Covenant Group’s finan­cial ser­vices train­ing.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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Tags: Asser, Best Practices, Business Purpose, Client Relationship Management, Closeness, Conversations, Covenant Group, Financial Advisors, Financial Health, Hobbies, Initial Interview, Interaction, Linkedin, Mutual Interests, Perception, Professional Tone, Relationship With Clients, Salesperson, Thoughtful Questions, Time Client
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The Game-Changer for Attracting Affluent Clients

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

Until now I’ve been a skep­tic on the value of social media for attract­ing afflu­ent clients. This isn’t to say you can’t use Face­book and Twit­ter to con­nect with investors in their 20’s and 30’s; but with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of prospects who work in the tech sec­tor, not the older more pros­per­ous clients most advi­sors target.

But last week, three sep­a­rate con­ver­sa­tions changed my mind on this. For the same rea­son that John May­nard Keynes gave when he was chal­lenged about an instance where his views had changed: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

Today and next Mon­day, I will focus on what led me to con­clude that the facts have changed, and what this means for you. Let’s start with some­thing that won’t nec­es­sar­ily win new clients, but will cost you clients if you don’t get it right.

Using LinkedIn to screen advisors:

Early last week, I had lunch with a long-time acquain­tance (let’s call him Paul) dur­ing a trip to Van­cou­ver. A part­ner with one of the “big four” national account­ing firms, last fall Paul turned 60 and is eigh­teen months away from the firm’s manda­tory retire­ment age of 62.

Until now, he’s man­aged his own money invest­ing exclu­sively in ETFs and mutual funds due to the account­ing profession’s strict pro­hi­bi­tions on directly own­ing shares of exist­ing or poten­tial clients. With retire­ment immi­nent, ear­lier this year I got an email in which Paul asked me for rec­om­men­da­tions on two or three finan­cial advi­sors he could talk to about man­ag­ing his sub­stan­tial invest­ments (bear­ing in mind that his day to day expenses will be cov­ered by a healthy pension.)

I asked Paul what he ended up doing.

“I sent the same email that I sent you to two other peo­ple in the invest­ment indus­try who I know,” Paul said. “I ended up get­ting replies with ten sug­ges­tions, with not a sin­gle over­lap between the three lists.

“That was way too many for me to talk to,” he con­tin­ued, “so one Sun­day morn­ing I spent an hour on LinkedIn, tak­ing a quick look at these advi­sors’ pro­files. About half didn’t have a pro­file on LinkedIn, or their pro­file was extremely bare­bones, so in those cases I went to their web­site. I made notes on my impres­sions of each advi­sor based on their pro­file, then used my gut to nar­row the list down to three advi­sors who I thought would be the best fit.”

“Ulti­mately, I met with all three of them and liked all them all. I thought I was going to have trou­ble choos­ing, but for­tu­nately my deci­sion ended up being an easy one. I talked to all three of these advi­sors about tak­ing on part of my invest­ments, but one of them said that he didn’t take on accounts where he wasn’t man­ag­ing all of a client’s invest­ments: so I ended up split­ting my invest­ments between the other two.”

The new Who’s Who:

That con­ver­sa­tion was fresh in my mind when I was back in Toronto later in the week with three friends from dif­fer­ent back­grounds who I’d invited to a Blue Jays game. One was a lawyer and two were suc­cess­ful busi­ness own­ers. The three had never met so we had an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion over din­ner before the game.

After wards, the two busi­ness own­ers thanked me and headed off to their cars; the lawyer and I walked back from the sta­dium. “Thanks for invit­ing me” he said. “Adam and Richard are inter­est­ing guys who have done some really neat stuff.”

“I looked them up on LinkedIn before com­ing down to the game. Fif­teen years ago, I had a Who’s Who in Canada direc­tory in my office that I looked at before hav­ing din­ner with some­one I’d never met. Today, I just go to LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn as your online presence:

From these con­ver­sa­tions and from sim­i­lar con­ver­sa­tions in the last while, it’s clear that if you hope to attract new clients, hav­ing a strong pres­ence on LinkedIn is becom­ing the cost of doing busi­ness. That’s espe­cially true when many prospects use LinkedIn as a con­ve­nient one-stop medium to get infor­ma­tion on advi­sors they’re meet­ing with or are curi­ous about, instead of going to advi­sors’ indi­vid­ual websites.

The day after the Jays game, I spent a few min­utes look­ing at the LinkedIn pro­files of half a dozen advi­sors I know; and as a whole found them incred­i­bly fee­ble. Gen­er­ally just advi­sors’ names and firms with noth­ing about their back­ground; and noth­ing to set them apart. I know that in some firms com­pli­ance con­strains the infor­ma­tion that advi­sors can post, but if the adage about first impres­sions mat­ter­ing is true, then most cur­rent pro­files do noth­ing to advance your cause.

That may not mat­ter as long as all advi­sors’ pro­files are equally weak, but as some advi­sors start using LinkedIn to tell their story effec­tively, a per­sua­sive LinkedIn pro­file will become the cost of doing busi­ness. Hav­ing a strong pro­file may not land new clients, but a weak pro­file will cer­tainly cost you poten­tial accounts.

If you want to see an effec­tive LinkedIn pro­file, look no fur­ther than the head of LinkedIn Canada. Note how he uses a free appli­ca­tion from Box​.net to include pre­sen­ta­tions, newslet­ters and upcom­ing events in his profile.

http://​www​.linkedin​.com/​i​n​/​b​r​i​a​n​c​h​u​rch

One cau­tion on pri­vacy and avoid­ing “Big Brother” concerns:

It’s clear that LinkedIn can be a pow­er­ful tool, but also has poten­tial for misuse.

Last year I spoke at a con­fer­ence at which a US con­sul­tant deliv­ered a talk on how advi­sors can use LinkedIn to go into client net­works to iden­tify who they know, with the goal of solic­it­ing refer­rals when you meet with clients. This is also the theme of a cur­rent online pre­sen­ta­tion on Finan​cial​-Plan​ning​.com by “LinkedIn Ninja” Crys­tal Thies, a con­sul­tant on how to max­i­mize your impact on LinkedIn.

I was appalled: My vis­ceral reac­tion is that this is way too “big broth­er­ish” for many clients, and risks under­min­ing client con­fi­dence and trust. Most clients aren’t aware that their entire net­work is vis­i­ble to any­one whose LinkedIn invi­ta­tion they accept; and even if they do know this, don’t expect their pro­fes­sional advi­sors to be trolling through their network.

In fact, after attend­ing the con­fer­ence talk I imme­di­ately switched off access to my net­work. The next week, I got an email from an advi­sor coach (who I vaguely know and from whom I had accepted an invi­ta­tion to con­nect on LinkedIn) won­der­ing if there was some­thing wrong, since he was hav­ing dif­fi­culty view­ing my other contacts.

So by all means ensure your LinkedIn pro­file puts your best foot for­ward, just be cau­tious about cross­ing the pri­vacy line. And con­sider shut­ting off access to your net­work from all but the clos­est of your LinkedIn contacts.

Next Mon­day, I’ll out­line how one advi­sor is using his online pres­ence to attract three new clients a month. In the mean­time, if you’re inter­ested in see­ing the LinkedIn Ninja’s Finan​cial​-Plan​ning​.com pre­sen­ta­tion on 9 Steps to attract­ing clients with LinkedIn, click below:

9 Steps to Grow Your AUM With LinkedIn

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Tags: Accounting Profession, Affluent Clients, Conversations, Email, Financial Advisors, Investment Industry, John Maynard Keynes, Long Time, Lunch, Mandatory Retirement Age, Mutual Funds, National Accounting Firms, Prospects, Skeptic, Strict Prohibitions, Substantial Investments, Target, Time Acquaintance, Trip To Vancouver, What This Means
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