Radically Rethinking Your Process for Converting Prospects

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It’s time to consider an entirely different approach to your process for converting prospects.

This is despite the impressive ingenuity and elaborate processes common among advisors. I’ve seen everything from personality tests intended to match a prospect with the “right” advisor to extensive “discovery” questionnaires.

Scenarios

Let’s explore a couple of hypothetical scenarios to illustrate the issue.

Scenario #1

In this scenario, the prospect is a frail, elderly widow. Your process involves extensive discovery to disclose the details of her financial situation. After you receive her responses to your questionnaire, you explain fundamentals of investing to her.

She listens patiently before telling you she has a Ph.D in statistics from MIT.

Oops!

Scenario #2

The prospect is an executive in his early 40s. During the course of your conversation with him, he expresses the view that he is leery of the stock market because he believes it’s manipulated by a small cabal of people with interests adverse to “ordinary investors” like him.

You patiently explain why you disagree. The conversation is polarizing. The meeting ends poorly.

What went wrong with these two meetings?