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Recently, an advisor said to me, “Our No.1 problem is getting leads – and we’ve tried everything from social media, email blasts, and a new website – but none of these things is working effectively.”
What I told him was: “In a low-volume, high-margin business like advisory, sales conversion (not lead generation) is where the real leverage is.”
Contrary to industry thinking, you don’t need more leads, you need to convert all of the qualified opportunities in front of you. The typical marketing mindset that spending more money and effort pushing free content through high-traffic channels to attract attention at scale will get you more leads isn’t as profitable as you might think. Spray-and-pray marketing is a good model for selling T-shirts but not so good for getting advisory clients.
Free content pushed at scale is generic, unspecific, and addresses people indirectly as a group. You might get leads from it, but most of what you catch either slips through your net or you end up having to throw it back in.
Instead, consider the “one-call sale” approach. With the one-call-sale model, you don’t fish in the wide ocean. You fish in “ponds” where your ideal clients have already gathered, and you don’t promote commoditized solutions. Instead, you target the problems that keep your potential clients up at night.
This way, your qualified prospects feel you’re addressing them directly as a person, not as a group. That, in turn, creates a baseline of trust which sets you apart from everyone else.
