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When your pipeline of new opportunities begins to dry up, what does through your mind?
Most likely, with a sigh of dread, “it’s time to go out and shake the trees” once again.
This can involve multiple outreach activities such as going to networking events, knocking on doors to find COI’s, and chasing your clients for referrals.
You’ve got to put yourself out there if you want to reach the unconverted corners of your market, or so you’ve been told by your peers and elders.
But is this true?
The problem with social settings as outreach activities (lunch meetings or networking events), is they divert you from your real purpose for being there.
You’re not really looking to make friends, you’re there to generate potential new clients.
But the setting itself forces you to have a social interaction, rather than a business interaction.
You find yourself trying to build a social relationship with someone, in the hope of turning it into a business relationship down the road (a very long and unfocussed sales process).
At some point, you need to break out of “friendship mode” into “business mode”— which puts you in an awkward position having to cross over social norms.
This kind of traditional prospecting taught by the “leaders” of the profession can be extremely inefficient, unreliable, and strikingly outdated.
As an advisor, you can't afford to waste your precious time scouring for prospects, attempting to build inauthentic relationships, only to discover down the road, there was no opportunity there in the first place.
Nor can you afford to be seen as having ulterior motives in your interactions with your market.
Traditional business development activities mostly amount to doing unpaid missionary work, which is most likely beneath your pay grade at this stage in your career.
The truth is you don’t need to “get out there” to get new clients.
With the right positioning, fishing out your ideal clients from someone else’s pond,
directly onto your calendar, shifts your business model to how a doctor operates.
To shift to this type of trust-based inbound system, you first need to open up your mindset and thinking around positioning.
You’re no longer an advisor going out there to find new clients, instead, you’re a financial “doctor” and you need to be positioned as a category-of-one.
Their problem, not your solution, is the foundation of them coming to you, rather than you coming to them.
Their issues are the only purpose of the conversation -- and it’s a structured trust-based conversation, designed to clarify their deepest untold problems and determine if it's a priority for them to solve.
This will completely change the way you grow your business and those who keep telling you to do more prospecting, will feel like an anachronism (a good word to look up if you’re not familiar with it).
The good news, this model will feel far more comfortable and authentic than what you probably don’t enjoy doing in the first place.
If a doctor ever approached you in a social setting with an agenda to have him see you, you’ll immediately be looking for the exit door, faster than anyone can say “fire”.
To learn more about how to reposition yourself in your market as the Trusted Authority, order your complimentary book and consultation below.
Related: Are You in a Trust Recession?
Get your Free copy of Ari’s best-selling book "Trust In A Split Second!" 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 book, “Trust In A Split Second!” has become an instant best-seller among financial advisors worldwide.