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

Many financial advisors would like more and better clients. But their client prospecting is often wasted and misplaced. Here are three concepts that can help you attract more and better clients:


Make yourself scarce

We live in a culture where people want what they cannot have. In order for people to want you, you must make yourself scarce. That means you only deal with people who fit your profile (yes, turn away business). In all financial marketing you do, communicate that you only deal with a certain segment of people.


Here’s an example. Bob, a 10-year financial advisor, only deals with people age 60 and over. His firm is called Senior Alliance. His business card says “Retiree Investment Management.” He does not deal with people under 60. If his client says, “Can you help my son—he’s 48 and he has some money,” he declines and refers the son to a colleague. By being so picky, his clients refer him to others as “He’s a specialist in dealing with people like us.” No client wants to go to a generalist. They want a specialist. What do you specialize in? If you come up short with an answer, then you cannot attract clients as a generalist and need to select a focus.


Another example is the financial advisor who specializes in an industry, For example, an advisor who only prospects chemical engineers. He becomes known in that circle, writes a columns for the engineers’ magazine and becomes an invited speaker at conventions. I know a guy who sold hundreds of life insurance polices to United Airlines pilots by visiting their layover facility at major airports. He gave talks to a group of pilots as they were waiting for their next flight.
Be different. Every time you open an account, it’s because you offer something different than the client’s current advisor. Yet most financial advisors look alike—many do the same activities, offer the same products and services and are indistinguishable from the next financial advisor. Why should the prospect deal with you?

You distinguish yourself from others by crafting your business differently. One way is to focus on a certain niche as described above and making yourself scarce. Another way is to run your business differently. For example, if most financial advisors recommend mutual funds, then you recommend stocks (and have a well researched argument with evidence as to why stocks would be better). If other financial advisors offer bond funds for fixed income, you offer individual bonds (and have a good presentation as to why individual bonds would be better). If other financial advisors have no system for selecting stocks, then you specialize in quantitative systems like the Dow Dividend Strategy, Value Line or CANSLIM (as documented by William O’Neill in How to Make Money in Stocks). Show people why “guessing” about stocks is no way to invest and why a structured system brings all-important discipline to the process. If other financial advisors raise money for third party money managers, you be the money manager (if you use a structured system, the time it takes to manage portfolios is negligible as the system does the work).

If every one in your office sells growth stocks, then specialize in precious metals or whatever interests you. Team up with the other financial advisors in your office and split commissions. They are not talking to their clients about metals and this business will be lost. It would be smart for both of you to split commissions and have him introduce you to his clients (other brokers will bring you business if they you are not competing with them, that you specialize in an area they don’t know about—metals, options, 401k, etc).

Write
In our culture, people who write are considered experts. If your name is in the newspaper or on the spine of a book, you will stand out from other advisors. You do not need to write a word. Many firms and others have an article service and ghost writing service to make you an author overnight (be sure and comply with the FINRA disclosures on ghost writing).

Think of the difference when you can give a prospect a copy of your book. Do you think he is more inclined to open an account with you? What about sending information to a referral and you include in the envelope two articles from the daily newspaper in which you are interviewed and one article you authored. Have you increased the probability of that prospect becoming a client?

As you implement your marketing, ask yourself each week how you are being different and distinguishing yourself from every other broker in town. Why will prospects leave their current advisor to join you?

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.

Some financial professionals use prospecting methods that produce the wrong prospects (i.e.; bad sales leads). I define a wrong prospect as someone who is not really interested, not qualified or hard to deal with. In essence, someone who wastes your precious time and, if they do become a client, they consume so much of your time that you wish they weren't a client.

You generate these prospects by using unfocused mass marketing models. For example, if you call a list of people over age 65 attempting to obtain long-term care appointments, you are generating the wrong prospects. You have no idea if these people are interested or qualified. So you waste a lot of time cold calling and then meeting people who are not qualified or interested. I call this being a “sales laborer.” You waste large amounts of time on non-revenue-generating activities.

With such prospecting, you begin the relationship by giving the power and control to the prospect. You asked them for an appointment. They can accept or decline and they have the control. You come after them. Wouldn’t you rather they come after you?

Wouldn’t it be smarter if you only met with the interested qualified prospects and spent more of your time in a sales presentation? Wouldn’t it be better if you attracted these interested people to you and practiced as a “sales professional.” Here’s the secret to attracting qualified prospects and interested prospects: set up your marketing so that prospects must indicate their interest before you ever make personal contact. Let them ask for your contact!

Rather than cold call your list, send a well-written, direct response mailer. Even if you get a 1% response to 1,000 items mailed, that’s 10 interested people who took action. They contacted you and requested something of you. You start off in control of the relationship.

When you call them, you qualify them and eliminate half. You get 5 appointments. These are the same 5 appointments you would have gotten with the cold calling, but look how much easier this was. Instead of talking with 1000 people, you talked to 10 people. Instead of meeting with 10 people, you met with 5. You saved maybe 25 hours of your time and spent $500 on postage and mailing. (In other words, had you cold called, you valued your time at $20 an hour for the mailing cost you saved. Is that all you’re worth--$20 an hour)?

Because you now know that you can get more appointments by sending more mailers, you will not be so desperate for every appointment. You can qualify people well and weed out those that have a low probability of becoming a client. You spend your time meeting with the most promising prospects and your close ratio rises because you meet with more qualified prospects.

Or what if you ran an advertisement in the local senior magazine or on the Internet, “Avoid Mistakes in Buying Long-Term Care--Get the Free Guide for Seniors.” You then have a few prospects to call who are interested and motivated. You have saved your time and limited the prospects you deal with to those who take initiative. These are the types of people you want as clients. You do not want people who must always be convinced, which is the type of prospect that is generated with unfocused, mass marketing. Sales laborers spend time with prospects that need convincing. Sales professionals spend time in sales presentations with interested, motivated prospects who take the first step.

Or what about inserting a flyer in the daily newspaper for your next LTC seminar “90% of Seniors Have Inadequate Health Protection.” In our tests, 10,000 inserted flyers (for about $500) generates 25 people to a seminar. You give a presentation to 25 motivated people at one time and then have individual appointments. Seminars make super-efficient use of your time (you give the same presentation at once to 25 or more people) and super effective use of your time (you are speaking to motivated prospects). People who attend seminars are very motivated as they need to place the activity on their schedule, get ready and drive to your location.

If cost is the hang-up to pursuing smart marketing as illustrated above, consider that you almost insure that your income will not increase because you waste your selling time on prospecting. Even if you have no money available for marketing, take a $500 loan from your credit card. Not only can you make a many-times return on your investment, but you’ll be motivated to earn and pay off this advance before your credit card statement arrives.

If you, in fact want to be a big producer, a fast method is to invest money into your business, not your time. Your time must be devoted to sales activities and nothing else. It’s the model used by the most successful companies in existence today—invest money up front and grow large and profitable quickly. Invest the money so that your time can be used for appointments with qualified prospects. As a great teacher once said, “You need to put wood in the fireplace first before it gives off any heat.”

If you’ve been tired of prospecting, got burnt out and feel that good prospects are scarce, see how the following principals can be easily applied at Insurance Leads.

How to Work Your Leads for Super Profits


Sales Lead Generation
Make an offer to your prospect that matches their agenda. Whether you use email, direct mail, newspaper advertising, it doesn’t matter. The goal is to put something in front of our prospect that matches their concern and not your concern. Here’s an example. If you want to have a prospect respond for your offer for mutual fund selection, you don’t send a mailing “Get my mutual fund selection system for only $99.” Such an offer is about YOUR agenda. Here’s the offer that matches their agenda, “Six Tactics that Financial Institutions Don’t Want You to Know About Selecting the Right Mutual Funds on Your Own—Get your free copy now.”

Sales Lead Generation Follow Up
Once your prospect responds (requests the free booklet or report), you send it. DO NOT contact the prospect until you have delivered the promised item. Print your photo, your name, credentials on the front cover and have your biography (well written to illustrate your expertise) in the back. Make sure you have plenty of unbiased non-sales content in the report. If you send an item that is effectively a sales pitch, the prospect won’t want to talk with you. People don’t want to talk with sales people. That’s why the item must be 100% informative, educational and add value to the prospect’s agenda.

After you send the item, you contact the prospect (whether it be by phone or a follow up mail piece). Let’s say it’s by phone and your objective is to sell something on the phone or sell an appointment. For example, you sell mutual funds and you want to meet this prospect. Your call is about their concerns and the only way you will know their concerns is to ask. So the goal of this call is not to state how brilliant you are or how great your mutual fund choices are. The goal is to find the prospect’s hot button that will motivate them to action.

Once you’ve identified the prospect’s hot button, you ask them how important it would be to solve this issue—what’s the payoff. When they tell you, ask them to explain further. In other words, get them to “taste” the payoff. Now here’s where mediocre sellers screw this up. They blurt out “well I can help you with that!!!” Now, you’re just another sales person, drooling at the thought that you have a motivated prospect. But the master does not volunteer a solution. The master asks “would you like to see how other people like yourself solve this problem?” Because people are addicted voyeurs, they will absolutely want to find out how others solve their financial dilemmas. You can then volunteer to meet and show them examples of other person’s solutions.
You have now maintained your position as a consultant and not a sales person. You have controlled your urge to talk about what you want to sell and you have remained focused on the prospect’s objective. You now have a lead that’s a real prospect. You can now see why most lead systems don’t work Let’s explore what you’re probably doing now to generate and follow up on leads.

Sales Lead Generation and Followup Failures to Avoid
First, the lead probably did not respond to anything. They are merely a name that supposedly meets some criteria. This is not a sales lead, it’s a suspect. REAL leads are people that respond to some marketing effort. They raise their hand (i.e. respond) and indicate interest. So if you don’t have a strong marketing message up front to get prospects to indicate interest, you’re already sunk

Next, you probably call that prospect to solicit an appointment. But you’ve got no credibility with them. You have failed to establish your expertise. You must first show the prospect why you’re credible. And there is no better credibility than to be an author (or to have printed materials personalized with your name and photo and the prospect assumes you’re the author).

Last, you probably contact prospects and tell them about your “stuff.” You don’t ask them enough questions or even seem to care about them. Since they responded to your marketing, you assume they are a buyer so you jump into your pitch. You immediately establish yourself as another hack they don’t want to talk to.

Is it now clear why it takes 200 leads to make one or two sales?

If you sell a financial product or service, you can see how these lead generation principals are applied in a simple system by Javelin Marketing at http://www.wealthyproducer.com/selfrunning.html