How about this for a resolution for 2011: get prospects to make faster
decisions.

One of the biggest frustrations for financial advisors is the amount of dithering that some prospects do. Sometimes it seems to take forever for people to make a decision.

Here’s an all too common scenario: you have a really good meeting with a prospect, you agree you’ll be in touch to schedule a followup meeting — and then the prospect won’t return your calls.

Or a prospect will look interested and ask you to send him or her some information as a followup. Again, when you follow up, you get no response.

There are a number of reasons why it is taking longer for prospects to make decisions. People are busy. Inertia is a powerful force. For some investors, it’s just easier to stay where they are. And often they’re genuinely unsure whether life with you is going to be better than with their current advisor.

Here are four explicit strategies to get your prospects off the fence:



> Strategy 1: Sell Your Point Of Differentiation

The first key to creating urgency among prospects is clearly communicating how they will be better off working with you compared with what they’re doing now.

You need to concentrate on outcomes rather than the process. How exactly are the clients you work with better off as a result of your efforts?

For this to be convincing, you need to be specific rather than general. So, if you’re talking about your investment process and how you manage risk, or ways you help your clients reduce their tax burdens, you need to be able to point to specific, concrete outcomes from your efforts.

Case studies using the classic problem/solution/result format can help tell your story. For example, if your focus is on how your clients benefit from your approach to comprehensive planning, show what a sample plan would look like. Then demonstrate one or two examples of the changes your clients have made as a result of your planning process and how they’ve benefited as a result.

Along the same lines, if retirees who winter down south are a big focus of your business, demonstrate the specific ways your expertise and approach leave snowbirds better off. Demonstrate your understanding of issues related to U.S. tax and estate law and your ability to help clients hedge U.S. currency exchange risk. If you run annual sessions that touch on these topics and other hot-button issues such as home security while your clients are away, be sure to mention that, too.



> Strategy 2: Take The Pressure Off

Talking to prospects is a lot like dating. Sometimes, the harder you try, the less success you have. The irony is that the more effort made to accelerate the process, the more prospective clients get their guards up.

The challenge when talking to prospects is communicating that you’d like to work with them, but you don’t need to work with them. You have to allow the conversation to evolve at a comfortable pace. The moment you convey anxiety or even a trace amount of desperation for the business, your chances of success go way down.

Sometimes it’s the small things that make a difference. For example, when talking to a prospect about getting together, you should say: “At what point in the next two to three weeks do you have 30 minutes to sit down for a coffee.” That communicates interest without conveying desperation.

“At what point in the next month or two” is too vague. There is not enough urgency. And “when in the next week” risks raising red flags about your anxiety to close the sale.

As a general rule, the more relaxed you are when talking to prospects, the better. One way to achieve that is to have a large number of prospects in the hopper. If you have five prospects that you’re actively talking to, inevitably you’ll feel pressure when talking to one of those five. After all, that’s 20% of your pipeline.

If you have 55 prospects under active cultivation, it’s much easier to be relaxed in your approach.@page_break@> Strategy 3: Create Momentum

Recently, I read about an American advisor who uses a four-meeting process to convert prospects to clients. The first meeting is a low-key chat over coffee to assess whether there’s a fit. The second meeting is for fact-finding. At the third meeting, the advisor presents high-level strategies and recommendations. The final meeting focuses on implementation.

Whether your process when meeting with prospects is two, three or four meetings, try to close each meeting by setting up the next one, ideally in the next week or two. That builds an appropriate level of momentum into the prospect meetings without creating pressure. The key is to lay out your meeting process when you’re setting up the first meeting on the phone.

You could say something like: “Before deciding whether we’re going to work together, I normally meet with prospective clients three times. The first meeting is really just to get to know each other and to allow both of us to decide if there’s a potential fit. If we both decide to proceed, we’ll set up a second meeting to get into the specifics of your situation, going into your objectives, your tax situation and how you’re invested currently. If we both still want to go ahead after that, we’ll set up a third meeting to review some specific recommendations.”

That way, at the conclusion of a meeting, you can refer to that initial conversation, saying you’d be interested in moving forward to the next stage if the prospect is. Then, you ask if they’d like to book a time for another meeting in the next couple of weeks.



> Strategy 4: Communicate Scarcity

Let’s suppose that you’ve met with a prospect and had a good meeting. But then the prospect doesn’t respond to your voice mail messages and emails.

At that point, you could call the prospect and leave a voice mail along these lines:

“Hi, Jim, it’s Dan Richards. Sorry we haven’t been able to connect. I have capacity for four new clients in the next quarter.

“After our last meeting I thought we’d work well together and you might be someone I could help. It sounds like you’re busy right now. I’ll touch base in about three months. Feel free to give me a call if you’d like to talk in the meantime.”

This says you’re busy, too, and it lets the prospect know that you’re interested but not desperate. And whether or not the prospect calls you back, you’ve set the stage for your next contact in 90 days.

I mentioned this idea during a conference call in November. Three days later, I got an email from an advisor who’d spent five years on the board of a local charity with the CEO of a public company. Through persistent low-key contact, he had obtained earlier in the autumn the opportunity to sit down for a fact-finding meeting with this prospect and then present a proposal. He’d identified several ways to improve the CEO’s portfolio and the CEO seemed interested and had promised to get back to the advisor — and then nothing.

This advisor had spoken to the CEO’s assistant on three occasions trying to book a followup call or meeting, without success.

The advisor, feeling that he had nothing to lose, left the CEO a voice mail along the lines of the script above. The next morning, he got a call from the CEO’s assistant to book a meeting.

We have to accept that prospects will make decisions within their time frame, not ours. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do things to help the process along. IE



Dan Richards is CEO of clientinsights (www.clientinsights.ca) in Toronto. For other columns by this sales expert, visit www.investmentexecutive.com.