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One of the tenets of effective selling is never make it hard for your prospect to buy from you.
Many advisors whom I speak with, say they get this idea.
But when we look at their average monthly conversion rate of prospects to paid clients, the numbers say otherwise.
The truth is that most prospects who go through the an advisor’s intake process do not commit to a paid client relationship.
They show a high level of interest initially and it seems easy to build rapport with them.
But somewhere along the way they lose interest and disengage with the process, and you never hear back from them again.
This is a huge source of frustration, because the intake process demands a lot from you and it’s free for them, yet they don’t respond to it like you expect.
You’d think that providing all that upfront value for free (discovery meeting, detailed analysis of their financial documents, a financial plan, and another meeting to explain it all) would give them the reassurance they need to want to move forward.
But that assumes the free value somehow removes the barriers to the sale.
It doesn’t.
What you’re actually doing by providing free value is removing the ability for your prospect to buy into your process – and they need to buy into your process before they can buy into you.
Think of how a private school operates a reservation system for new enrollments.
You must pay a non-refundable reservation fee and go on their waiting list before you’re given a spot.
As a result, everyone who enrolls is serious about their intention and ability to attend that school.
Or consider how attorneys require upfront payment, before they’ll go on record and give you legal advice.
Why do they do this?
Because their time is valuable, their advice has consequences, and they need to ensure their clients can compensate them for it.
In their world, every prospect who ends up “wanting to think about it”, costs them a potential paid client they could’ve got.
The same is true for advisors.
Here are the four fatal weaknesses of the typical advisor’s intake process:
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It has multiple steps and meetings
There are too many points where the competing priorities of everyday life can kill momentum and break the process completely
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It removes the consequences for disengaging
Because it’s free the prospect knows they can exit any time. They never buy into the process and so have little motivation to follow through with it
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It makes the prospect do work
They don’t want to do work (especially not paperwork), they just want someone to solve their problem
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It devalues your perceived value as a professional
People only value advice and information that they pay for. If it’s not valuable to you to be able to give it away for free, then it’s not valuable to them
My suggestion is to shift your mindset away from value-based selling, it’s become commoditized, everyone’s doing it.
It’s the wrong approach for the type of selling that advisors need to master, which is called the “expert consultant sale”.
Your prospects need to buy into your process (pay you for it), by the end of your the very first meeting, based on your ability to build trust with them.
If you’d like to learn how to transition your intake process into a paid model, then order the Trusted Authority book below and learn about a new process through your complimentary consultation.