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

You don’t need a global search to increase your business. There are just three things on which to focus:

• The quality of the prospects you speak to
  
• The number of prospects you speak to
  
• The quality of your presentation

Let’s take these in order over three posts.

The quality of the prospects you speak to is a direct function of HOW you prospect.
Be sure that your prospecting system only generates appointments with interested and qualified people. Here's the comparison of two prospecting systems. One produces good quality prospects, the other produces people who make you tired and hate your profession.

If you cold call for appointments, you generate low quality prospects because in many instances, you are convincing the prospect to see you. You may be "twisting his arm" to some degree to get the appointment. Is it any wonder that 30% of the time, the prospect is not home when they agreed or they are not interested?

What would happen if instead, you placed an advertisement offering a free booklet about a particular topic in which you had expertise. Those people that called from the advertisement for that booklet would be self-motivated. That's the type of prospect you want--people who take initiative and take action.

A new real estate agent asked me how to market. I had her write a booklet "Ten Mistakes to Avoid When you Sell Your Million Dollar Home." We ran the ad in the food section of the Wednesday paper, the day that has all of the food coupons. The ad was $250. The agent got 62 calls for her booklet.

How long would it have taken to locate 62 interested and motivated people by cold calling? What will be the quality of the conversation after the prospect gets the booklet and then gets called by the agent?

See the difference in how your prospecting system determines the type of prospects you develop and how easy they will be to close? So your prospecting MUST be based on the following model—you offer an item to people who meet your criteria (e.g. by age, income, profession, zip code, etc) and you ONLY contact those people who want your item. That item can be

• a booklet or free report
  
• a seminar presentation
  
• a free quotation
  
• a free analysis

Then, when you contact the prospect, you contact them because they requested something of you. You are not asking for their business, you are contacting them to determine how you can serve them. This places you in the power position and starts the relationship on the right foot with the right prospect.

Next post, I'll discuss how to gain high numbers of inquiries from these quality prospects.