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?

Waiting for your phone to ring for a referral is no longer the safe zone it once was, unless you are happy depending on an unpredictable and passive model to grow your business.

In 2023, trust is only half of the equation, The other half is authority.

Here are seven mindset shifts to stretch your thinking to generate only ideal clients this year.

Engage in activities that position you as a trusted authority.

Being good at what you do is no longer enough to differentiate yourself from other advisors.

Funnel marketing worked reasonably well until two to three years ago, but it’s been failing ever since. Here's why.

Stop being reactionary, waiting to get inbound opportunities, rather than systematically and proactively putting in place a system to target specific ideal clients (i.e., higher net worth) that you want to engage.

Even though you are an advisor, you’re not in the financial advice business. You’re in the problem-solving business.

Replace talking about your solution with talking about a roadmap.

When you build trust in your sales conversation, then ask this bridging question towards the end.

The first and most important thing you need to figure out is what a potential high-net worth client is looking for when they come to see you.

A funny thing can happen in the mind of a prospect during their initial consultation with you.

When a prospect shares their challenges and you show them your solution, it’s easy to assume they’ll become a paying client. That is the wrong assumption.