What a 29 year old Banker can Teach You About Referrals

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

via Dan Richards, Cli​entIn​sights​.ca

It all started with a sim­ple request that, as it turned out, was not so sim­ple. The result­ing encounter with a 29 year old account man­ager at a lead­ing bank pro­vides impor­tant lessons for advi­sors around:

- Com­mu­ni­cat­ing your focus on cus­tomer needs
– Check­ing for sat­is­fac­tion
– Let­ting clients know you’re open for busi­ness
– Fol­low­ing up
– The right incen­tives for your team

A sim­ple request

Given a grow­ing amount of busi­ness south of the bor­der, ear­lier this year I decided to open a US dol­lar bank account to make deposits and write cheques. Even though I’ve banked at this branch for many years, I was told that I had to sit down with an account man­ager to do this … and was intro­duced to a young woman who appeared to be in her late 20s or early 30s, let’s call her Mary Smith.

“Mr. Richards, we have sev­eral dif­fer­ent plans for US dol­lar accounts” Mary began. “To ensure that I open the right one for you, how many deposits and cheques are you likely to make in the aver­age month and what kind of bal­ance do you expect to main­tain in the account.”

The paper­work wasn’t oner­ous and we were through in about 5 min­utes. And that’s where it got interesting.

What else can I help you with?
After I’d fin­ished sign­ing all the forms, Mary said:

“Mr. Richards, is there any­thing else can I help you with, per­haps a line of credit or we could check to see if you can reduce your bank fees by switch­ing to a dif­fer­ent type of account?”

And then she did what every­one should do after ask­ing that kind of ques­tion, she sat back and waited for me to respond … after a cou­ple of sec­onds I had no choice but to fill the vacuum.

“Thanks for the sug­ges­tion, Mary”  I said “ and I may take you up on your offer to look at my bank account at some point down the road, but I have an appoint­ment in 10 min­utes I have to head off to.”

The “net pro­moter ques­tion” in action

“That’s not a prob­lem at all” was the answer. “Do you have two quick min­utes just to touch on a cou­ple of final things?”
When I answered yes, Mary went on:

“You may get a follow-up call about our appoint­ment today, with seven or eight ques­tions. The most impor­tant ques­tion is one that asks if you’d feel com­fort­able rec­om­mend­ing me to a friend on a scale from 0 to 10. It’s impor­tant to note that 10, the top score, doesn’t mean I was per­fect, just that I fully met your needs. And I hope that based on our con­ver­sa­tion, if you do get that call you’ll feel com­fort­able giv­ing me a 10.”

Again, she paused and waited for my response. There was no way I could turn Mary down. And indeed, if I’d got­ten that follow-up call, I would have given her a 10 just on her inter­est and enthu­si­asm alone.

As an aside, this bank uses some­thing called the “net pro­moter ques­tion” to mea­sure sat­is­fac­tion.  I’ve writ­ten in the past about this as the best vehi­cle to mea­sure sat­is­fac­tion and loy­alty. Used  by orga­ni­za­tions like Apple, Schwab and Amer­i­can Express,  it asks: From 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would rec­om­mend this indi­vid­ual to a friend or colleague?

Start with the 9’s and 10’s (the pro­mot­ers), sub­tract the scores from 0 to 6 (the detrac­tors) and you get a “net pro­moter score” that is highly pre­dic­tive of sat­is­fac­tion and loy­alty; indeed, sev­eral lead­ing banks now use this to help deter­mine their front­line staff’s bonus.

That con­ver­sa­tion with Mary actu­ally crys­tal­lized my think­ing on the pos­i­tive job she’d done. The key of course is that she com­mu­ni­cated real con­cern and inter­est; we’ve all had sim­i­lar requests from ser­vice depart­ments at auto deal­ers and muf­fler shops, if I get a request for a 10 after get­ting ho-hum, indif­fer­ent ser­vice, it’s not going to turn a 6 into a 10, in fact it may even reduce it to a 5.

“I’d like to give you two cards”

Then Mary fin­ished with one last request: “I’d like to give you two of my busi­ness cards” she said hand­ing me two cards. “I hope you’ll use the first card to put my infor­ma­tion into your con­tact man­age­ment sys­tem should there be any­thing you want to dis­cuss in future. And the rea­son that I’m giv­ing you the sec­ond card is in case you have a friend or fam­ily mem­ber who is hav­ing prob­lems or needs some help on any aspect of their bank­ing needs.”

So there you have it – no muss, no fuss, no pres­sure – but she’d planted the seed should I be talk­ing to any­one who’s run into a road­block at their bank.

Mary’s impres­sive per­for­mance didn’t end there, though. When I got back to my office, there was an email thank­ing me for tak­ing the time to meet with her. And about four weeks later I got a voice­mail from Mary remind­ing me that any­time I’d like to review my exist­ing account, sim­ply to let her know.

What does it take to get that kind of motivation?

I was intrigued and impressed by our inter­ac­tion. I called Mary and explained that I’ve worked in the indus­try for many years (In the small world cat­e­gory, it turns out that one of her col­leagues had a copy of my book Get­ting Clients Keep­ing Clients, with its promi­nent green cover.) I asked Mary how long she’d been with the bank and, with­out get­ting into too many details, a bit about how she’s compensated.

It turns out that Mary had started work­ing in the branch dur­ing her third year of uni­ver­sity and after four years had suc­cess­fully applied for a posi­tion as account man­ager, a role that she’s been in for three years. Mary was quite forth­right about her com­pen­sa­tion: Her base is $44,000 but if she hits all her tar­gets for sales and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion she can make another $10,000. She said that it’s unlikely that she’s going to get all of that bonus, but had earned $5,000 last year and is aim­ing to earn $7,500 this year.

This also pro­vides a les­son on the power of the right vari­able incen­tives. This isn’t to sug­gest that money is the only thing that mat­ters, far from it – if peo­ple don’t like their job and the peo­ple they work with, it’s unlikely that the prospect of a $10,000 bonus will get them excited. But if the folks on your team fun­da­men­tally enjoy what they do, this demon­strates the power of well-targeted incen­tives, struc­tured so peo­ple feel that earn­ing that bonus is within their control.

It also reminds us that we can learn from every­one we deal with – from the pos­i­tive atti­tude of the staff at Star­bucks to the curios­ity and enthu­si­asm of young folks just start­ing in the busi­ness. And Indeed many of us could take lessons from that 29 year old account man­ager about cus­tomer focus, check­ing for sat­is­fac­tion, plant­ing the seed for refer­rals and dis­ci­plined follow-up.

If you’re inter­ested in read­ing more about how to apply the net pro­moter ques­tion to your busi­ness, click here.

Copy­right © Cli​entIn​sights​.ca

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

Tags: Appointment, Bank Fees, Business South, Dollar Accounts, Dollar Bank, Encounter, Incentives, Leading Bank, Mary Smith, Mr Richards, Net Promoter, Paperwork, Referrals, Satisfaction, Simple Request, South Of The Border, Suggestion, Vacuum, Young Woman
Posted in My Practice | Comments Off

Finding your perfect niche – the Water Cooler effect at work

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

At some point, most advi­sors have been told that they should con­cen­trate their efforts on attract­ing clients in a defined niche. There are three rea­sons for this:

• You’ll build unique exper­tise in this group’s needs; as a “spe­cial­ist” in its chal­lenges, you’ll be able to deliver out­stand­ing value that gen­er­al­ists can’t match.
• Depend­ing on the group, you can build cred­i­bil­ity and pro­file by being inter­viewed in indus­try pub­li­ca­tions, writ­ing arti­cles and speak­ing at their indus­try events.
• By focus­ing on a defined niche, you become the “safe choice”   within that group and will see many more refer­rals as a result

Today’s arti­cle on how to find your per­fect niche is a follow-up to “From 0 to 100 clients in 18 months,” a guest arti­cle last month by U.S. indus­try expert Kather­ine Vessenes, which described how she attracted over 100 clients, each of whom paid an annual plan­ning fee of $1200 or more.

Vessenes’ advice on find­ing your per­fect niche is below; to read the first arti­cle on how she went from 0 to 100 fee-paying clients, click here:

The Per­fect Niche:  By Kather­ine Vessenes, JD, CFP®, RFC

When peo­ple ask me how did you man­age to bring on over 100 new clients in 18 months, in a brand new mar­ket, I tell them there were a lot of factors—but close to the top of the list is find­ing the per­fect niche.

In work­ing with multimillion-dollar advi­sors I noticed most of them had clearly defined niches. They knew who their ideal client was and they had a mar­ket­ing plan that worked for their per­fect prospect. Another thing became appar­ent to me early on—only two of the many multi-million dol­lar advi­sors we have assisted, had thought­fully and sys­tem­at­i­cally pur­sued their niche in a business-like manner!

Here is what I mean—only two advi­sors took the time and energy to think about a niche that would be a good fit, and then went about test­ing the mar­ket to see if it would work. One of them (I’ll call him Ted from Seat­tle) actu­ally tested three dif­fer­ent niches. Two were com­plete bombs until he set­tled on the one that still works for him 25 years later.

All the other advi­sors just fell into their niches. Lucky for them, they were in the right place at the right time for their tar­get group. They started work­ing with employ­ees of the local util­ity com­pany, pro­fes­sors at the U, or Boe­ing employ­ees and one good expe­ri­ence led to another—pretty soon a good por­tion of their new busi­ness came from refer­rals in their niche.

I too, tested out a num­ber of dif­fer­ent niches and learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work:

What didn’t work for us or lessons from the trenches:

Clients who are too far from us in social class, cul­ture, edu­ca­tion and self-confidence.

One of the niches we exper­i­mented with involved mem­bers of a local Evan­gel­i­cal church in the Mid­west. The church is huge and if the niche worked, it would have kept us busy indef­i­nitely. We even had a Bib­li­cally respon­si­ble mutual fund that we thought would appeal to this group.

Even though my own spir­i­tual beliefs were not too far from this group, I was much dif­fer­ent in the other cat­e­gories: with my law degree and CFP, I had much more edu­ca­tion than the prospects did. In fact, I didn’t even know another woman out of the thou­sands of atten­dees of this church who had a doc­tor­ate degree. I didn’t hang out with this group socially and once you’ve been legal coun­sel to a for­mer US pres­i­dent and you’ve started your own busi­ness, you don’t lack in the self-confidence depart­ment, either. Or maybe it was just my sassy Texas her­itage leak­ing through.

Don’t get me wrong. These were all kind, lovely peo­ple. In fact you would prob­a­bly want your chil­dren mar­ry­ing them. There was just one problem—they were so far from my per­son­al­ity, back­ground and char­ac­ter, we just never jelled.

So you can imag­ine how mad­den­ing it was for me to watch some of the women refuse to make any deci­sions about their money, unless their hus­bands gave them the nod of approval. (Inside I am think­ing: “Honey you can do this. You are smart and edu­cated! This is the rea­son we got the vote. It is your money—you can make the decisions!”)

Even­tu­ally it became clear to me that my big Texas per­son­al­ity was just too much for the laid-back Mid­west woman. No mat­ter how much I tried to “pull it in” I was never going to fit in with this group. Short of mov­ing back to Austin, I had to admit this niche was not a good fit, cut my losses and move on.

Solu­tion:

Today we look for clients who do fit with our social class, cul­ture, edu­ca­tion and self-confidence. They are not fab­u­lously wealthy. In fact, they made their money the same way we did—by get­ting a good edu­ca­tion and then work­ing hard.

All of our clients have doc­tor­ate degrees. They actu­ally like that I have a lot of education—it means some­thing to them and they are not intim­i­dated by it. They rec­og­nize that they may be very smart in their area of exper­tise, but they know lit­tle about finances and they appre­ci­ate our expe­ri­ence and depth of knowledge.

We also seem to fit socially. Many of them will ask me to meet them for social events and I have made some deep friend­ships in a state where pre­vi­ous to open­ing the office here, I only knew two peo­ple: my daugh­ter and son-in-law.

Older clients, approach­ing retirement

Yes, I know this is heresy and many peo­ple love this as a niche—I am just say­ing it didn’t work for us.  The rea­son most advi­sors like this mar­ket is this is where the money is—these folks have accu­mu­lated more wealth, so it works out great for a busi­ness model that is based on AUM.

Older clients who are pre-retirement didn’t work for us for a cou­ple of rea­sons: first, because our mar­ket is highly edu­cated, many prospects in this cat­e­gory already had their own advi­sors and weren’t in enough pain to switch to a new one. Sec­ondly, they had no inten­tion of chang­ing their lifestyle so they could save the money they needed for retire­ment.  Typ­i­cally they were in houses that were too expen­sive for them, had high amounts of debt, or were spend­ing a for­tune putting kids through schools they couldn’t afford. In fact, most had so messed up their finances, there wasn’t enough time for me to fix them between now and their retire­ment date.

Our solu­tion:

We found we work well with younger clients who are just mov­ing into their careers. Yes, this may seem like heresy, too, because I was taught when I started in the busi­ness it was impor­tant to find clients who were between 10 years younger and 10 years older than the advi­sor. Although I refuse to put my birth cer­tifi­cate up on line, many of these clients are younger than me, a lot younger.

This actu­ally works out great—they have lots of prob­lems and lots of pain. That means there are many ways we can help them and they are very grate­ful. It also means we can help them set up a good sav­ings strat­egy now that will ben­e­fit them for their entire life. I feel like we are mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in every case.

A few of our clients have asked me how long I will be work­ing as an advisor—I tell them the truth—I will be doing this until I am 95—they will be retired long before me. The rea­son is, this is so much more fun than retire­ment, I can’t imag­ine quitting.

Folks who couldn’t save

Another niche we exper­i­mented with was col­lege funding—we looked for par­ents who wanted a cost effec­tive way to put their kids through school. Yes, this is another niche that works great for some advisors—but it didn’t for us.

One of the things we found was this group, even in the most afflu­ent sub­urbs, was really strug­gling finan­cially. They weren’t sav­ing for retire­ment and they cer­tainly didn’t have any money for col­lege fund­ing. We did some fab­u­lous and time con­sum­ing col­lege fund­ing plans—helped these guys get more finan­cial aid, changed a lot of lives and didn’t make any money. At least some stu­dents will fin­ish col­lege with a lot less debt—which makes me feel bet­ter about the work we did.

Solu­tion:

Our ideal client likes to live on less than they make. In fact many of our two-earner house­holds live on one salary and bank the rest. We find the younger the client, the more likely they will be good savers. They are not wealthy now, but if they con­tinue with our plan, they will be.

What did work for us: The Water Cooler effect at work

We found it was imper­a­tive that our clients not only worked for the same com­pany, but they were phys­i­cally sit­u­ated in the same build­ing. Being in the same build­ing turned out to be a far big­ger fac­tor than I first real­ized. I think this group eats together in the lunch­room every day and hang out in between meet­ings. Even­tu­ally they must run out of things to talk about—and that’s when our name comes up.

This is one of the key fac­tors I encour­age advi­sors to con­sider when select­ing a new niche. This worked much bet­ter for us than col­lege funding—because even though that niche had all the stu­dents attend­ing the same school, the par­ents (our prospects) worked for count­less dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies. In gen­eral, the par­ents didn’t hang out together. If they did hang out, they didn’t spend enough time for the con­ver­sa­tion to turn to finances. I sur­mised that it takes time and trust for peo­ple to start talk­ing about your services.

Another advan­tage of hav­ing them work for the same com­pany is it saves us a lot of time in get­ting up to speed on dif­fer­ent ben­e­fit plans. I can now rat­tle off the match­ing lim­its and dis­abil­ity plans of the biggest employ­ers in our niche. We have so many clients there, this infor­ma­tion comes nat­u­rally and saves us from hav­ing to rein­vent the wheel with each new client. It makes us look like the experts we are—because we know their plans back­wards and forwards.

One last com­ment about the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of the word “niche”. Being from Texas, lov­ing big hair and lots of bling, I don’t use the frou-frou pro­nun­ci­a­tion I hear from my more edu­cated friends around the coun­try. They pro­nounce the word: NEESH.

I much pre­fer NITCH—because it rhymes with itch and that is what we are try­ing to do for our clients—find the itch and then scratch it for them.

Kather­ine Vessenes, JD, CFP®, RFC, is one of the top Prac­tice Man­age­ment con­sul­tants for finan­cial advi­sors. The cre­ator of the No-Sell Sale®, she is con­sid­ered the country’s lead­ing prac­tice man­age­ment con­sul­tant on build­ing a multimillion-dollar busi­ness (Dear­born) and the country’s best known author­ity on the legal and eth­i­cal issues of finan­cial advi­sors (Bloomberg). She has her own prac­tice where she fol­lows the advice she gives other advi­sors. She can be reached at:  952−401−1045, www​.vest​men​tad​vi​sors​.com or katherine@vestmentadvisors.com

© 2013 Kather­ine Vessenes. Per­mis­sion to reprint required.

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

Tags: Advice, Cfp, Challenges, Credibility, Generalists, Guest Article, Industry Expert, Industry Publications, Jd, Katherine Vessenes, Marketing Plan, Match, Multimillion Dollar, Niche, Niches, People, Profile, Referrals, Rfc, Water Cooler
Posted in My Practice | Comments Off

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.

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

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
Posted in Dan Richards | Comments Off

A Good Brand Will Repel More Than It Attracts

Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

by Stephen Wer­sh­ing, The Client Dri­ven Practice

Finan­cial advi­sors work hard to develop a value propo­si­tion that will get the atten­tion of prospec­tive clients. Focus­ing on how well your slo­gan or ele­va­tor speech attracts atten­tion, though, can backfire.

How you describe your­self, whether it be ver­bally or through a brochure or your web­site, is one of the key ele­ments in pro­mot­ing your brand. It needs to be effec­tive in prompt­ing ques­tions or con­ver­sa­tion about what your prac­tice has to offer. Ide­ally, it will cap­ture the inter­ests of prospec­tive clients in your niche. And it will do noth­ing for peo­ple out­side that tar­get mar­ket. If that value propo­si­tion is well-crafted it will actu­ally turn peo­ple away from your prac­tice if they are not in your niche.

I was reminded of this by Eric Schwartz, CEO of Cam­bridge Invest­ment Research, in a talk he gave a cou­ple months ago. We sus­pect it may have been said by leg­endary mar­ket­ing guru Al Ries. The only direct ref­er­ence I can find is by William Arruda, but if you have not read any­thing by Ries on brand­ing it is worth your time.

Many finan­cial advi­sors I work with are chal­lenged when nar­row­ing their mes­sage. The whole point, they believe, is to attract new clients. Why say some­thing that may turn away most of the peo­ple you talk to? But the desire to say some­thing that every­one finds attrac­tive hurts your brand because it takes the empha­sis off of what is spe­cial about what you have to offer a par­tic­u­lar group of people.

Brands that attract the right clients and gen­er­ate refer­rals build a rep­u­ta­tion. Fuzzy, gen­eral, unfo­cused brand­ing mes­sages are not mem­o­rable. An effec­tive brand will help you build a rep­u­ta­tion that will assist peo­ple in remem­ber­ing you when the right sit­u­a­tion comes along.

Let’s say you tar­get vet­eri­nar­i­ans. You have devel­oped an exper­tise in the finan­cial chal­lenge of run­ning an ani­mal hos­pi­tal. You under­stand how to value a vet­eri­nary prac­tice and are famil­iar with the terms and lim­i­ta­tions of suc­ces­sion agree­ments when those prac­tices get sold. Your brand – what peo­ple say about you – would empha­size that unique knowl­edge. So when you describe the value of what you do, you would talk about that exper­tise. If the per­son you were talk­ing to was not a vet­eri­nar­ian, they would prob­a­bly have no inter­est at all in dis­cussing it further.

And that’s okay. Because if a vet­eri­nar­ian 10 years from sell­ing his prac­tice talks to you and the advi­sor who talks about his “spe­cial rela­tion­ship with his clients” and another who talks about her “sophis­ti­cated invest­ment man­age­ment strat­egy”, who do you think will win the client?

Brand­ing is not about attract­ing the most clients, it is about attract­ing the right clients. Get com­fort­able with describ­ing your prac­tice in a way that most of the pop­u­la­tion will have no inter­est in. Then you can focus on build­ing a rep­u­ta­tion that your ideal prospects will have a lot of inter­est in.

The Client Dri­ven Practice

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

Tags: Al Ries, Animal Hospital, Brochure, Driven Practice, Elevator Speech, Financial Advisors, Financial Challenge, Guru Al Ries, Investment Research, Niche, Promoting Your Brand, Prospective Clients, Referrals, Reputation, Slogan, Succession, Target Market, Value Proposition, Veterinarians, Veterinary Practice, William Arruda
Posted in My Practice | Comments Off

Are You Using Periodic Reviews to Secure Client Capital?

Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

by Norm Trainor, The Covenant Group

Some of the most valu­able busi­ness prospects are already your clients. Because you have already suc­ceeded in con­vert­ing exist­ing clients, a major por­tion of the mar­ket­ing process has been com­pleted. It allows you to build upon your past suc­cesses and the fact that the exist­ing clients are already famil­iar with your work.

Get infor­ma­tion on past actions for future suc­cess
To get insight into how you can do that, how­ever, you must undergo peri­odic reviews. As I explained in a recent pre­sen­ta­tion at the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Insur­ance and Finan­cial Advi­sors’ Annual Con­fer­ence (NAIFA), this is a six-step process and should be part of a reg­u­lar follow-up sched­ule that you main­tain for each of your clients.

Explain to your clients that you like to con­duct peri­odic reviews, and send an invi­ta­tion between two and four weeks ahead of when you would like to meet. Call them to estab­lish a con­crete date and time, and then send a meet­ing agenda a week before this date. Shar­ing an out­line for the meet­ing will make it a more con­struc­tive dis­cus­sion for you and the client and will allow both of you to orga­nize your thoughts ahead of time. Tele­phone once again to con­firm that your client received the agenda and ask if there are any ques­tions he or she would like to ask ahead of time or that should be cov­ered in more detail dur­ing the meet­ing. Anthony Lam delves deeper into the sim­ple steps you can take before a meet­ing here.

When you meet with the client, you can ask for feed­back on your per­for­mance and for sug­ges­tions of how you can pro­vide added value. This is a great oppor­tu­nity to have your clients reaf­firm their sat­is­fac­tion with your ser­vice and con­fi­dence in your abil­i­ties. The meet­ing will be a primer not only for secur­ing future sales — it can also be a great tran­si­tion as you ask for refer­rals and intro­duc­tions. At that point, describe who your ideal prospect is, and guide the client through a few ques­tions to help him or her iden­tify poten­tial leads. Now the client will be primed for you to ask for a per­sonal intro­duc­tion (a much more effec­tive tac­tic than cold-calling referrals).

In both the introduction-request and review processes, fol­low­ing up with your client is essen­tial. Let him or her know how it goes with the prospects they iden­ti­fied. Sim­i­larly, con­tact clients with whom you con­duct reviews to A) thank them for their time and feed­back, and B) let them know what course of action you plan to take as a result of their cri­tiques and/or suggestions.

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

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

Tags: Anthony Lam, Business Prospects, Confidence, Covenant Group, Future Sales, Insight, Insurance, Introductions, Invitation, Marketing Process, Meeting Agenda, National Association Of Insurance And Financial Advisors, Norm Trainor, Referrals, Satisfaction, Simple Steps, Six Step, Successes, Time Telephone, Transition
Posted in My Practice | Comments Off

What To Do When You Get A Referral

Wednesday, December 5th, 2012

by Stephen Wer­sh­ing, The Client Drive Practice

I spend a lot of time coach­ing advi­sors on how to attract refer­rals. Let me take a minute and dis­cuss what to do when you receive one.

• Con­tact them promptly. It should be obvi­ous and go with­out say­ing, but you would be sur­prised that some advi­sors receive a name and num­ber from a client and put off con­tact­ing them. Your client prob­a­bly men­tioned you because their friend expressed a chal­lenge they were deal­ing with right now. Don’t waste time. Make that phone call a priority.

• Ask what they need. When you reach the refer­ral, after intro­duc­ing your­self and ref­er­enc­ing the client who rec­om­mended you, find out what’s on their mind. Give them an oppor­tu­nity to describe what prob­lem they have and what kind of solu­tion they look for. Put the spot­light on them.

• Lead with your value propo­si­tion. Once the refer­ral has described their chal­lenge, give them your ele­va­tor pitch. You should be in the habit of start­ing every con­ver­sa­tion about your prac­tice with it.

• Com­pare their need to your unique skill. If things go well, and the refer­ral was sent to you because of the spe­cial solu­tion or exper­tise you rep­re­sent, it will be clear to the refer­ral that what you do answers the prob­lem they just described.

• Set the appoint­ment. Don’t waste time on the phone doing fact gath­er­ing or pre­sent­ing. If you have suc­cess­fully con­nected their need to your spe­cial skill, the next step is to get together.

• Send your client a thank you note. Express your grat­i­tude for their vote of con­fi­dence. Your client takes the risk by send­ing a friend to you – honor it. Update them on the sta­tus of your con­ver­sa­tion with­out breach­ing con­fi­dences. Let your client know that you spoke to the per­son that they sent and you have sched­uled an appoint­ment, or didn’t. Send them a thank you regard­less of whether the refer­ral went any­where or not. My pref­er­ence is to hand write a card and send by mail. Peo­ple don’t do that very often any­more, so it is much more spe­cial than an e-mail. Do it the same day you speak with the referral.

• Next time you see the client who sent you the refer­ral, ask about the cir­cum­stances that led to it. It leads your client to relive the sit­u­a­tion, and makes it more likely they will make another refer­ral in the same sit­u­a­tion. Know­ing what the client said will give you valu­able infor­ma­tion about what the client val­ues and how to teach other clients to do the same. It gives you a chance to con­firm that they under­stand your value propo­si­tion and teaches you how they describe it. It enables you to dis­cover a new trig­ger phrases that prompted your client to refer.

Receiv­ing refer­rals is more than an oppor­tu­nity to bring in a new client. It is an oppor­tu­nity to reward a refer­ror with grat­i­tude. It is an oppor­tu­nity to learn more about when clients refer, which helps you attract more. It rein­forces your dif­fer­en­tia­tor, and dri­ves it fur­ther into the clients brain. And all of this helps lead to more referrals.

Copy­right © The Client Drive Practice

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

Tags: Appointment, Contact, Elevator Pitch, Express, Gratitude, Habit, Lot, Mail, Opportunity, People, Phone Call, Preference, Priority, Referral, Referrals, Risk, Spotlight, Value Proposition, Vote Of Confidence, Waste Time
Posted in My Practice | Comments Off

Referrals can Expand Your Circles of Influence

Wednesday, November 7th, 2012

by Shauna Trainor, The Covenant Group

Mar­ket­ing your orga­ni­za­tion has many inter­con­nected com­po­nents. The adver­tise­ments you place in print pub­li­ca­tions must carry a sim­i­lar mes­sage to those you dis­play online as well as the blog posts, news­pa­per columns or newslet­ters you write. In this mar­ket­ing mix, we some­times for­get about one of the most pow­er­ful chan­nels: Word of mouth.

Rec­om­men­da­tions, refer­rals, and intro­duc­tions from the clients you cur­rently serve can sig­nif­i­cantly impact your cir­cles of influ­ence. Because referred prospects are typ­i­cally in the same social or finan­cial groups as your exist­ing clients, the prac­tice of gain­ing intro­duc­tions can ele­vate your access to your ideal client. It may also shorten the lead vet­ting process, as those mak­ing the refer­ral are famil­iar with your areas of exper­tise and services.

Have you incor­po­rated a refer­ral process into your mar­ket­ing strat­egy? How do you use your client cap­i­tal to gain access to desir­able prospects?

Cold call­ing may result in a few sales leads, but it is a time-intensive process and can be less effec­tive than ask­ing cur­rent clients to sup­ply names of or even make intro­duc­tions to the kind of peo­ple you want to attract. In order to boost the num­ber of prospects you put into the mar­ket­ing pipeline, cre­ate a stan­dard process that you and your employ­ees can fol­low when ask­ing to be intro­duced to ideal clients.

At The Covenant Group, we encour­age entre­pre­neurs to not only guide clients through the refer­ral process, but request per­sonal intro­duc­tions. Refer­rals can some­times be pas­sive. The way you deliver ser­vice will impact your abil­ity to secure per­sonal intro­duc­tions, rather than refer­rals of names to add to a cold-calling list. When a client actu­ally intro­duces you to an acquain­tance or busi­ness asso­ciate, whether by email, let­ter or in per­son, it is fur­ther affir­ma­tion of that person’s trust in your abil­i­ties, and can assist in clos­ing the sales cycle with a new prospect.

In client meet­ings, dis­cuss how they feel about your ser­vices. Ask them to affirm their con­fi­dence in you and describe the value that they see in the rela­tion­ship. Then out­line your ideal clients (this helps the per­son you are talk­ing to think about high-quality prospects) and ask him or her a few ques­tions to jog mem­ory of peo­ple who may fit this pro­file. As they start to think of poten­tial refer­rals, you can ask for an intro­duc­tion. Arrange a meet­ing that will make it easy for the client to intro­duce you. After­ward, be sure to thank the client and keep him or her up-to-date about how the meet­ing and new rela­tion­ship progresses.

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

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

Tags: Acquaintance, Advertisements, Affirmation, Business Associate, Circles, Cold Calling, Covenant Group, Financial Groups, Marketing Organization, Marketing Strategy, New Prospect, Personal Introductions, Pipeline, Print Publications, Prospects, Referral Marketing, Referrals, Sales Leads, Shauna, Word Of Mouth
Posted in My Practice | Comments Off

Four Steps to Deepen Client Relationships and Increase Referrals

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

by Dan Richards, Cli​entIn​sights​.ca

Research shows that only 25% of clients are truly “engaged” as opposed to merely sat­is­fied – and those engaged clients are not only the most loyal and sat­is­fied but also pro­vide almost all referrals.

Today’s arti­cle by Julie Lit­tlechild of Advi­sor Impact lays out an Engage­ment Roadmap, out­lin­ing the spe­cific steps to turn client sat­is­fac­tion into engage­ment. It focuses on four spe­cific steps that are highly cor­re­lated with engaged clients:

1.     Seek struc­tured feedback

2.     Ensure you have the right client fit

3.     Cre­ate deeper connections

4.     Take the lead in help­ing clients man­age their finan­cial lives

Click to read the full article:

http://​www​.advi​sorone​.com/​2​0​1​2​/​0​9​/​2​5​/​4​-​w​a​y​s​-​f​o​r​-​a​d​v​i​s​o​r​s​-​t​o​-​b​e​t​t​e​r​-​e​n​g​a​g​e​-​c​l​i​e​n​t​s​?​u​t​m​_​s​o​u​r​c​e​=​t​o​p​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​1​0​0​7​1​2​&​a​m​p​;​u​t​m​_​m​e​d​i​u​m​=​e​n​e​w​s​l​e​t​t​e​r​&​a​m​p​;​u​t​m​_​c​a​m​p​a​i​g​n​=​t​o​p​s​t​o​r​ies

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

Tags: Amp, Client Relationships, Client Satisfaction, Compendium, Fit, Four Steps, Julie Littlechild, Referrals, Take The Lead, Target, Utm
Posted in My Practice | Comments Off

Julie Littlechild Dispels the Cult of Satisfaction

Wednesday, October 17th, 2012

by Stephen Wer­sh­ing, Client Dri­ven Practice

This will be the first of a series of posts on ses­sions from this year’s FPA Expe­ri­ence, held last week in San Anto­nio, TX.

Julie Lit­tlechild, author of sev­eral stud­ies on client atti­tudes and refer­ral behav­iors includ­ing Anatomy of the Refer­ral, pre­sented “Crack­ing The Refer­ral Code” includ­ing new data soon to be released in this year’s update of Anatomy. In this pro­gram Lit­tlechild explains that to seri­ously drive refer­rals we need to get away from the “cult of sat­is­fac­tion” and to look more deeply at what dri­ves client loyalty.

In her stud­ies, she sorts clients into one of four cat­e­gories from Dis­grun­tled to Engaged. It is impor­tant to under­stand the dri­vers that lead clients into each of the groups because, while over­all sat­is­fac­tion rat­ings are not widely dis­trib­uted, all refer­rals come from the Engaged group. There is a lot of behav­ior that client sat­is­fac­tion sim­ply can­not explain. Advi­sors fail to attract refer­rals because they have sev­eral mis­taken assump­tions about client satisfaction:

·         Sat­is­fac­tion is loy­alty
·         If I focus on sat­is­fac­tion refer­rals will fol­low
·         Clients refer because they want to help my busi­ness grow

Focus­ing on sat­is­fac­tion is a dead end because it is too broad. Engaged clients, hence refer­ral sources, require a closer con­nec­tion. They require a part­ner­ship with the advi­sor. And part­ner­ship arises from sev­eral aspects of the rela­tion­ship including:

·         Shared val­ues
·         Going beyond the port­fo­lio
·         Involv­ing fam­ily
·         Giv­ing clients a voice

The feel­ing of part­ner­ship can be enhanced by focus­ing on clients that have shared val­ues. While this is obvi­ous it is often over­looked. It is a big com­po­nent of “fit.” While Lit­tlechild found that 89% of advi­sors say fit is impor­tant, only 23% have actu­ally incor­po­rated it into their client accep­tance processes.

Giv­ing the client a voice is very impor­tant as well. Littlechild’s most cur­rent data show that 64% of clients believe that an oppor­tu­nity to pro­vide feed­back is critical.

She finds that we can cap­ture much more of the “low hang­ing fruit” of refer­rals by pay­ing closer atten­tion to those activ­i­ties that build part­ner­ship with clients. The pay­off, of course, can be sub­stan­tial. The study revealed that 67% of clients would make a refer­ral if they heard a friend describe a chal­lenge they believe their advi­sor could address, even if that friend did not explic­itly ask to be referred.

Look more deeply at your rela­tion­ship with clients. Go beyond sat­is­fac­tion and you can start gen­er­at­ing the refer­rals you hope for.

I will dis­cuss fit in my next post, report­ing on Tom Reimer’s pre­sen­ta­tion on that topic.

Copy­right © Client Dri­ven Practice

    Lat­est Advi­so­r­An­a­lyst Prac­tice Growth Sto­ries

Tags: Anatomy, Attitudes, Client Acceptance, Client Loyalty, Client Satisfaction, Closer Connection, Cult, Driven Practice, Fpa, Involving Family, Julie Littlechild, Mistaken Assumptions, Partnership, Referral Code, Referral Sources, Referrals, San Antonio Tx, Satisfaction Ratings, Sessions, Sorts
Posted in My Practice | Comments Off