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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Going from 0 to 100 Clients in 18 Months

Thursday, January 31st, 2013

Fore­word by Dan Richards, Cli​entIn​sights​.ca

Ear­lier in Jan­u­ary, I exchanged emails with Kather­ine Vessenes, a lawyer and author of Build­ing your multi-million dol­lar prac­tice, who for many years has been a high pro­file con­sul­tant to suc­cess­ful Amer­i­can advi­sors and their firms.

About two years ago, she decided to return to her roots and began build­ing a finan­cial plan­ning prac­tice in Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island. In a recent arti­cle she described how in 18 months she went from zero to 100 clients, each of whom pays an annual plan­ning fee of $1200 or more.

The arti­cle out­lines nine keys to her suc­cess, but four stood out for me:

1.     Find the right niche – Vessenes chose to con­cen­trate on young pro­fes­sion­als and aca­d­e­mics at the local uni­ver­sity. While they had great future poten­tial, the fact that they were early in their earn­ing career meant they were cur­rently under­served and typ­i­cally there was no advi­sor in place to dis­place. And I was struck by the point about the “water cooler effect” when your clients are in the same build­ing and inter­act frequently.

2.     Focus on hot but­tons – Even under­served investors need an impe­tus for action. By offer­ing edu­ca­tional sem­i­nars focus­ing on tax sav­ing strate­gies, she was able to attract poten­tial clients out to hear her talks, each of which offered con­crete advice and spe­cific strate­gies. Of note, every­one who said they’d like more infor­ma­tion was called within two days.

3.     Stream­line your process – Vessenes talks about the PMS approach as key to her suc­cess, in which 80% of her time is spent in front of clients, con­cen­trat­ing on Prospect­ing, Mar­ket­ing and Secur­ing Client Rela­tion­ships. Some­thing that makes this pos­si­ble is a highly sys­tem­atized, con­sis­tent, process-driven approach to deal­ing with clients.

4.     Go above and beyond – It’s a cliché for advi­sors to talk about going above and beyond with clients, but Vessenes makes this a core part of her prac­tice. Despite not ask­ing for refer­rals, one-third of new clients have come from intro­duc­tions. The key is to look for tan­gi­ble ways to add value – whether it be by hav­ing a staff mem­ber spend two days call­ing every finan­cial insti­tu­tion in the state look­ing for the best rate on a loan or seek­ing out a lawyer with deep exper­tise to help a same-sex cou­ple adopt­ing a child.

Even if you have no inter­est in build­ing a busi­ness based on annual plan­ning fees or in deal­ing with smaller clients, Kather­ine Vessenes’ expe­ri­ence offers impor­tant lessons. Here’s her full arti­cle, out­lin­ing nine lessons on what it takes to attract clients today.

How We Brought on 100 Clients in Just 18 Months

By Kather­ine Vessenes, JD, CFP®, RFC

We just cel­e­brated a great day—102 of our tar­get mar­ket clients engaged us in just 18 months! No one was more sur­prised than me.  Here is how we did it:

1.     We stuck to the PMS model: If you have read our book, Build­ing the Mul­ti­mil­lion Dol­lar Prac­tice, then you know there is only one way to get your busi­ness to the Mil­lion dol­lar mark and beyond—advisors need to spend their time focus­ing on three things: Prospect­ing, Meet­ing with Clients and Secur­ing the Rela­tion­ship (PMS).  Every­thing else is del­e­gated. I have a fan­tas­tic team and these num­bers would not be pos­si­ble with­out a great deal of ded­i­cated sup­port. I spend about 80 to 90% of my time in front of clients.

2.     We treat the busi­ness like man­u­fac­tur­ing: I got some great advice from a mil­lion dol­lar advi­sor a decade ago. After meet­ing with three to four new clients per day (and leav­ing absolutely exhausted), she reminded me: This is an assem­bly line. We took that advice and added another piece to it: it is a very high touch assem­bly line. We have very defined processes and sys­tems. These include a set meet­ing sched­ule and we don’t devi­ate from it. These processes are designed to pro­vide a level of ser­vice to clients that they can’t get any­place else. We always do the same thing in a first meet­ing, sec­ond meet­ing, etc. That makes it much eas­ier for staff to pre­pare because we are not rein­vent­ing the wheel at every point in the process. Also we are con­stantly look­ing for ways to make our processes more effi­cient and more effective.

3.     We found the per­fect niche: young, edu­cated clients who like us and we like them. When we started our prac­tice in Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island, we started focus­ing on young pro­fes­sors at Brown Uni­ver­sity. We had exper­i­mented with a num­ber of other niches and found this one really clicked for us. There were a lot of rea­sons this niche worked: they appre­ci­ated my edu­ca­tion and law degree; they were under­served; they didn’t have deep rela­tion­ships with other advi­sors; and then there was the water cooler effect. I found niches work much bet­ter when the mem­bers are housed in the same build­ing and see each other every day. They must run out of things to talk about over lunch, because sooner or later they bring up finances and our name.

4.     Mar­ket­ing through edu­ca­tional events. Ini­tially our mar­ket­ing focused on edu­ca­tional events. We found it was impor­tant to have a topic that was not only of inter­est to our tar­get mar­ket, but also had a high pain fac­tor. It is not my style to do teaser pre­sen­ta­tion. So I make sure each of these events has great content—content they can use to make their lives bet­ter. Even if atten­dees didn’t want to come in and meet us later, I wanted them to have a great time and a good impres­sion of us—because the next time we did an event, they could still be a good cheer­leader for us. These meet­ings allow the future client to get to know us in a non-threatening set­ting and see if our phi­los­o­phy will fix their pain.

5.     Call backs after the event. You can have the best mar­ket­ing event in the world, but if you are not good at con­vert­ing event atten­dees into appoint­ments, then your sys­tem will never work. We have a proven sys­tem for fol­low­ing up with atten­dees. First, we never call folks who said they weren’t inter­ested in com­ing in. In fact, we don’t even put them on our ezine list. For the ones who are inter­ested and requested a call back, we call them within two days of the event and also send them a fol­low up email. The email just reminds them there is no cost or oblig­a­tion with the ini­tial meet­ing, just a chance to answer their ques­tions and get to know them. I don’t want them to feel any pres­sure. I found the greater the time lapse between the edu­ca­tional event and the call back, the harder it is to secure the meeting—so it is impor­tant to do these as quickly as pos­si­ble. We usu­ally make these calls in the evenings or Sat­ur­day mornings.

6.     The Pareto effec­tive in reverse. Of course you know of the 80/20 rule: where 80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients. Unfor­tu­nately, since we were just start­ing out, we couldn’t afford to be that picky. There was one place where I drew the line, though: there were cer­tain clients I just didn’t want to take on—I knew they would be dif­fi­cult, time con­sum­ing,  hard to please, or put a lot of extra stress on our sys­tems. Another way to think about this is about 80% of your prob­lems and stress come from 20% of your clients. As a result, we fire about 20%–I try hard to assess in our first meet­ing if the prospect is a good fit for us and if we can keep them happy. If not, then we take a pass on them.

7.     We stopped ask­ing for refer­rals. For those who have been read­ing my arti­cles for years, you are prob­a­bly won­der­ing if I have lost my mind. Yes I have writ­ten a lot on this topic, but I decided to try some­thing both eas­ier and more effec­tive: I stopped ask­ing for refer­rals. Instead, we just give a WOW level of ser­vice that is not avail­able from other firms. The strat­egy def­i­nitely worked. We started get­ting refer­rals the by the third month we were in busi­ness. Now over a 1/3 of our new clients come from happy, exist­ing clients.

8.     Focus on sav­ing taxes now and in the future. Most of our clients had no idea that they were going to be pay­ing more in taxes in the future. Although the recent leg­is­la­tion is wak­ing a few more up, we spend time show­ing clients the impor­tance of plan­ning for tax-free dis­tri­b­u­tion strate­gies in retire­ment. Once again this sets us apart from other firms, but it also allows me to sleep bet­ter at night know­ing clients will be bet­ter off in retire­ment if some of their income is tax-free.

9.     The WOW expe­ri­ence. I believe part of the key to get­ting more refer­rals is to pro­vide your exist­ing clients with a WOW expe­ri­ence they can’t get else­where. Here are a few of the things we have done in the last year, that we don’t see many other advi­sors doing:

a.     Young pro­fes­sional had a chance to buy into his practice—but I didn’t like the loan they were offer­ing. Solu­tion: one of our team mem­bers spent two days call­ing every bank and credit union in Rhode Island to see if we could find him a bet­ter rate. We found him a great HELOC at a local credit union, which not only allowed him to save in inter­est, but to deduct the pay­ments. Results—thousands of dol­lars in sav­ings every year.

b.     Young les­bian cou­ple wanted to adopt. We reviewed all the finan­cial plan­ning issues for same-sex cou­ples and found there were a lot of gaps in their finan­cial plan. Then I put my Chief of Staff on the phone to find an expe­ri­enced attor­ney in Mass­a­chu­setts who did adop­tions for same-sex cou­ples. The trick was find­ing an attor­ney who was expe­ri­enced with same-sex adop­tions. Result: very happy sat­is­fied clients who have sent me a lot of referrals.

c.     Female Korean pro­fes­sional wanted a life insur­ance pol­icy where the death ben­e­fit could go to her par­ents in Korea, and she could use the cash value for tax-free rev­enue in retire­ment. Unfor­tu­nately, OLD FOGY Assur­ance Com­pany didn’t like the arrange­ment because our client didn’t have a Green Card. They wanted her to set up a US trust for the ben­e­fit of her par­ents. It would have cost our client $2,000 to $3,000. Solu­tion: we went back to the insur­ance com­pany and lob­bied on her behalf. They relented and allowed her par­ents to be the direct ben­e­fi­cia­ries. Results: happy client was saved thou­sands in legal bills and sent us about 8 new clients in the last year.

In short, we found clients are hun­gry for the advi­sor who is will­ing to go above and beyond and pro­vide ser­vice and solu­tions that they can’t get elsewhere.

Kather­ine Vessenes, JD, CFP®, RFC, is the pres­i­dent of Vest­ment Advi­sors, the country’s lead­ing con­sul­tancy for build­ing the Multi-Million Dol­lar Prac­tice, accord­ing to Kaplan Press.  The author of three books, Kather­ine is a sought after indus­try speaker, leader and author. She also has her own finan­cial plan­ning prac­tice where she imple­ments the advice she gives other finan­cial advi­sors. You may reach her at Katherine@vestmentadvisors.com or 952−401−1045.

© Kather­ine Vessenes, 2013. May be reprinted only with permission

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Tags: Academics, Career, Client Relationships, Concrete Advice, Driven Approach, Educational Seminars, Financial Planning, Hot Buttons, Impetus, Investors, Katherine Vessenes, Lawyer, Local University, Niche, Providence Rhode Island, Recent Article, Roots, Underserved, Water Cooler, Young Professionals
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Goodbye Zig

Wednesday, December 5th, 2012

I got a text from one of the reps in my first branch office last night let­ting me know you passed away. I have not heard from him in years – funny he should think of me when he heard the news.

You were such a big influ­ence on my career. While I was going through train­ing in finan­cial plan­ning, learn­ing about ana­lyz­ing cash flow and man­ag­ing invest­ments and plan­ning estates, you taught me about tak­ing care of peo­ple.  While I was learn­ing mod­ern port­fo­lio the­ory and the tax code, you taught me the impor­tance of goals and service.

You taught me that stinkin’ thinkin’ will lead to a hard­en­ing of the atti­tudes. I still work on my cyn­i­cal side, because I learned through your cas­sette tapes (remem­ber them?) that it is your atti­tude and not your apti­tude that will deter­mine your altitude.

In my early days as a man­ager, I repeated your mes­sages at so many staff meet­ings that my reps teased me about it. And, appar­ently, still remem­ber me for it. Not a bad legacy now that I think about it.

Though we never met, you were a pow­er­ful influ­ence on my life and career. Part of how I got to where I am is because of you. Thank you.

So long, my friend. And maybe some­day I will still get to see you at the top.

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Stop Asking for Referrals

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

by Stephen Wer­sh­ing, The Client Dri­ven Practice

The big day has arrived! My book on refer­ral mar­ket­ing, Stop Ask­ing for Refer­rals, has now been released by McGraw Hill!

After work­ing with finan­cial advi­sor for 14 years (and being one for 25), I focused two years ago on research­ing every­thing I could find on the art of refer­ral mar­ket­ing.  I found that a lot of great work has been done that shows us what really works, and how we can cre­ate refer­ral mar­ket­ing strate­gies that will bring in plenty of new clients.  You have read many of those insights and ideas on this blog. I have been work­ing with advi­sors all over the coun­try imple­ment­ing these strate­gies. And now you can learn them, too, and start build­ing the prac­tice you have always wanted. And now most of those ideas have been con­cen­trated into this sin­gle action-oriented manual.

In this break­through book, you will learn:

•    How and why clients refer
•    How to engage your clients to teach you what they find most valuable
•    How to pre­pare your clients for the oppor­tu­nity to refer you
•    How to be the advi­sor clients nat­u­rally think of when they meet a good prospect
•    How to turn a bad refer­ral into a great opportunity
•    How to use LinkedIn to iden­tify peo­ple your clients can refer
•    How to have the “New Refer­ral Con­ver­sa­tion” with clients
•    How to cre­ate a refer­ral mar­ket­ing strat­egy that works

It’s all here — what works in get­ting refer­rals and how to put it into action.

Stop! Ask­ing for Refer­rals will give you the insight and strate­gies to solve your prob­lems attract­ing referrals. 

Bob Veres said the book “will almost cer­tainly become the best book on mar­ket­ing in the finan­cial planning/independent RIA world.”

Michael Kitces said “read­ing this book will rev­o­lu­tion­ize how you think about grow­ing your busi­ness.“
Julie Lit­tlechild rec­om­mends it as some­thing that will help you “unlock the untapped poten­tial you have in your busi­ness today with an approach that is com­fort­able as it is effective.”

Sheryl Gar­rett raves “Kudos for this pow­er­ful, one-stop mar­ket­ing resource!”

Get your copy today!  The book is avail­able on Ama­zon, at major book­sellers, or right on my web­site here.

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Study Shows Clients Get First Impression From Your Website – Make Sure Your Message Is Clear

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

by Stephen Wer­sh­ing, The Client Dri­ven Practice

Don’t make the mis­take of say­ing what other advi­sors put on their websites.

At the Per­sh­ing INSITE 2012 con­fer­ence, Michelle Gutier­rez, a direc­tor at Per­sh­ing, ref­er­enced a Tower Group study that showed that 71% of a sam­ple of investors get their first impres­sion of you by vis­it­ing your web­site. Only then do they want to meet with you. (I can­not find a copy or sum­mary of this study, so I can’t ver­ify this sta­tis­tic. If any­one has seen it, I would be grate­ful if you would put the link in the com­ments below.) So, if your mes­sage is not clearly on your home­page you are miss­ing opportunities.

So many sites I see say the same thing: inde­pen­dent, objec­tive, com­pre­hen­sive, wealth man­age­ment, finan­cial plan­ning. Does your web­site say that you build one-on-one rela­tion­ships with clients, offer­ing per­son­al­ized atten­tion and finan­cial guid­ance? Then you are just like a national bro­ker­age! Aren’t you?

If the client can­not quickly under­stand that you are really good at some­thing in par­tic­u­lar that the prospect needs, you may not get the chance to make her a client. You may have an amaz­ing pre­sen­ta­tion that you make to prospects in an intro­duc­tory meet­ing, but you have to get that appoint­ment for it to work its magic. If your web­site looks pretty much like your com­peti­tors, and their in-person sales pitch is good, your prospect may sign on with them with­out ever talk­ing to you.

Estab­lish­ing your brand requires putting your value propo­si­tion, what makes you dif­fer­ent, every­where you have a mar­ket­ing mes­sage. When­ever you have a chance to tell peo­ple what you do, ver­bally, in print, or on the web, you need to be rein­forc­ing the descrip­tion of your ideal client and that spe­cial solu­tion or expe­ri­ence you deliver.

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What Facebook can Teach Financial Advisors

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

We all know the Face­book story ….

From a Har­vard dorm room in 2004, in eight years Face­book has changed how much of the world com­mu­ni­cates. In the process, it has cre­ated sub­stan­tial wealth for its founders and early investors. While not yet pub­lic, pur­chases on pri­vate mar­ket­places put its value at $100 billion.

As CEO, Mark Zucker­berg obvi­ously did many things right. But there is one par­tic­u­lar aspect of his approach that was crit­i­cal to Facebook’s suc­cess; and that advi­sors can learn from.

Bet­ter done than perfect:

On the walls at Facebook’s offices are painted four words:

“Bet­ter done than perfect”

As I think about some of my con­ver­sa­tions with advi­sors, I’m struck by how often those words would help advi­sors break the log­jam of per­fec­tion­ism that pre­vents them from get­ting things done in their practice.

Some com­mon examples:

• The advi­sor who spends dozens of hours fine tun­ing his finan­cial plan­ning process to get it exactly right before using it with his clients to the point that it never actu­ally gets in front of clients
• The advi­sor who goes through draft after draft of his or her newslet­ter per­fect­ing the words; but is only able to sum­mon up the energy to do this once a year
• The advi­sor who invests immense amounts of time research­ing the best way to approach accoun­tants read­ing arti­cles, lis­ten­ing to pre­sen­ta­tions by con­sul­tants and talk­ing to other advi­sors, but runs out of steam when it comes to mak­ing the plan happen

We’ve all been guilty of per­fec­tion­ism spend­ing an inor­di­nate amount of time try­ing to get things exactly 100% right, when 90%, 80% or even 70% would be suf­fi­cient to get the job done.

Bear in mind this isn’t always the case. If I’m hav­ing heart surgery, the stakes are high enough that I want my sur­geon to obsess about get­ting things 100% right. But when it comes to get­ting out a quar­terly newslet­ter and many of the other things advi­sors do in their day, not so much.

Imple­ment­ing the hacker way:

Ear­lier this year, fil­ings to reg­u­la­tors included a let­ter from Zucker­berg to poten­tial investors, in which he described Facebook’s core val­ues. One of those val­ues is some­thing called “the hacker way.”

While hack­ing has come to have neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions involv­ing tak­ing down com­puter sys­tems, Zucker­berg describes hack­ing as a mind­set of exper­i­men­ta­tion. Doing things quickly and inex­pen­sively as a vehi­cle to test the bound­aries of what can be done, and then striv­ing to con­stantly improve and per­fect ini­tia­tives once in the field. In fact, some of Facebook’s most impor­tant fea­tures have emerged from that mind­set of experimentation.

July 1 is two months away; not only does it rep­re­sent the begin­ning of sum­mer, it also marks the mid– point of the year, so you’ve got 60 days before 2012 is half way over.

If you haven’t achieved all of your goals for 2012 (and who among us has?), con­sider apply­ing Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra of “Bet­ter done than per­fect” in your busi­ness. Pick one ini­tia­tive that you’ve run into road­blocks on because you haven’t had the time to exe­cute it to a suf­fi­ciently high stan­dard. Then think about whether tak­ing a “just do it” approach might break the log­jam and begin the process of iter­a­tion and improve­ment to get that ini­tia­tive off the draw­ing boards; and into the mar­ket­place and help move your busi­ness forward.

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Building the Business with New Clients

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

by Norm Trainor, The Covenant Group

Some­times it can feel like you are just rac­ing in place with your busi­ness — that the office is the one run­ning you, rather than the other way around. Stop­ping for even a minute to catch your breath would mean falling behind the pack, yet you don’t have the energy to sprint to the fin­ish line and pass competitors.

For finan­cial advi­sors and other entre­pre­neurs, it is nec­es­sary to look beyond sur­vival mode to how you can guar­an­tee sus­tain­able and strong growth for years to come.

Paul Boulanger, man­ag­ing direc­tor for Accenture’s finance and enter­prise per­for­mance con­sult­ing prac­tice, told Busi­ness Finance mag­a­zine that not only do firms need to main­tain low oper­at­ing costs, they need to estab­lish best prac­tices that will ensure ongo­ing growth.

He notes that “Finance Mas­ters” are those lead­ing their orga­ni­za­tions to suc­cess while main­tain­ing cost sav­ings. They have built gov­er­nance struc­tures that address busi­ness issues such as finan­cial plan­ning, analy­sis, set­ting tar­gets and fore­cast­ing what is com­ing down the pipeline, Boulanger added. These mas­ters are con­tin­u­ally ask­ing the ques­tion: “What can I do to grow and improve the business?”

Have you spent the major­ity of your time rac­ing just to keep up with your busi­ness? Are you too focused on the day-to-day respon­si­bil­ity of man­ag­ing the firm to see the direc­tion it is taking?

To build your busi­ness, you need to grow it by acquir­ing and retain­ing the types of clients who will help you reach your pro­fes­sional goals. A finan­cial advi­sor coach can help walk you through the steps of reor­ga­niz­ing (or cre­at­ing for the first time) your busi­ness model and restruc­tur­ing your approach to acquir­ing new clients.

In con­vert­ing ideal prospects into clients, try using the You/Me/Us/We model to cre­ate an effec­tive client attrac­tion con­ver­sa­tion that engages prospects in a dia­logue and cre­ates the oppor­tu­nity for you to demon­strate you exper­tise and your services.

It is impor­tant to lis­ten and under­stand the prospect’s needs and out­line how you can achieve them together. Estab­lish­ing trust is a key ele­ment in this process. Once estab­lished, you will be able to earn that person’s per­mis­sion to move to the next point in the buy­ing cycle.

First, focus on the other per­son. Before you get to the meet­ing, con­duct back­ground research to learn as much as you can. This will make ask­ing rel­e­vant ques­tions dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion more nat­ural and lead to more reveal­ing answers. As the dia­logue con­tin­ues, slowly tran­si­tion to why you are there — the “Me” part of the conversation.

Pro­ceed to the “Us” stage, giv­ing exam­ples of how you helped peo­ple in sit­u­a­tions sim­i­lar to the prospect’s. Finally, wrap up with the “We,” focus­ing on how, together, you and the prospect can work toward his or her goals.

Attract­ing new clients is para­mount to grow­ing your busi­ness and avoid­ing stag­na­tion. With the You/Me/Us/We con­ver­sa­tion, you may be more suc­cess­ful in acquir­ing ideal prospects and build­ing long-lasting rela­tion­ships with them as a finan­cial advisor.

As founder, pres­i­dent and CEO of The Covenant Group, Norm Trainor is often seen as the face of the com­pany and its’ lead­ing finan­cial advi­sor train­ing pro­grams. He has penned sev­eral best-selling books, arti­cles and other works with entre­pre­neurs and finan­cial advi­sors to show them how they can become more valu­able to their clients, boost pro­duc­tiv­ity and, ulti­mately, achieve the suc­cess they desire.

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Tags: Accenture, Address Business, Boulanger, Business Finance Magazine, Business Issues, Business Model, Covenant Group, Enterprise Performance, Financial Advisors, Financial Planning, Finish Line, Governance Structures, Managing Director, Norm Trainor, Performance Consulting, Pipeline, Professional Goals, Prospects, Sprint, Survival Mode
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Separate Yourself From Other Advisors By “Productizing”

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Face it – what most of us do for clients is indis­tin­guish­able from what other advi­sors do for clients, at least from the clients’ per­spec­tive. Claim­ing that we pro­vide great cus­tomer ser­vice, finan­cial plan­ning, or adher­ence to the fidu­ciary stan­dard won’t work. So, how can you dif­fer­en­ti­ate your­self? One effec­tive way is to “pro­duc­tize” your offer­ing. Doc­u­ment your process, define what prob­lem it solves and for whom, and pack­age it as a sin­gle deliverable.

Here are a few examples:

• Real­Life­Fi­nance^TM (Ger­ste­in­Fisher, New York, NY)
• Par­ent Care 360 (Andrew L. Comins, CLU, ChFC, MSFS)
• RetireS­mart (Mass Mutual)
• Divorce Sur­vival Kit (Carol Ann Wil­son, CFDS)
• Res­cue Your IRA (Bro­gan Finan­cial, Knoxville, TN)

To pro­duc­tize your offer­ing, first decide what issues it will address. Will it be ori­ented to risk man­age­ment, col­lege sav­ings, retire­ment plan­ning, a major life event like the loss of a loved one or a divorce, or some aspect of invest­ment man­age­ment? Iden­tify what you will help clients work through and what the result will be at the end of the process.

Deter­mine the out­comes and deliv­er­ables of your ser­vice. If it involves finan­cial plan­ning, decide what com­po­nents of the plan will be fun­da­men­tal. List what kinds of analy­sis you will per­form. Decide what you will deliver and how it will look. Will it be a plan, ongo­ing reports, per­son­al­ized page on a web­site, or a report? Will this be some­thing that is deliv­ered once dur­ing your rela­tion­ship with the client, or is it an ongo­ing ser­vice? If it is ongo­ing, how fre­quently will you deliver it to the client?

Give every­thing a con­sis­tent look. The plan you deliver, any ongo­ing reports the client receives, the work­sheets you use dur­ing the process, and the mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial to pro­mote the process should be named and design so that it is clear it all belongs to a cohe­sive system.

Once it is com­plete, give it a com­pelling name. If it is descrip­tive, a list can work well (our 10 point…, Our seven step…). If you can come up with some­thing more like a brand name, con­sider trade­mark­ing. Whichever way you go, the point is to offer peo­ple some­thing brief and mem­o­rable. If you have done it effec­tively, you can men­tion the name of your ser­vice to some­one who is in your tar­get mar­ket and they will ask you to tell them more about it. Peo­ple will not remem­ber every­thing about the descrip­tion of your process or the steps involved in it, but they may remem­ber the name. Once they have that in their mem­ory, it gives them some­thing quick and inter­est­ing to men­tion to other people.

Copy­right © Stephen Wer­sh­ing

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Tags: Adherence, Carol Ann Wilson, Clu Chfc, Cohesive System, College Savings, Comins, Deliverable, Deliverables, Divorce, Financial Planning, Great Customer Service, Investment Management, Ira, Loss Of A Loved One, Management College, Msfs, New York Ny, Perspective, Retirement, Survival Kit
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Firing Clients

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Do you know how some­times there are things that drive you absolutely crazy and you just have to make your opin­ion heard?

Here’s one that is at the top of my list – “Fir­ing” clients.

If you have fol­lowed my blog or have heard me speak at a con­fer­ence, you know that I believe in client seg­men­ta­tion.  In fact, I am one of the first busi­ness coaches or con­sul­tants to do seg­men­ta­tion with advi­sors.  When I started this busi­ness in 1998, seg­men­ta­tion was a big part of my busi­ness.  Clients used to send me sheets of paper con­tain­ing a list of clients, assets and rev­enue and we would scan and con­vert these lists to an Excel file and sort them into A, B, C and D categories.

In 1985 when I was an advi­sor, our National Sales Man­ager did a pre­sen­ta­tion on seg­men­ta­tion and I sorted by client cards into books marked A, B, C and D and shifted my focus to the A and B clients and dou­bled my busi­ness over the next 12-months.

BUT, you should never “fire” a client! The growth of your busi­ness depends on the rate of sat­is­fac­tion and the size of you client, per­sonal and busi­ness net­works – the higher your sat­is­fac­tion rate, the stronger your busi­ness growth.

Your small clients have done noth­ing wrong.  You chose to work with them.  You made them a promise that you would help them with their invest­ment or finan­cial plan­ning needs.  They have paid you for the ser­vices you provided.

Today, we have a much more sophis­ti­cated way of seg­ment­ing clients.  We now call our categories:

• Super Ideal
• Ideal
• Mar­gin­ally Ideal
• Less Than Ideal

There are two types of clients who fall into the Less Than Ideal cat­e­gory – Good Peo­ple and Bad Peo­ple.  Good Peo­ple are pleas­ant to work with, prof­itable because they don’t take much time and are peo­ple who pro­mote you to their friends and col­leagues.  Bad Peo­ple are just the oppo­site – you cringe every time you see their name on call dis­play, they upset your staff, they are rude and demand­ing and they con­stantly com­plain about your fees.

If the Good Peo­ple are will­ing to accept a scaled back pro­gram and be 100% sat­is­fied, then keep them.  After all, if you can ser­vice three of this type of client in the same time as an Ideal Client and the total fees are the same, what’s the prob­lem?  If Good Peo­ple are not will­ing to accept a scaled back pro­gram, they will decide to leave and it is their deci­sion.  The ideal solu­tion, if you are in a large orga­ni­za­tion, is to pass these clients on to a new advi­sor who needs to build his client net­work.  He will find gems within this list that you will never know about because you don’t give these peo­ple suf­fi­cient attention.

Bad Peo­ple have to go.  No mat­ter what you do or how you do it, they will not be happy.  Bad Peo­ple rep­re­sent less than 3% of your clients but cause 95% of your prob­lems and stress.  Have a face-to-face meet­ing with them and explain why you are sug­gest­ing that they find a new advi­sor.  Pick up any trans­fer fees.

The Bot­tom Line:

Seg­men­ta­tion helps you to iden­tify prof­itable vs. unprof­itable clients and to struc­ture ser­vice tem­plates for each cat­e­gory to allow you man­age client-by-client profitability.

Your suc­cess depends on the level of client sat­is­fac­tion you are able to achieve.  Stage client expe­ri­ences that will lead your clients to give you a 9 or 10 score on The Ulti­mate Ques­tion – “How likely is it that you would rec­om­mend us to a friend or col­league?”  Peo­ple who score you 9 or 10, accord­ing to Fred Reich­held, a thought-leader in client loy­alty and sat­is­fac­tion and author of The Ulti­mate Ques­tion, are Pro­mot­ers.  Your goal should be to develop pro­mot­ers within your client net­work.  “Fir­ing” clients (Good Peo­ple) will take you in the oppo­site direc­tion from achiev­ing this goal.

If you “dis­en­gage” from unprof­itable rela­tion­ships, do it once in your career to free up capac­ity.  Don’t do it annu­ally as other coaches might sug­gest as it cre­ates Detrac­tors.  BUT, make it a hard and fast rule to never again accept a less than ideal client.

Bob Simp­son is Pres­i­dent of Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sul­tants.  Bob can be reached on his direct line at 905−502−0100, toll free at 866−646−6002 or by e-mail at bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca.

About Bob Simpson

Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sult­ing has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

Bob Simp­son, pres­i­dent and founder of Syn­chronic­ity has been involved, directly or indi­rectly in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try since 1981. He has been a very suc­cess­ful finan­cial advi­sor with Nes­bitt Thom­son Inc., a major Cana­dian finan­cial insti­tu­tion. Between 1981 and 1989, he built a busi­ness with more than $120 mil­lion in assets under man­age­ment, was branch man­ager and SVP National Sales for Mid­land Wal­wyn and has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

You can fol­low Bob Simp­son via:

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Tags: 12 Months, Assets, Blog, Business Clients, Business Coaches, Business Growth, Business Networks, Client Cards, Colleagues, Financial Planning, National Sales Manager, Satisfaction Rate, Segmentation, Top Of My List
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