How to Show Up at the Top of Google Searches

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

More and more investors are con­duct­ing google searches as part of their pur­chase process  – and not just for restau­rants and car deal­ers but also for pro­fes­sion­als such as lawyers and finan­cial advisors.

And while con­duct­ing google searches for advi­sors has not entered the main­stream among older investors it is becom­ing increas­ingly common-place among clients in their 30’s and 40’s.

Today fea­tures a 32 page report from Google on how to max­i­mize the chances of show­ing up first on searches for finan­cial advi­sors in your communities.

The report pro­vides tips on:
• Accu­rate page titles
• Improv­ing your site struc­ture
• Opti­miz­ing con­tent
• Mak­ing bet­ter use of images
• Using header tags
• Mak­ing your site mobile-phone friendly
• Pro­mot­ing your site effectively

Click here for the full report.

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Tags: Car Dealers, Financial Advisors, Google, Google Searches, Header Tags, Images, Lawyers, Mainstream, Mobile Phone, Older Investors, Page Titles, Restaurants
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Getting Employees to Work Smarter, not Harder

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

It seems to be an afflic­tion many entre­pre­neursshare — they think that by putting in long work weeks and think­ing about noth­ing but their bur­geon­ing busi­nesses, they will be able to make it grow more quickly and achieve their pro­fes­sional goals. That rea­son­ing is skewed, however.Consider your own work pat­terns. Even if you put in days that are 10 hours or longer, work on the week­ends and spend the rest of your free time think­ing about the com­pany, how much of that time are you actu­ally being effec­tive? Do you find your­self in the office, star­ing at a pile of work, and wast­ing min­utes or hours try­ing to make sense of what’s in front of you?

Through The Covenant Group, I’ve met a lot of finan­cial advi­sors who are too busy work­ing in their busi­nesses to work on them. Wrapped up in the minute details, they can­not deter­mine where their com­pa­nies are going or ever decide where they WANT them to go. Step­ping away from the daily grind, giv­ing your­self per­mis­sion to take a breath and think, is far more impor­tant than mak­ing sure you respond to five more emails before going home for the day.

I think a recent Har­vard Busi­ness Review blog post writ­ten by Robert C. Pozen casts more light on this per­cep­tion that work quan­tity super­sedes qual­ity, as well as the worko­holic cul­ture that has risen around it. As he points out, we log our pro­duc­tiv­ity in terms of hours, instead of results and the value that pro­fes­sion­als such as ana­lysts, con­sul­tants and lawyers “cre­ate through their knowledge.”

From a resource man­age­ment per­spec­tive, this atti­tude can cut down on your own and your employ­ees’ pro­duc­tiv­ity, because they are think­ing too much about how long they are at the office instead of “answer­ing the most crit­i­cal ques­tion: ‘Am I cur­rently using my time in the best pos­si­ble way?’” Pozen points out.

Many of the advi­sors I I’ve coached have said that they are already maxed out on how much time they can put into their busi­ness and feel stuck at a cer­tain income level or num­ber of clients. They feel that it would be impos­si­ble to grow their busi­nesses any fur­ther, since there are only so many hours in the day. The solu­tion is not to ded­i­cate addi­tional time to the com­pany, but to give a greater effort when you are there. Del­e­gate some of the more time-consuming, less-valuable tasks that con­sume your time to an employee. Think about whether your daily tasks are truly advanc­ing the firm, or whether they just con­sti­tute busy work. Being hon­est about your own pro­duc­tiv­ity is the first step to cut­ting down hours and improv­ing results.

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.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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Tags: Affliction, Attitude, Covenant Group, Critical Question, Emails, Entrepreneurs Share, Financial Advisors, Free Time, Going Home, Harvard Business Review, Lawyers, Management Perspective, Minute Details, Perception, Productivity, Professional Goals, Resource Management, Robert C Pozen, Work Patterns
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A Question to Engage Client Accountants

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Last week, I con­ducted the first of six weekly online ses­sions to help advi­sors develop and imple­ment a plan to attract new clients in 2011.

In that ses­sion, I talked about how one advi­sor sets aside time each Fri­day to meet with the accoun­tant or lawyer of one of his key clients … and how he makes these meet­ings happen.

After­wards, I got this email from one of the par­tic­i­pants on the call:

I’ve gone for lunches with clients CA’s and lawyers in the past.  I find get­ting a meet­ing is not much of a prob­lem. I find that the dif­fi­culty can be in main­tain­ing ongo­ing con­tact that is a) mean­ing­ful, b) rel­e­vant and c) inter­est­ing to the COI.

When 2 or 3 months rolls by and it’s time to check-in with the COI, I would like some good ideas about what to call about. Any sug­ges­tions?

Engag­ing accountants

I responded by shar­ing a  recent con­ver­sa­tion with a suc­cess­ful advi­sor in Dal­las after my talk at his firm’s conference.

I’d talked about ways to engage prospects and he told me what he says at the end of meet­ings with client pro­fes­sion­als and high poten­tial prospects, where he feels the con­ver­sa­tion has gone well and the peo­ple he’s talk­ing to seem relaxed and interested.

He fin­ishes by saying:

One final thing. My team and I spend a ton of time each week mon­i­tor­ing the best sources we can find on a broad range of issues.

In that process, we often find arti­cles that address key con­cerns for some of our clients and send those along to them.

Some­times my client’s big con­cerns are things like the out­look for inter­est rates, house prices or the dol­lar, other times the main issues for clients aren’t related to money at all … for exam­ple, I have sev­eral clients strug­gling with lack of moti­va­tion among chil­dren in their twen­ties, I have oth­ers who are wor­ried about what to do with U.S. vaca­tion prop­er­ties that have declined in value.

Clients often tell us they find these arti­cles very helpful.

If you’re inter­ested, that’s some­thing I’d be happy to offer you also. So tell me, is there any one issue that if we came across some really inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion, you’d like to receive it.

Four key questions

I asked this advi­sor four ques­tions about this approach:

First, what kind of gen­eral reac­tion does he get?

What kind of issues emerge?

What does he say when prospects or accoun­tants shared a con­cern with him?

And finally, how does he fol­low through on an ongo­ing basis?

The gen­eral reac­tion he receives:

The advi­sor reminded me that he only asks this ques­tion to prospect and client pro­fes­sion­als at the end of meet­ings when he’s been get­ting pos­i­tive vibes. In light of that, the over­all response has been very pos­i­tive … he gets spe­cific responses over half the time. And even in cases where peo­ple tell him there’s noth­ing off­hand they can think of, no one seems offended.

The issues which emerge:

On the types of answers he gets, he finds that more often than not peo­ple pick up on the exam­ples he uses. If he tells prospects in retire­ment that exist­ing clients are con­cerned about issues like out­liv­ing their money, sav­ing taxes and the low inter­est they’re get­ting on sav­ings, those are the con­cerns peo­ple play back.

If he tells accoun­tants that other CPAs he’s talked to have expressed con­cerns about ways to bring in new clients and the eco­nom­ics of run­ning small and mid sized firms, then gen­er­ally they respond that those are the things that they worry about also.

And if he uses exam­ples of under­wa­ter vaca­tion prop­er­ties or unmo­ti­vated chil­dren, those con­cerns tend to come up as pri­or­i­ties as well.

His response:

When some­one voices a con­cern on which they’d like to receive infor­ma­tion, he thanks them for shar­ing this, asks for their con­tact info and tells them that while he can’t make any promises, if he sees some­thing inter­est­ing he’ll send it along.

He imme­di­ately black­ber­ries his assis­tant, ask­ing her to go online and look for a recent arti­cle on this topic. A favourite source is the Wall Street Jour­nal; while WSJ​.com lim­its access to non­sub­scribers to the first para­graph of most sto­ries, it has a ser­vice which allows advi­sors to email peo­ple full arti­cles, even if the recip­i­ent hasn’t signed up as a WSJ online sub­scriber.  His goal is to send a fol­low up email to the prospect or accoun­tant in the next day, includ­ing an ini­tial arti­cle on their issue wher­ever possible.

Fol­low­ing up afterwards:

On the final issue of how he fol­lowed through, this advi­sor has iden­ti­fied half a dozen hot but­ton issues shared by many exist­ing and prospec­tive clients and pro­fes­sion­als; among these are fore­casts for the US econ­omy, inter­est rates, the dol­lar and house prices.

In the course of his reg­u­lar read­ing, he looks for arti­cles on these issues that he can send … and by focus­ing on areas that are com­mon across clients and prospects, is able to deliver rel­e­vant, value added infor­ma­tion in a time effi­cient fash­ion.  Note that he is care­ful not to over­whelm clients and prospects, his goal is to send some­thing every month or two, always remind­ing the recip­i­ent that they’re get­ting this infor­ma­tion because they’d asked for it.

Let’s be clear, this approach will not be a fit for every advi­sor. But for advi­sors look­ing to build bridges with high poten­tial prospects and client accoun­tants, con­sider whether you can mod­ify this approach to make it work for you.

A ques­tion to engage client accountants

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Tags: Accountant, Accountants, Contact, Email, Hap, House Prices, Interest Rates, Lack Of Motivation, Lawyer, Lawyers, Money, Online Help, Participants, Prospects, Sessions, Vacation Properties, Value Clients
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A Sentence That Tripled Referrals

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

A sen­tence that tripled referrals

Every advi­sor rec­og­nizes that the best source of new clients is refer­rals. Despite this, even many estab­lished advi­sors with big books strug­gle to get introductions.

Recently, a suc­cess­ful advi­sor told me how he added just one line of text to his web­site — and got sur­pris­ing refer­ral results as a consequence.

That line:

New clients accepted by refer­ral only

Posi­tion­ing your­self as a “referral-only” advisor

Over the ensu­ing months, this advi­sor added a “New clients by refer­ral only ” agenda item to client meet­ings, saying:

“If you’ve been on my web­site recently, you may have noticed that I have a new pol­icy that I only accept new clients who are referred by my exist­ing clients or by accoun­tants and lawyers I work with.

That’s because I have lim­ited capac­ity to take on new clients — and in my expe­ri­ence, the new clients who I work with best and am able to help the most are referred by my exist­ing clients, as they’re much more likely to be a good fit. So should you be talk­ing to friends who might be inter­ested in sit­ting down with me, let my assis­tant Lori know — I’d be happy to sched­ule a time to meet.”

In fair­ness, this didn’t mark a big strate­gic depar­ture for this advi­sor — almost all of his new clients were already com­ing from refer­rals. But by putting this in writ­ing on his web­site and using this as a jumping-off point for con­ver­sa­tions with clients, the num­ber of refer­rals to prospec­tive clients has more than tripled. What’s inter­est­ing is that these refer­rals haven’t hap­pened imme­di­ately in client meet­ings. Rather the impact has typ­i­cally flowed in dur­ing the weeks that fol­lowed these meetings.

This advi­sor isn’t alone in mak­ing a pub­lic writ­ten state­ment that he only accepts new clients by refer­rals. For exam­ple here’s a line from the bio of a chairman’s club pro­ducer with Mer­rill Lynch in Dallas:

She accepts new clients on a refer­ral basis only, from a national net­work of accoun­tants, attor­neys and other pro­fes­sion­als as well as her exist­ing clients.

But cases like this are rare — even advi­sors who get the bulk of new clients from refer­rals don’t typ­i­cally put this in writ­ing as their policy.

Cre­at­ing exclusivity

There are at least two rea­sons that this approach works.

First, it allows the advi­sor to have con­ver­sa­tions with clients that raises the aware­ness of refer­rals and gets them think­ing about who might be a fit.

But sec­ond — and just as impor­tant — the writ­ten pol­icy ele­vates this advisor’s posi­tion­ing and cre­ates a sense of scarcity. Human nature being what it is, we tend to under­value things that are read­ily avail­able and want the things we can’t have. Being overea­ger can actu­ally work against you — some of us might remem­ber that from our expe­ri­ences dat­ing in high school. It can also hurt your chances when inter­view­ing for a job.

This also applies to attract­ing new clients. When sit­ting down with qual­i­fied prospects, your goal is to com­mu­ni­cate that you’d like to work with them but that you don’t need to work with them; even a hint of des­per­a­tion can sab­o­tage your efforts. By post­ing “new clients accepted by refer­ral only” on his web­site, this advi­sor com­mu­ni­cates a level of self-assurance, con­fi­dence and exclu­siv­ity that makes him more attrac­tive to exist­ing and prospec­tive clients alike.

Com­mu­ni­cat­ing confidence

This isn’t the only instance where com­mu­ni­cat­ing a sense of exclu­siv­ity or scarcity enhances your posi­tion­ing as a con­fi­dent, expert advi­sor and makes you more attrac­tive as a result.

A cou­ple of years ago, I talked to an advi­sor who had assumed some man­age­ment respon­si­bil­i­ties in his branch and could only devote half his time to clients. He’d writ­ten all clients a note about this change and said that as a result he’d only be able to work with clients with assets of at least $750,000.

Two inter­est­ing things hap­pened. First of all, some clients with less than $750,000 sud­denly came up with addi­tional assets to hit that thresh­old. And other clients asked whether he might be able to make an excep­tion for friends who only had $600,000.

Along sim­i­lar lines, I recently talked to an invest­ment coun­selling firm that raised their min­i­mum to $2 mil­lion — and found that the demand for their ser­vices actu­ally increased as a result. By say­ing they weren’t for every­one, they raised their appeal to clients in their tar­get group.

Finally, I talked to an advi­sor who’d acted on a sug­ges­tion in an arti­cle I wrote in Jan­u­ary about get­ting prospects off the fence. Again, the strat­egy is to com­mu­ni­cate scarcity and con­fi­dence. When some­one you meet with expresses strong inter­est and then doesn’t respond to voice mails and emails, I sug­gest leav­ing a mes­sage along the lines of:

“Just fol­low­ing up on our last meet­ing. I have capac­ity for six new clients in the next 90 days. When we met, I thought we might be a good fit and that I could help you achieve your goals. It sounds like you’re really busy right now, I’ll touch base in April. Let me know if you’d like to talk in the meantime.”

Feel­ing he had noth­ing to lose, he left this mes­sage for a prospec­tive client who had seemed inter­ested but then hadn’t returned his calls. To his pleas­ant sur­prise, the prospect called back the next day.

Less is def­i­nitely more

After his suc­cess in post­ing New clients accepted by refer­ral only on his web­site, this advi­sor told me that one of his team mem­bers had sug­gested putting this phrase on his busi­ness cards and includ­ing it in his newslet­ter — and asked me what I thought.

I advised against this for two reasons.

First, the rea­son this works is that this is a sin­cere expres­sion of where this advi­sor stands, rather than a sales pitch. And my con­cern was that adding it to busi­ness cards or newslet­ters would cross the line to the point where some clients would see it as a mar­ket­ing pitch for referrals.

Sec­ond, what makes this suc­cess­ful is not the line on the web­site itself but rather the sub­se­quent oppor­tu­nity to raise this in con­ver­sa­tion with clients. The only rea­son to add “new clients by refer­ral only” to other ele­ments of his com­mu­ni­ca­tion would be doing so facil­i­tated more client con­ver­sa­tions about this pol­icy. And in my view, adding this to busi­ness cards is unlikely to achieve that goal.

Remem­ber the key rea­sons this works: First it enhances this advisor’s posi­tion­ing as con­fi­dent and suc­cess­ful. Hav­ing done that, he uses this as a jump­ing off point to ini­ti­ate con­ver­sa­tions with clients. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing the line more broadly risks putting him into the “overea­ger” cat­e­gory and under­min­ing the sense of exclu­siv­ity and scarcity that has made this approach successful.

A final concern

Some advi­sors might be con­cerned that tak­ing a “by refer­rals only” stance means you have to turn down prospec­tive clients who would oth­er­wise want to work with you — and you will lose busi­ness and limit oppor­tu­ni­ties as a result.

Just to be clear, post­ing this on your site is really a state­ment of phi­los­o­phy and expres­sion of intent. While you can’t run prospect­ing work­shops or be cold call­ing if you go this route, there’s noth­ing to pre­vent you from mak­ing excep­tions if you encounter peo­ple who’d be a good fit on a char­i­ta­ble board or at a com­mu­nity event you’re involved in. In fact, those peo­ple may well value the oppor­tu­nity to work with you even more because you are mak­ing a spe­cial excep­tion for them.

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Tags: Accountants, Agenda Item, Attorneys, Client Meetings, Consequence, Conversations With Clients, Fairness, Fit, Introductions, Jumping Off Point, Lawyers, Lori, Merrill Lynch, Positioning, Professiona, Prospective Clients, Referral Basis, Referrals
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A Million Dollar Meeting Gone Wrong

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

A mil­lion dol­lar meet­ing gone wrong

Land­ing a meet­ing with a prospec­tive client with a mil­lion dol­lars to invest doesn’t hap­pen every day — espe­cially when it results from a cold call.

But get­ting a chance to sit down is only the first step. Over lunch last week, a long-time friend who’s a part­ner with a down­town Toronto law described a recent meet­ing with a finan­cial advi­sor seek­ing his busi­ness and how some sub­tle errors and obvi­ous mis­takes cost the advi­sor the oppor­tu­nity to do business.

This lawyer has assets of well over $1 mil­lion — our con­ver­sa­tion offers a num­ber of impor­tant lessons for advisors.

The first relates to what it takes to get a meet­ing when you’re call­ing cold.

Cold call­ing to get meetings:

Here’s what the lawyer told me.

“The orig­i­nal con­tact came a year ago from a guy call­ing on behalf of a bro­ker with one of the banks. The only rea­son that he got through orig­i­nally was that I get in early so when he called the first time at 7:30 I answered my phone. I blew him off, told him I was happy where I was — but he said he’d like to send me a report from his firm on the out­look for mar­kets regard­less. He also said he’d like to touch base in six months. I said sure, fig­ured I’ve never hear from him again — was a bit sur­prised when that report crossed my desk a week later”

“The same guy called me last fall at about the same time in the morn­ing, guess he’d fig­ured out when I get in — and I told him I still wasn’t inter­ested in meet­ing. And again he said that he under­stood, but would like to email me an arti­cle from For­tune Mag­a­zine that the bro­ker he works with has been send­ing clients on the out­look for the econ­omy and then touch base in about six months.”

“In March, I got another call — this time from the bro­ker him­self. I agreed to give him half an hour over a cof­fee” the lawyer said. “I was impressed by his low key man­ner on the phone and his per­sis­tence. My com­fort level went up when he told me that he dealt with a num­ber of lawyers and had been in the invest­ment indus­try for 20 years. And I actu­ally felt a bit of oblig­a­tion, given that I’d twice said his assis­tant could send me stuff and then he’d fol­lowed through both times.”

Take­aways on get­ting ini­tial meetings

The obvi­ous les­son is that when it comes to get­ting ini­tial meet­ings per­sis­tence pays.

But there are other lessons as well.

First, if you want to get through to busy peo­ple you have to find the time that they’re likely to pick up the phone — whether it be early in the day, later on after their assis­tant has left or on Sat­ur­day morn­ings. The only way to deter­mine this is through trial and error — and once you’ve had suc­cess once, you need to record this for the future.

Sec­ond, one way to build trust is by mak­ing offers that prospects find valu­able and then deliv­er­ing. Send­ing those reports and arti­cles helped build cred­i­bil­ity — if the per­son call­ing for this advi­sor had said “Just check­ing to see if you’re ready to buy yet”, while it cer­tainly would have shown per­sis­tence, it wouldn’t have cre­ated the same impe­tus to meet.

Finally, one of the keys to win­ning over prospects is demon­strat­ing patience. A crit­i­cal fac­tor to the suc­cess in secur­ing this meet­ing was how the calls were spaced out. If the per­son call­ing had made the same three calls a month apart, chances are he would have been seen as a pest rather than call­ing on behalf of some­one worth meeting.

A meet­ing that went wrong

The sec­ond set of lessons relate to how you man­age that ini­tial inter­ac­tion with a prospect.

The lawyer went on to talk about the meeting

“We met at the Star­bucks under­neath my build­ing. He already had a cof­fee and a table when we got there — he rec­og­nized me from my photo on our firm’s web­site. On the phone he’d asked what kind of cof­fee I liked in case he got there first — and sure enough he had it wait­ing for me.

“Our con­ver­sa­tion began just fine. He thanked me for tak­ing the time to meet — said he’d like to learn a bit about my sit­u­a­tion and would be happy to answer any ques­tions I might have about markets.

“First he asked about how I was invest­ing cur­rently — I told him that I’d worked with a bro­ker in the past but for the past 10 years had been invest­ing on my own. He then asked about how I was invested currently.”

The lawyer paused and went on.

“At that point some­thing weird hap­pened. I have a habit of play­ing with my pen, this is some­thing I’ve always done.

As I was talk­ing about what I own right now, this guy picks up his pen and starts play­ing with it also.

Then when I crossed my legs he crossed his as well — and for the rest of our meet­ing, every time I did some­thing he did the same thing. Frankly, I didn’t know what exactly to think.

After about 15 min­utes, this guy says: ‘I appre­ci­ate your tak­ing the time today to talk. Let me tell you a bit about my back­ground and approach.”

The lawyer fin­ished our con­ver­sa­tion by repeat­ing this advisor’s con­clud­ing comments:

“From what you’ve told me, I do think that I might be able to add value to how you’re man­ag­ing money. As a next step, I’d like to sug­gest that we meet one lunch hour over a sand­wich at my office to review your cur­rent invest­ments in more detail — I’d be happy to give you an alter­na­tive point of view on what you’re doing right now. There would be no cost or oblig­a­tion for this.

My office is just a block away from here. I’m free a week from Fri­day and on Mon­day of the fol­low­ing week. Which of these two would work bet­ter for you?”

The lawyer wrapped us his sum­mary of the meeting:

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Tags: 1 Million, Assets, Banks, Coffee, Cold Call, Cold Cold, Contact, Desk, Economy, Fortune Magazine, Half An Hour, Lawyer, Lawyers, Long Time Friend, Lunch, Million Dollars, Persistence, Prospective Client, Six Months, Subtle Errors
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Converting prospects to clients

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

When­ever you ask a prospec­tive client for a com­mit­ment to act — to meet, to share their state­ment or to trans­fer their account — they weigh the ben­e­fits of this action against the per­ceived risk.

When a prospec­tive client hes­i­tates, there’s a temp­ta­tion to keep pil­ing on ben­e­fits until they agree. That’s one way to achieve suc­cess — by increas­ing the ben­e­fits of the action you’re proposing.

But there’s another approach to get­ting a prospect to act that fewer advi­sors con­sider — and that’s to reduce the risk of that action.

Here are some ways to do that.

Strat­egy one:  How you get in front of prospec­tive clients

The first and eas­i­est way to reduce risk is to get intro­duced by refer­rals from clients or accoun­tants and lawyers.

That’s because refer­rals are a trans­fer of trust — when clients refer you to friends or col­leagues, the trust your clients feels towards you is trans­ferred to their friends.

Another approach that reduces risk is com­mu­nity net­work­ing — mak­ing a con­scious invest­ment of time to engage in activ­i­ties that let prospec­tive clients get to know you in a way that’s com­fort­able; this works espe­cially well if you’re in a lead­er­ship role.

Strat­egy two: Client tes­ti­mo­ni­als and client surveys

A recent col­umn talked about a low stress approach to client testimonials.

When meet­ing with a prospec­tive client, you might say:

“Quite often, peo­ple I talk to about the pos­si­bil­ity of work­ing together are inter­ested in the expe­ri­ence that exist­ing clients have had.

Here are com­ments from clients I’ve worked with for some time who are in sit­u­a­tions sim­i­lar to yours.”

And then you offer a piece of paper with short com­ments from four or five clients — ide­ally peo­ple who are in sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions to the prospect, retirees or busi­ness own­ers or cor­po­rate executives.

Some advi­sors have com­mis­sioned a client sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey — there are firms like Advi­sor Impact who are in the busi­ness of going out and sys­tem­at­i­cally gath­er­ing feed­back from clients.

So you could say to a prospec­tive client:

“Happy clients are my num­ber one priority.

Last year, I com­mis­sioned an out­side firm to sur­vey my clients. And here’s a sum­mary of the findings”.

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Tags: Accountants, Business Owners, Client Satisfaction Survey, Client Surveys, Client Testimonials, Colleagues, Community Networking, Corporate Executives, Friends, Lawyers, Leadership Role, People, Piece Of Paper, Prospective Client, Prospective Clients, Prospects, Referrals, Risk, Stress, Temptation
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Becoming the fall back advisor for high end clients

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Once you’ve devel­oped a clearly defined and dif­fer­en­ti­ated value propo­si­tion, there are many dif­fer­ent routes to get­ting the word out to high end prospects.You can build pro­file as the “go to” resource within a defined client group, build refer­ral rela­tion­ships with accoun­tants and lawyers or focus on devel­op­ing media pro­file in your community.

And then there’s the role of patience — one of the most impor­tant qual­i­ties to an effec­tive prospect­ing campaign.Recently, I talked to an advi­sor about the fine line between com­mu­ni­cat­ing that you’d LIKE to work with prospects on the one hand but that you don’t NEED to work with them on the other. In con­ver­sa­tions with prospects, you need to avoid any­thing that makes them fear that they may be rushed or pres­sured when meet­ing with you.

This brought to mind a con­ver­sa­tion with a highly suc­cess­ful, Chairman’s Club level finan­cial advi­sor some years back, who had decided to retire after a long career with one of the bank owned brokers.

He’d mapped out his retire­ment plans care­fully. Most impor­tant, he’d brought his daugh­ter into the busi­ness a cou­ple of years before from an analyst’s role with a well known insti­tu­tion; among her other qual­i­ties, she held a CFA.

He involved her in all his client meet­ings and let her increas­ingly take the lead in man­ag­ing key rela­tion­ships. As a result, none of his clients were sur­prised when he broke the news that he was step­ping back to a part time role and all of the con­ver­sa­tions about this went well.

All except the talk with one of his very largest clients, a highly suc­cess­ful ser­ial entre­pre­neur, on whom he paid a per­sonal visit to let him know of his plans.

This client’s response took him aback:

“Joe, I’ve really enjoyed our rela­tion­ship and you’ve done a great job for me. But I have to tell you that I’m going to be mov­ing my account.”

Caught com­pletely off guard, the bro­ker con­fessed to being sur­prised. He asked his client to tell him more.

“This is no reflec­tion on you or your daugh­ter” was the reply. ” Let me tell you what happened.

“For some time, I’ve sat on the board of a local hos­pi­tal — among the other board mem­bers is one of your com­peti­tors. Over the course of time, we chat­ted at meet­ings and got to know each other a bit.

“About three years ago, this guy called me and said he’d like to buy me break­fast, to talk about some invest­ment strate­gies he’d put in place for some busi­ness own­ers that he worked with that might be a fit for me.

“I told him that you and I worked together, that I was happy where I was and that this wouldn’t be a good use of his time.”

The client paused and then went on. “Frankly, the other broker’s response sur­prised me.

“He said  — I’m delighted to hear that. First, I’m delighted that you’re being well served. And sec­ond, in light of that I’m happy to hear that you aren’t look­ing at alter­na­tives — because I wouldn’t want my clients who I’m doing a good job for to be talk­ing to com­peti­tors either. But why don’t we have break­fast regardless.”

“So we had a very pleas­ant break­fast, talked about what was hap­pen­ing at the hos­pi­tal and our fam­i­lies, didn’t really talk much about invest­ments much at all.

“But I started get­ting his newslet­ter and invi­ta­tions to things he was putting on for his clients.

“About six months later, he called and invited me to a lun­cheon to hear a money man­ager in town from New York.

“Since then, he’s been in touch two or three times a year. We’ve had lunch a cou­ple of times, we played golf on one occasion.

“About a year ago, we were hav­ing lunch and he says to me: ‘I under­stand that you’re happy in your cur­rent rela­tion­ship and I respect that. But should there ever be a change, I very much hope that I’ll have the oppor­tu­nity to com­plete for your business.

“I told him that I thought that was a rea­son­able request. In light of that con­ver­sa­tion, I really feel that I have an oblig­a­tion to give him a chance to show what he can do.”

So here’s the inter­est­ing ques­tion: What had the incum­bent bro­ker and his daugh­ter done wrong to lose a multi mil­lion dol­lar account?

The answer: They really hadn’t done any­thing wrong … it’s just that another advi­sor had done some­thing very right, by posi­tion­ing him­self as the log­i­cal fall­back should there ever be a change in the sta­tus of this client’s relationship.

It takes a cou­ple of things to make this approach work for you — the right prospects and the right approach.

Start by iden­ti­fy­ing poten­tial can­di­dates against whom you want to posi­tion your­self in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to the bro­ker described above. They should have three qual­i­ties — first, they would be a very sub­stan­tial addi­tion to your book, sec­ond, you have an exist­ing rela­tion­ship in place and third you like and are com­fort­able with them. Chances are that if you like them, they like you.

Once you have iden­ti­fied poten­tial can­di­dates, you have to sort out an approach that works for you.

To be effec­tive, this approach has to be both more aggres­sive and less aggres­sive than you’d use against a typ­i­cal prospect.

More aggres­sive because the fre­quency of per­sonal con­tact is much higher than with a nor­mal prospect.

And less aggres­sive because the con­tact itself is lower key. In fact, when it comes to using the “fall­back advi­sor” approach, you have no expec­ta­tion of that indi­vid­ual becom­ing a client in the near term, there’s not even a trace of “are you ready to buy yet?”

Instead, you are patiently posi­tion­ing your­self against the even­tu­al­ity of a change in their sit­u­a­tion. Remember, a key rea­son this works is both the value being pro­vided and the level of patience being demonstrated.

Because of the amount of time and patience required, you likely want to focus on only a few prospects in this fash­ion.  In the long run, how­ever, the time and patience to become “the fall­back advi­sor” against the right indi­vid­u­als can pay very big dividends.

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit http://​www​.get​keep​clients​.com.

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Tags: Accountants, Cfa, Client Group, Client Meetings, Conversations, Fall Back, Job, Lawyers, Part Time, Patience, Personal Visit, Profile, Prospects, Referral, Relationship, Relationships, Retirement, Serial Entrepreneur, Take The Lead, Value Proposition
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