Posts Tagged ‘Outset’

Turning Warm Leads into Meetings

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

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by Dan Richards, Cli​entIn​sights​.ca

Most advi­sors tell me that once they meet with prospects, they have an excel­lent suc­cess rate con­vert­ing those prospects into clients. That’s why I got an excep­tional response to last Monday’s arti­cle on how approach­ing friends and casual acquain­tances about the pos­si­bil­ity of work­ing together, using a low-key tech­nique called sig­nal­ing.

In my arti­cle, I wrote about an advi­sor who chat­ted with a lawyer he knew casu­ally at a client’s 50th birth­day party and then sent him an email the next day offer­ing to put the lawyer on the dis­tri­b­u­tion list for his monthly client emails. The arti­cle also men­tioned that this advi­sor plans to give it a few months and then to make a follow-up call, sug­gest­ing they get together for a cof­fee to talk fur­ther about the prospect’s finan­cial situation.

Why you have to pick up the phone

I got an email from an advi­sor, thank­ing me for the arti­cle but with a ques­tion: “I hate being harassed by peo­ple try­ing sell me things and I hate harass­ing prospects”  he wrote. “Is it really nec­es­sary to pester prospects who are get­ting your material?”

I had a two-part response to his note.

First, while these follow-up calls can make prospects feel harassed and regret that they said yes to receiv­ing mate­r­ial, done right that doesn’t have to be the case. Pro­vided the calls don’t hap­pen too often, few prospects who’ve agreed to be put on your dis­tri­b­u­tion list and are see­ing value in the infor­ma­tion will object to a pro­fes­sional follow-up call, inquir­ing whether there’s inter­est in sit­ting down.

I told the advi­sor that part of the prob­lem might be that he sees these calls as harass­ing and pes­ter­ing prospects – and that the issue might be more in his mind than with prospects. The key to mak­ing this work is that you have no hid­den agenda. You’ve been clear from the out­set that you’re inter­ested in shar­ing the invest­ment related infor­ma­tion you pro­vide clients, which makes the tran­si­tion to talk­ing about the prospect’s own finan­cial sit­u­a­tion much easier.

On the ques­tion about whether this is really nec­es­sary, the unfor­tu­nate answer is yes. In the per­fect world, we wouldn’t have to be reach­ing out to prospects, we’d be doing a ter­rific job for our clients, prospects would see that and would call us as a result.

Regret­tably, in the real world that sel­dom hap­pens – if you want to max­i­mize meet­ings with prospects, no mat­ter how good a job you do of deliv­er­ing value and build­ing your cred­i­bil­ity through the infor­ma­tion you send, you ulti­mately have to give them a call or have some­one call them on your behalf.

As one exam­ple, I spoke to a finan­cial plan­ner who built a large pipeline of prospects through his exten­sive speak­ing engage­ments. At the end of his talk, he gave the audi­ence the chance to enter a draw for a book and to receive his free online newslet­ter. He got lots of peo­ple say­ing yes to this but few meet­ings – until he hired a sum­mer stu­dent to fol­low up and ask if there was inter­est in sit­ting down to meet.

With regard to fre­quency, peo­ple are get­ting monthly infor­ma­tion,  I’d say four to six months after they start receiv­ing infor­ma­tion is about right; if the email goes out quar­terly, I’d give it nine to twelve months. If some­one isn’t inter­ested in meet­ing, a sim­ple “I under­stand how busy we all are, could I check back with you in about nine months?”  will often clar­ify the prospect’s interest.

It’s never been more impor­tant to have a strong pipeline of prospects with whom you’re build­ing aware­ness, trust and cred­i­bil­ity. But to make that pipeline pay off, you need  to build reg­u­lar follow-up into your week – con­sider block­ing off 30 min­utes a week to fol­low up with prospects who you’ve spo­ken to in the past and who are receiv­ing your material.

To read last Monday’s arti­cle about how approach­ing casual acquain­tances, click here:

http://​www​.cli​entin​sights​.ca/​e​n​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​h​o​w​-​t​u​r​n​-​a​c​q​u​a​i​n​t​a​n​c​e​s​-​c​l​i​e​n​t​s​?​a​c​c​e​s​s​k​e​y​=​F​4​B​D​0​A​7​7​-​2​5​F​8​-​2​3​1​4​-​A​2​C​3​-​D​5​C​F​6​D​D​B​0​0B2

 

Access Dan Richards’ com­pendium of arti­cles at Cli​entIn​sights​.ca

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Learn to Prioritize Your Clients

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

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by Norm Trainor, The Covenant Group
Do you find your­self con­stantly scram­bling just to keep up with all of your clients? Does it seem as though you’re fight­ing (and los­ing the bat­tle) to deliver the level of ser­vice you promised at the out­set of client rela­tion­ships? Have you lost busi­ness as a result?

Entre­pre­neurs who are work­ing to build their busi­nesses and increase their client cap­i­tal often become over­whelmed when they treat every­one equally. Often, when finan­cial advi­sors first start out on their own, they do not estab­lish a struc­ture for their clien­tele. This is some­thing I dis­cuss more deeply in The Entre­pre­neur­ial Jour­ney. They may treat their most prof­itable clients the same way they do their least prof­itable ones, which is a waste of time and pre­vents them from reach­ing their full earn­ing potential.

How many clients do you cur­rently have? Now ask your­self, hon­estly, how many of those peo­ple you have a close work­ing rela­tion­ship with. Most likely, that num­ber is no higher than 100. If you stretch your­self too thin by serv­ing as an advi­sor to too many peo­ple, you will be doing them all a disservice.

The key is not to shed clients, but to seg­ment them. As your busi­ness has grown, it’s likely that you iden­ti­fied your ideal clients and that these are not the rela­tion­ships you acquired in the early days. Rather than aban­don those who have remained loyal and who may even­tu­ally mature into your ideal clients, clas­sify them on an A, B or C list.

As I explained in the book, most advi­sors will likely find that their top 40 or so clients are sup­ply­ing their firm with 150 per­cent of its wealth, and work­ing with the remain­ing clients detracts from prof­its, bring­ing the com­pany back to 100 per­cent. Deter­mine your key rela­tion­ships by estab­lish­ing a set of cri­te­ria for who should be on the A list, and strictly observe those rules. Don’t let some­one who should be in the B or C cat­e­gory linger on the A list.

Iden­tify the poten­tial value of each of your clients, and com­pare their like­li­hood of buy­ing. The A clients will be those who offer high value and have a high chance of doing busi­ness with you. To achieve the value every client promises, take a three-pronged strat­egy. Focus on grow­ing their assets, then cross-sell and consolidate.

To avoid “orphan­ing” the rest of your clients, bring on a junior sub-producer or con­sider split­ting the ser­vic­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties with another advi­sor. By hav­ing a strong plan for work­ing with every seg­ment of your clien­tele, you will be able to ensure that every indi­vid­ual is adding to your rev­enue rather than tak­ing away from it.

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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