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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
Dear Bev,
We need to get all of our advisors engaged in growth. Some are more willing to listen and learn and others remain convinced it is “wrong” for our clients to ask them for more. One said to me, “How would you feel if you bought an expensive car and the dealer asked you who else you could bring in for a Maserati”?
I don’t think this analogy holds at all. We are not a cost, per se. We help our clients make critical financial decisions at important times in their lives. While not everyone is in the market for a Maserati, everyone who has amassed some level of wealth does need guidance and support. I don’t want to get into debates — growth is important to our firm. Period. There is no discussion about it, so I don’t understand why we are coddling people who are resistant.
My four other partners believe we shouldn’t instill goals or reward people for it because it will feel like we are an insurance company posting winners and losers in the lunchroom. That’s the picture they paint about incentives and objectives. We have a firm of 19 people. If we don’t continue to grow revenue and income, we can’t hire and we can’t build for the future. I’m struggling with ways to get everyone to see this is not because we want more money but because we want to achieve long-term sustainability.
L.C.
Dear L.C.,
I had a client tell me the other day they had identified two types of advisors in their RIA — servicing advisors, who wanted only to work with clients, and sales advisors, who wanted to find new opportunities. As I told them, I violently disagree with this characterization.
You can create roles such as RM or Servicing Advisor where the only responsibilities are around caretaking of the client. You also can create roles, as one of my RIAs has done, where advisors have sole responsibility for bringing leads in for their colleagues and then move on to focus on the next lead. However, the premise that there are fundamentally two different types of people is flawed.
Any advisor can learn to sell. It’s important as a first step to reframe what selling is. It isn’t the Maserati example your colleague gave you, and it isn’t the guy who came to my house to clean my rugs one time and asked me to write down names of my friends with their phone numbers. This type of selling has its place — it is product and transactional focused. The people in this realm of sales have to always be pushing because their livelihood depends upon it.
In financial advisory, it’s a different mentality. Your work is truly transformational and, as you state, is imperative for people at certain stages of life. We all know what it looks like when someone has made several poor financial decisions or worked with a less-than-competent advisor. And we all know the damage that can be done in those situations.
I tell my advisor clients they have an ethical responsibility to make sure their clients, friends and COIs — as well as anyone they come in contact with — know the capabilities their firm can provide to help with transitional times in life. It’s hard to find good help!
Finding a great financial advisor is no different than when your trusted primary healthcare provider retires and you have to search for someone new. It’s an important relationship, and you have to feel comfortable sharing everything. Financial support is similar. Clients have to be confident enough with you to share their fears, their hopes, their dreams and their financial obstacles.
If I am a new client, it can be embarrassing to talk about how little I’ve saved, or the bad decision I’ve made, or that my kids have been clamoring for my money. Some people don’t share these things with their closest friends, never mind a new person they hardly know.
In this work, if clients don’t know you are seeking to help more people, or they don’t know how to talk to their friends and family about what you’ve done, or you aren’t comfortable suggesting to those in your personal life how important it is to make great financial decisions, then you are leaving people behind who could really use your help!
It’s an important reframe. This isn’t about selling — at all. It’s about problem-solving and helping — it’s about offering an opportunity to change someone’s life. Remember, they can always say “no.” You are not forcing anything on anyone. You are simply making them aware you are available and want to help. Perhaps if you share these ideas with your colleagues, it could change their frame of reference.
Dear Bev,
How do you know when someone is ready to close? I’m in a group of like-minded advisors where we share ideas, and one of our colleagues said that he never asks for the business — the future client asks him if they could work together. I have never had this happen. What does it look like when someone is ready?
N.C.
Dear N.C.,
It is different for different people. Some people are ready to go and want to dive in after learning just enough to make them comfortable. Others want to learn everything there is to know about this important decision and will keep asking questions and for information until they are comfortable.
The important piece in the process actually starts long before the close. Many advisors — and salespeople in general — think that with a good conversation along the way, closing will come naturally, but it rarely does. Certainly, there are those times a prospect is primed and ready to make a move; they just need the information in the sales process to get comfortable. In many cases, however, people are just shopping or looking to learn, and they might fear making an important decision such as who to hire to manage their family’s wealth. They might look for reasons to drag their feet and delay a decision.
Start with the end in mind in any interaction with a prospect. Ask them questions like, “What will be most important to you in making a decision like this?” or “Can you tell me about an important life decision similar to this one you made in the past and walk me through the steps you took to make it?”
You can always let the prospect know you need this information because it is vital to providing them with optimal service. In order words, match their “what’s in it for me” when you ask these questions.
Ask about timing and what obstacles might be faced in making a decision. If you can elicit these answers in advance, you will know when to go for the close! It will seem more obvious and natural if you can gain insight before you even launch into the process.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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