How Financial Advisors Can Acquire More Ideal Clients in 2021

Let’s face it, you have a successful practice, and you are growing, but you still are not acquiring ideal clients. As Albert Einstein said, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Are you talking to the same type of clients and prospects every week? Or are you talking to ideal prospects, people who will pay you more than any current client pays you?

How do I define ideal clients? 

To acquire ideal clients you first must define your ideal client definition. What is the revenue you want to generate from a new ideal client this year? Is it $5000 or $10,000 or $20,000 or more? Define the revenue that you want to generate to your practice per ideal client, family or household. Take the top paying clients, double the revenue from your best client, and use that as a guide to what an ideal client can generate as revenue. Now that will make you start to think about the value you have to deliver the acquire more ideal clients. The more value you deliver, the more valuable you become. How can you deliver more value?

Ideal families

The financial industry teaches us to measure clients or households, but what about ideal families? How many ideal families do you have? I mean the whole family, parents, children, and grandchildren, and other family members, and relatives. When you measure your ideal families, as a family office does, the revenue can be anywhere between $10,000 to $100,000 per year or more. Start your segmentation by looking at how many ideal families you manage? 

How to deliver more value?

To answer this question, you first must look at the value you deliver now, and figure out what value do I offer to ideal prospects? What are the three things ideal prospects are not getting from their current financial advisor or institution? Once you figure out what they are not getting, this becomes part of your value-added offers to make to them. For example, are wealthy prospects getting clarity around all of their goals, clearly mapped out on paper, and have a comprehensive financial and investment strategy? What is their probability of success in reaching their goals? The problem with ideal prospects is that they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know they are not getting all of the value-added advice and services you offer. How will they know what they don’t know? This is part of your offers, which come in the form of value-added questions. So what are your value-added questions? How will prospects know what they don’t know?

The second problem

The second challenge for financial advisors and wealth managers trying to acquire more ideal clients is that their offers are logical. You and I know that the wealthy engage emotional first and logic second. Making your offers emotional is the hard part since most financial professionals talk about financial planning, wealth management estate planning and turn them into offers which are almost always logical. So where do you start to engage these ideal prospects? How confident and successful are you to pick up the phone to set up appointments with ideal prospects? This is the hard part, isn’t it?

What are your emotional compelling offers? 

Once you discover how to make these emotionally compelling offers, how do you practice them? What are your offers on a phone call to an ideal prospect? Do you have one offer or three, four or five offers to make? Do you have successful scripts to use or do you wing it on the phone with an ideal prospect? Most financial advisors I talk to don’t even get to the wing it stage, because they are not making the calls. They are sending messages, hoping to engage the ideal prospect. Hope and winging it are not sound plans. This is where proven processes can help. That is what practice management is all about, Do you have proven scripted processes to find, meet and acquire ideal prospects? If the answer is no and you are looking for processes, contact us to learn how to implement proven practice management processes into your practice .

How about your goals for your practice in 2021? 

Our updated Practice management checklist. While each financial advisor's practice may have a different approach, advisors need to understand where their practice needs help, and will they get the right help for the right part of their practice. What areas does your practice need help with?

Related: Do You Have Clarity Around Your Financial Advisory Practice Goals for 2021?