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If your sales approach relies heavily on you attempting to prove your value and expertise, you might be losing potentially qualified prospects who aren’t buying your approach.
Many advisors make the mistake of sticking to a fixed industry sales approach, thinking what worked in the past, will always work in the future.
When you start a conversation with a predetermined sales agenda, you risk triggering resistance, which ultimately leads to you doing “free consulting” to win them back to your side.
The million-dollar question is: how do you start a conversation that isn’t perceived as you attempting to convince them to hire you?
You do that by embracing a conversational tone like a doctor, with bed-side manner and empathy.
Begin by diagnosing to a very deep level exposing the severity of your prospects situation.
Help them articulate to you their “Cost of Inaction” (COI) which helps them see what it’s costing them NOT to solve their problem.
For example, if they need help with a retirement plan, use phases like: “Have you considered…” or “Are you aware of what it’s costing you not to have a plan in place -- to be sure you’re not overpaying more taxes than you need to?”.
Here your reverse engineering their issue that they came to you for, so they can finally see the seriousness and the urgency of their problem.
Often times they will trivialize their issue, making you do all the work to educate them on solutions.
But a doctor doesn’t prescribe medicine until the patient full understands a 360-degree perspective on their problem.
Your job is to encourage a dialogue about their current situation with open-ended questions were you help dimensionalize their problems.
Then you can ask: “Is this a priority for you to address, or is thi something you want to address down the road some time?”.
Clearly, if they can see the seriousness of their issues and you can help them calculate their cost-of-inaction, all of a sudden you have shifted from sales-mode to doctor-patient mode.
By adopting a conversational and empathetic approach that prioritises understanding your prospect’s situation, creates trust -- offering education and solutions to early, breaks trust.
If you’re ready to challenge your sales thinking, order your complimentary book and consultation below.
Related: The Silent Treatment Sucks!
Get Ari’s 6 best-selling books for FREE here and you’ll also receive a Complimentary Sales and Lead Generation Consultation (value $995.00). Ari Galper is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling and is the most sought-after high-net-worth new client acquisition expert for financial advisors. His latest books "Are You Chasing Ghosts", "Trusted Authority" and "Trust In A Split Second" have become instant best-sellers among financial advisors worldwide, get your free books here.