Are you an experiencing a decline in the acquisition of new clients?
To break out of your prospect’s selection process and avoid being commoditized as an advisor, you must shift them out of their shopping-mode mindset.
If you shift your mindset to become a financial doctor to your prospects, you no longer have to dispense information or advice pre-sale to prove yourself.
Your prospect doesn’t care about you pre-sale... they care about your understanding of them.
Could it be that your internal eagerness to comply with your prospect’s apparent requirements conveys a subservience that dissuades them from trusting you?
Because each side has their own agenda, selling has devolved into a game where the truth is often held back, and trust is difficult to establish.
Few prospects have the mental bandwidth to plan ahead five weeks, let alone five to 20 years.
Here’s a sobering truth you’re seeing more of every day: Your unique status, as an advisor, is declining at a rapid pace.
When a prospect comes inbound, it’s easy to assume they know what they want, understand what they need, and recognize you as the one for them.
Trust is no longer created from your level of knowledge or expertise.
When you are trying to build trust with a new prospect, one of the worst things you can do is sell your “value proposition” – an extinct notion that no longer applies in today’s highly competitive market.
In the medical profession, prescribing a treatment without first thoroughly diagnosing the patient’s illness opens the risk of malpractice.
You’re not there to make friends. You’re there to create trust by diagnosing their issues.
Your prospects often don’t tell you everything you need to know to assess the depths of their problems, because they can’t articulate the context behind their surface-level description of their issues.
What if we stop thinking of prospects who don’t commit as “tire-kickers,” and instead view them as potential clients we lost?
“Spray-and-pray” marketing is a good model for selling t-shirts – not so good for getting advisory clients.
Emails are ignored and even seen as a nuisance, because free information is everywhere, and it’s no longer trusted.
Advisors are conditioned to believe that the more “runway” they have with a prospect, the more time they’ll have to show them enough value to make their hiring decision. But is this true?
Here’s what you can say in response.
Do you like your mechanic? Do you like your doctor?
Most advisors don’t consider do-it-yourselfers as serious potential clients. That is a big, incorrect and very costly assumption.
Are you being hired based on the facts you collect and provide or on how your prospects feel about you?
Information and knowledge has officially been democratized.
Ironically, many advisors allow their prospects to avoid being decisive.
To your prospects, titles are ubiquitous, to be expected, no big deal – they have little power in their decision-making process.
Providing value pre-sale (free information about solutions and how you provide them) continues to increase the level of indecisiveness on the part of your prospect.
If you’re losing five, six, or even seven out of every 10 prospect each month, that’s a lot of value slipping away.
Seminars and workshops are a costly and exhausting way to acquire high-net-worth clients.
Having a reliable sales and marketing system that works automatically in the background, bringing in new, qualified leads every month instead of having to go on the hunt, allows you to prioritize your work in a meaningful way.
Before your prospects are willing to pay for anything, they need to see (not just hear) what it is they’re buying.
Here are the four blind spots inside of the typical advisor’s intake process
Advisors have relied on COIs to build their businesses. That is no longer working, and here is why.
Forget the traditional sales process used by the advisory profession.
To de-commoditize your practice, jettison the traditional sales behaviors and routines that your peers use.
I reviewed some advisor websites and I was confused by their value propositions.
Your prospect is not an expert and has no ability to judge whether you’re right for them based on the information you provide about their finances.
Why should you do highly valuable work for free?
We’ve all been told that people buy from those they know and like. But if that were the whole truth, then you’d have far more clients.
The number-one reason prospects evade us is…
Learning to walk away is the hardest part of selling, because we’ve been so conditioned to pursue anyone who we believe could benefit from our services.
Advisors have always considered the discovery meeting unchallengeable. Why?
When I hear of advisors spending $80,000 on marketing and getting zero clients, as one advisor shared with me recently, I envision a revolving door.
Merely advertising your presence in the marketplace is too vague and unspecific. It fails to project authority and generate trust.
With online lead generation, it’s easy to haul in a large amount of leads in a short amount of time and think you’ve hit the jackpot.
You know you have a non-ideal client when…
With Denzel Washington, it’s not that no other actor can play the roles he plays – it’s that no other actor can play them quite like him.
Stop burning up fuel and generating heat in the lower gears, doing general marketing activities that only attract more non-ideal clients and overload your system.
Here’s a problem marketing experts can’t solve.
The decision to focus on a specific area allows the specialist to become a trusted authority, and this is what leads them to a more differentiated position than that of a general practitioner.
Can you see why your prospect’s hiring decision is not a rational assessment of what you actually do?