Financial Advisor Blog on Marketing, Lead Generation, Prospecting and Sales

You’ve documented your goals and your activities are aligned with your goals. You’re reaching your weekly call and appointment goals. But still your income is not as large as you desire. So what’s missing?

I have observed thousands of financial advisers and notice that many overlook this critical variable—the failure to isolate ONLY ONE objective for each activity. Let’s take a look at three examples:
When you cold call someone, what’s your objective? Is it to get an appointment, to qualify them, to get them to like you, or to set the stage for a future call? You must pick ONLY ONE objective to be most effective. If you make the call thinking, “Let’s see what becomes of this” your successful calls will be less frequent.

If you want to get an appointment on the call, then get right to it, “Mr. Smith, my name is Jon Doe. I am a local expert in helping business owners cut their personal income taxes in half using welfare benefit plans. If you have interest in reducing your taxes by 50%, I would like to meet with you for 20 minutes next Wednesday.” By getting right to the point, you will be able to make more calls, have shorter conversations and a lot more scheduled appointments!

The business owners who respond to such a call are goal-oriented, want to improve their situation and they make decisions quickly—just the type of client you want. Other business owners you call may find such an approach to be too direct. That’s fine—these people are not the prospects you want to pursue. You are looking for action takers, not procrastinators.
What’s your objective in the first appointment with a prospect? Is it to open an account, to set the stage for the second appointment or to tell them how great you are? Pick ONLY ONE because if you go into the appointment with some vague, open-ended goal, you get poor results. If your objective is to open an account on the first appointment (not a goal I recommend), then you must be clear and have your prospect be clear about that.

Open the appointment with, “Mr. Smith, my objective for us meeting today is to learn about your situation and determine if I can help you. If so, I will explain what I can do for you. I encourage you to ask as many questions as come to mind. At the end of our meeting, if there is a match, I want to open your account with me.” With the above opening, there is no ambiguity about the objective of this meeting. Let’s take another example.

When you give a seminar, what’s your objective? Is it to educate people, to get an appointment right there at the seminar or to set the stage to call them later and beg for an appointment? Your objective should be to have attendees schedule an appointment before they leave the seminar - I get 65% of attendees to do so.

You are NOT there to educate people! Just look at what we pay teachers and you will see that educating people is a fast road to the poor house. You hold a seminar to have attendees make an appointment with you. You do that by showing them you are a better advisor than their current advisor, you explain issues clearly, you answer their questions well, and you are a nice, approachable friendly character. If the attendees get educated in the process, that’s fine, but it’s not why you hold the seminar (more on this can be found at the links below).

Every time you begin an activity, first be clear about the objective of that specific activity. Doing so will focus your attention and make you more efficient and effective. You’ll be a laser rather than a shotgun in reaching your goals.