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

Think about Tiger Woods. If he practices just his putting and gets really great, does that assure him of a win? To be a great golfer, it won’t help him to rank a “10” in putting but only a “7” in drives, fairway shots and chip shots. To be great, he must be strong all around and would be a far better golfer if he ranked 8.5 in all phases of the game. And that’s what he does—ha practices all phases of his game but is not #1 in any single skill. In fact—he ranks only 27th in the PGA in drives but his overall game is so good, it allows him to be a world ranked champion.

Advisers need to take a lesson. I see them focus on one aspect of their game, mostly prospecting. But they do little to:
· Improve their sales skills (most have never had formal sales training)
· Telephone appointment setting skills
· Marketing skills (oral and written communication that has prospects act)
· Referral skills (so that they get clients to bring them new business)
· Client retention skills (so that clients generate a lifetime stream of income)

For success with less work, you must have a balanced game and bring all parts of your business along in balance. What good is it if you have the tenacity to cold call all day but your phone presentation is lousy? You waste most of your time because your tenacity is offset by your lack of phone skills. Or what if you have 5 appointments a day but only close 2 as clients because your sales skills are mediocre? If all parts of your business don’t support the other, much of your effort, even in the areas where you rank a “10,” are wasted.

The balanced approach to building a profitable business

These are the 5 key areas of a profitable easy-to-run business
1. Prospecting
2. Appointment setting
3. Sales—how to conduct a prospect interview
4. Drip Marketing (e.g. newsletter for monthly client/prospect contact and client retention)
5. Referrals from clients

Now let’s see what you’re missing in each of these areas.

Prospecting—your prospecting must have people call you in response to mail, advertising or seminar invitations. If you chase the prospect rather than they contact you, your prospecting is all wrong and you have a fabulous opportunity to learn how to change that (and save a lot of time).

Appointment Setting—in our study of 500 advisers, the most successful asked the prospect at least 8 questions and the call lasted for more than 5 minutes. The least successful advisers rushed to set an appointment before understanding the prospect motivations and were often shot down. You can learn winning phone appointment-setting skills.

Sales—most advisers don’t know the definition of sales. Sales is “asking the prospect appropriate questions so that they see the solution for themselves.” It’s not about talking or spouting features and benefits or convincing. It’s about asking the right questions. The good news—you can retrain yourself in about 2 days and soon have prospects asking to buy.

Drip Marketing—if you don’t stay in contact every 30 days with a newsletter with clients and prospects, they forget you and you will lose business. You must have a drip marketing system that operates without your attention

Referrals—if 50% of your new business does not come from referrals, it’s because you have no system. You cannot wait for clients to bring you business because “you’re a nice person.”

Additional posts in this blog will focus on each of these activities in detail and how to do them.

Post provided by Javelin Marketing

Frankly, most sales skills books are poor. They contain scripts from the 1950s or focus on “closing techniques.” What I’ve learned is that when a sales conversation is done correctly, you don’t need closing techniques; the prospect wants to buy. They also focus on objection handling and when the lessons from the books below are mastered, objections disappear.

If you are just starting in sales, read “The Closers.” This is an old book with some older advice but it made a big impression on me and taught me that selling is not just a conversation about features and benefits. Selling is a science.


Next is SPIN Selling. Rather than repeat opinions (most of what you get about sales), this book is the research results of 35,000 sales presentations and details exactly what works. The books conclusions:

“Investigating is the most important of all selling skills and it’s particularly crucial in larger sales.”

“There is a clear statistical association between the use of questions and the successes of the interaction. The more you ask questions, the more successful the interaction is likely to be.”

The next book, Question Based Selling reiterates the same major conclusions—it’s all about asking questions.

Note that the two books above are written by authors involved in large ticket industrial sales. But the lessons are easily applicable to the one-call-close or the sale to individuals (insurance, securities, mortgages, law and accounting services, etc.)

Some sellers may think that they ask questions but not to the degree these books illustrate. In our company, we have even taken this one step further with a rule, “Never say anything that does not end in a question mark.” This prevents the me-focused selling so prevalent in America and insists that if the seller makes a statement about the features and benefits of his product, that the statement must still end in a question to the prospect, inquiring about how this stated benefit fits the PROSPECT’s desires.

David Sandler’s book “You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike in a Seminar” is awesome but please don’t even read it unless you already rank yourself a very skilled sales person. Sandler’s techniques for uncovering pain will be difficult to use unless you’ve mastered the tools of the previously mentioned books.

From the lessons learned, we’ve adopted two definitions of sales at Javelin Marketing:

“Selling is the asking of appropriate questions so that the prospect sees for himself that he wants to buy your product (service)”

“Selling is a conversation where the seller enrolls the prospect in the prospect’s vision.”

When you really learn how to sell, you realize that the notions of convincing, persuading and handling objections have nothing to do with sales when done by a master. Sales is about what the prospect wants, nut what you want. Will you be a sales master or do what others struggle to do?

Read and grow rich.