What’s Your AIDAS Sales Story?

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

by Matthew Asser, The Covenant Group

Per­haps you’re famil­iar with the AIDAS the­ory in sell­ing. Accord­ing to the Atten­tion, Inter­est, Desire, Action, Sat­is­fac­tion model, a prospect will expe­ri­ence all five emo­tions, and it is the salesperson’s respon­si­bil­ity to ensure that the poten­tial client passes through the stages in the cor­rect order. The sales story that you tell can sig­nif­i­cantly impact whether you are able to lead a prospect to a pos­i­tive sales cycle out­come — specif­i­cally, him or her becom­ing a client.What’s your sales story? How do you direct the con­ver­sa­tion in an ini­tial meet­ing with a prospect? What ques­tions do you ask to learn more about him or her while demon­strat­ing your qual­i­fi­ca­tions and value?

You only have one chance to gain and hold a prospect’s atten­tion, so come to a sales meet­ing armed with research about his or her back­ground and ser­vice needs. Set the tone with friendly con­ver­sa­tion before div­ing into the main rea­son for the meet­ing, dis­cussing his or her busi­ness prob­lem, then pre­sent­ing your take on the sit­u­a­tion and the solu­tion that you can offer. This will draw his or her atten­tion. If your sales story method includes shar­ing anec­dotes about past clients’ prob­lems, ensure the exam­ples you relay are rel­e­vant to your prospect.

Try to keep the story short, punchy and intrigu­ing to main­tain inter­est. Regal­ing a prospect with tales of your past suc­cesses that have noth­ing to do with his or her needs will seem bor­ing and reduce your chances of advanc­ing to the next stage of the sales conversation.

To spark the prospect’s desire to buy, use a rel­e­vant story to draw con­nec­tions back to his or her sit­u­a­tion and pause to ask for any ques­tions. Increase the level of engage­ment by ask­ing a few more ques­tions to get a bet­ter sense of the prospect’s val­ues, as well as his or her busi­ness and per­sonal goals. Gain per­mis­sion to pro­ceed to the next sales cycle step, pre­sent­ing a solu­tion and ask­ing the prospect to take action. If he or she seems hes­i­tant, ask your­self how you can make the prod­uct or ser­vice you are offer­ing seem more appeal­ing. Remem­ber: most peo­ple want to buy, but they will react neg­a­tively when they think you are try­ing to sell to them. Recall points that the prospect made ear­lier in the con­ver­sa­tion to drive home the ratio­nale for why your solu­tion can solve his or her problem.

Finally, main­tain your new client’s sat­is­fac­tion by deliv­er­ing value-added ser­vice, being ready and will­ing to meet future needs and reg­u­larly show­ing your appre­ci­a­tion of his or her business.

Matthew Asser has spent the last few decades gain­ing exper­tise in how finan­cial ser­vices firms can opti­mize their oper­a­tions, mar­ket­ing, new prod­ucts, busi­ness devel­op­ment and client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment prac­tices. He’s well-versed in the chal­lenges that an entre­pre­neur may strug­gle with, and as a Senior Coach and Facil­i­ta­tor, helps clients achieve busi­ness change through The Covenant Group’s exten­sive finan­cial advi­sor train­ing programs.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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The Ten Door Approach

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

by Bob Simp­son, Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Consulting

Here’s a mind­set shift to help you accel­er­ate the growth of your busi­ness.  I call this approach the “Ten Door Approach”.

This mind­set helped me to build a $120 mil­lion book in a lit­tle over 8 years, when the aver­age advi­sor man­aged $3 to $5 million.

When I met a new prospec­tive client, I had a greater goal than to sim­ply open a new account for that per­son or fam­ily.  It was to pro­vide a level of advice and ser­vice that would lead that new rela­tion­ship to help me open ten doors to oppor­tu­ni­ties within their per­sonal or busi­ness networks.

From our first meet­ing, we started dis­cussing how we help peo­ple to achieve their per­sonal goals.  We talked about what they did in their per­sonal and busi­ness lives.  We talked about their chil­dren and the their activ­i­ties and inter­ests.  I knew what social clubs they belonged to and why involve­ment in these clubs was impor­tant to them.  I knew if they were golfers and what club they belonged to.  I learned about their friends that they trav­elled with.  More than 50% of time we spent in meet­ings was talk­ing about them.

Peo­ple enjoy talk­ing about themselves.

Today, I would check them out on LinkedIn.  Last week, I estab­lished my 500^th con­nec­tion on LinkedIn and have 137 mem­bers of Advi­sor Col­lab­o­ra­tion, a group that I man­age on LinkedIn.  It is amaz­ing what you can learn about peo­ple on the Internet.

Edi­to­r­ial Note:  There are some great quasi CRM pro­grams:  www​.con​nect​edhq​.com and www​.gist​.com, which aggre­gate LinkedIn, Twit­ter and Face­book infor­ma­tion into a sin­gle page so you can quickly read up on what your clients are up to.  I wouldn’t use them as my CRM but I would set up an account just to do research on people.

If a client wrote a blog, I would read it.  I am gen­uinely inter­ested in peo­ple and am inter­ested in what they are up to.

There is a fine line between being inter­ested and being creepy.  That is why I like LinkedIn vs. pro­grams like Face­book and Twit­ter.  That is not to say that peo­ple who use Face­book or Twit­ter are creepy but it is some­times too much information.

Through this approach, I received invi­ta­tions to speak to ser­vice clubs.  I also was invited to speak to a retiree’s club for a fairly major cor­po­ra­tion.  I met pro­fes­sion­als, like accoun­tants and lawyers, with whom they worked.  Those were pretty big doors through which I met some inter­est­ing new clients.

The secret to open­ing these doors is stag­ing con­sis­tently supe­rior client expe­ri­ences.  The infor­ma­tion that you obtain by being inter­ested in your clients’ lives is vitally impor­tant in achiev­ing this goal.  Each client expe­ri­ence must be unique and be based on their inter­ests, pref­er­ences and pri­or­i­ties.  It must include spe­cial touches that make them feel special.

If you sur­vey your clients, you need to receive scores of 9 or 10 to Fred Reichheld’s Ulti­mate Ques­tion:  “How likely is it that you would rec­om­mend us to a friend or col­league?”  Scores of 7 or 8 aren’t good enough.

If you can achieve this goal, your clients will help you build your busi­ness by open­ing doors to friends, col­leagues, busi­ness asso­ciates and groups to which they belong.  Ten doors is a rea­son­able tar­get over the life­time of a client.

If you still believe that the rea­son you do not get an accept­able num­ber of client refer­rals is because you don’t ask, you are dream­ing.  If your clients do not open doors for you, it is because you haven’t earned it.  It is a clear sign that there is some­thing wrong with your client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment systems.

Do the right things for the right peo­ple and be con­sis­tent and patient and the doors will open, even dur­ing bad markets.

Related Links

Tech­nol­ogy to help stage client experiences

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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Fifteen retirement readiness tasks for clients

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

In May, U.S. insurer Met Life issued a 28 page report, quan­ti­fy­ing where Amer­i­cans stand in terms of their prepa­ra­tion for retirement.

This readi­ness index mea­sures fif­teen tasks — attached to the report is a ques­tion­naire that advi­sors can take clients through to bench­mark where clients stand on each task and iden­tify areas to work on.

The fif­teen tasks for retire­ment readiness

The fif­teen tasks fall into five areas:

Activ­i­ties related to income and benefits.

This includes assess­ing when full time retire­ment will be finan­cially fea­si­ble, eval­u­at­ing the impact of changes in the econ­omy on pen­sions, invest­ments and retire­ment ben­e­fits and deter­min­ing what has to be done to receive the com­pany and Gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits that clients are enti­tled to.

Work related tasks

This makes up five of the fif­teen things to do.

These include decid­ing whether to fully retire or work part-time, iden­ti­fy­ing the options for full time or part time work in retire­ment, fig­ur­ing out if skills can be eas­ily trans­ferred to part-time work and explor­ing alter­nate career or part time oppor­tu­ni­ties in retirement.

Leisure related activities

Leisure related tasks include things like deter­min­ing the bal­ance between work and leisure in retire­ment and iden­ti­fy­ing per­sonal goals in retirement.

Rela­tion­ship tasks

Rela­tion­ship tasks to pre­pare for retire­ment cap­ture think­ing through the impact of retire­ment on rela­tion­ships with a spouse, fam­ily and friends and also con­sid­er­ing the effect on rela­tion­ships with co-workers.

Plan­ning for retirement

This includes deter­min­ing what it will take to have a sat­is­fy­ing retire­ment, iden­ti­fy­ing alter­nate plans should there be an unex­pected set­back related to health or finan­cial issues and also eval­u­at­ing whether retire­ment plans meet the demands of poten­tial changes.

Con­clu­sions on retire­ment readiness

This report reached a num­ber of gen­eral conclusions.

First, get­ting ready to retire is more com­pli­cated than just hav­ing enough money — there are many dimen­sions to a sat­is­fy­ing retirement.

In fact, the report points out that exist­ing retirees have pro­vided a road map to what has to hap­pen to max­i­mize the odds of a sat­is­fy­ing and ful­fill­ing retirement.

And sec­ond, com­plet­ing these tasks doesn’t mean that some­one should retire — but it does mean they can retire, they’re ready to retire.

The cur­rent think­ing on the tim­ing of retirement

Amer­i­cans are about evenly split on when they plan to retire — about half plan to retire at the age they’d been plan­ning to a cou­ple of years ago, the other half say they plan to work past the date they’d planned to.

Exist­ing retirees

About 64% of exist­ing retirees say they retired ear­lier than they’d expected, 33% retired when they’d expected to and only 3% said they’d retired later than expected.

The sur­vey didn’t ask if that early retire­ment was vol­un­tary — in all like­li­hood there were some cases in which com­pa­nies made the deci­sion for these early retirees.

Peo­ple feel­ing that they can retire on target

Peo­ple who say they can retire when they’d planned to were more likely to have estab­lished per­sonal goals. Estab­lish­ing those goals and then fol­low­ing through on them appears to focus peo­ple on the impor­tant activ­i­ties that will keep them on track.

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Tags: Alternate Plans, Benchmark, Co Workers, Compendium, Family And Friends, Government Benefits, Insurer, Opportunities In Retirement, Part Time Work, Pensions Investments, Personal Goals, Planning For Retirement, Planning Retirement, Questionnaire, Retirement Benefits, Retirement Plans, Retirement Readiness, Setback, Target, Time Opportunities
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