Answer four key questions

Three minutes may not seem like much time, but making your initial overview brief doesn’t mean you won’t spend more time explaining how you operate later in the meeting. In fact, the goal of that initial overview is to interest prospects enough that they’ll want to know more and ask followup questions, which you’ll answer after you’ve had a chance to get them talking about their situation.

– The four questions every prospect wants answered

Let’s start with the four basic issues that every prospect wants addressed in a first meeting:

1. Results: How will I be better off as a result of working with you, compared with what I’m doing now or what other advisors would do for me?

2. Your process: What specific things about your approach set you apart and allow you to provide these results?

3. Implementation: What is it about the way you work that will make me believe that this is not just words and that you’ll actually be able to deliver?

4. Credibility: What concrete information about your background and your firm will give me confidence that this actually will happen?

That’s a lot of information to present in three minutes. But, remember: you’re not trying to say everything; just enough to get prospects interested in hearing more. In fact, the less you say, the better the chances that your message will resonate.

That rule of thumb brings me to a lesson from a different setting with a similar problem in getting a story across:

– A lesson from graduating MBA students

The focus on pruning back how much you say about yourself came up last week in a different context. I had arranged for a corporate recruiter to meet with some second-year students in the MBA program at the University of Toronto, where I’ve been teaching for many years. These students are facing a tough job market, and a good number of them are still searching for employment just a couple of months before they graduate.

The recruiter asked for volunteers who would be willing to have him critique their resumés. The three resumés he looked at had two things in common. First, they contained lots of achievements from remarkably bright and accomplished students. And, second, those achievements were buried among references to more mundane things such as courses on advanced Excel modelling or membership in student clubs and associations.

The recruiter’s observation: when he picks up a resumé, his initial impression comes from his first 30 seconds of scanning it. Anything that has an indifferent impact gets in the way of drawing attention to the things that truly set the student apart.

The recruiter also made a suggestion on presenting summer and full-time jobs on a resumé: for each job, students should have a subhead for responsibilities and a second one for accomplishments, with a maximum of three bullet points under each. He told the students that being forced to choose the most important accomplishments from each job will help get their story across in a much more powerful fashion.

– When less is more

This move toward brevity in resumés is no different from the shift in philosophy in the way financial advisors should present the benefits they would provide to prospective clients. At one time, the conventional approach was “the more, the merrier”: you kept pitching the benefits until one resonated. Unfortunately, however, by the time you get to a relevant benefit, many prospects have tuned out.

Today, most advisors know that they first need to invest the time to understand their prospects’ issues and “pain points,” then selectively link to the aspects of the advisor’s approach that will address those issues.

Introducing a smaller number of benefits that are targeted to your prospect’s situation is far better than talking about all the advantages of working with you in a “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” approach.

The phrase “less is more” first appeared in a work by British poet Robert Browning, although it was more broadly popularized by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, two of the pioneers of modern architecture. Just as “less is more” applies to art and architecture, so it applies to communicating with prospects; the shorter and more focused your message, the likelier it is to stick.

– That one piece of paper

Let’s talk about the practical logistics of delivering that tight message.

To get your message across in the first three minutes with prospects, those four headings that make up your one-page message are: background, approach, implementation and results.

I would keep the headings in that order, ending with results – the positive impact of your approach on clients. However, there’s nothing magic about this sequence, so feel free to change the way you present this information in a way that works for you.

Under each of those headings are those two or three bullet points. To work effectively, the layout of that paper should be designed by someone who knows their way around graphic-design software. Ideally, you should be sitting beside your prospect – at, say, a round table – so you can put your overview in front of him or her and work through it together.

As part of this process, you’re incorporating a short story – perhaps a case study about how a client benefited from your service or how you arrived at your approach. If you find yourself struggling to keep this segment of your meeting to three minutes, the world won’t end if you go to four minutes or even five.

Once you’ve finished, pause and say: “What questions do you have about this overview?”

Then, jot down your prospect’s question and continue on by asking, “What else?” Depending on the response you get, one final “Do you have any other questions?” will wrap up this segment.

At that point, you should shift attention to your prospect by saying: “I’d be pleased to answer your questions, and we’ll definitely come back to this issue. Before I do that, though, tell me about how you got to where you are today.”

Or you might say: “Tell me your key goals, from a financial point of view?”

To make the transition to your prospect’s financial situation, I recommend a question used by an advisor whom I have worked with in the past: “What kind of written plan do you have in place to ensure that your income exceeds your expenses in retirement?”

Once you’ve heard your prospects out, you can come back to their questions from your introduction, linking your answers about your process and results to what you have heard them say. Again, when answering their questions, the shorter your responses, the better.

Some advisors might say that this back-and-forth process is convoluted and cumbersome; they’d rather just tell their entire story off the top.

But, remember: the more effectively you engage prospects and get them talking in the first few minutes when you meet, the stronger the foundation for your story.

Further, the more likely they are to want to learn more and the better the chances that these potential clients will commit to a followup meeting.

Dan Richards is CEO of Clientinsights (www.clientinsights.ca) in Toronto. For more of Dan’s columns and informative videos, visit www.investmentexecutive.com.

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