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The typical advisor’s sales process revolves around these four things:
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Discovery meeting
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Prospect’s financial document retrieval
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Free financial plan
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Review meeting
These four steps are followed almost religiously in an attempt to provide value, in the hope, you will gain a new paying client.
But why should you do highly valuable work for free?
How did the cart get before the horse?
How did the idea of doing work up front for free (free consulting) become such an engrained norm in the advisory industry?
When an industry becomes saturated and competitive, ideas creep in, that on the surface, appear they’ll give you a competitive edge (giving away free value to win more clients), but in reality, it becomes a race to the bottom.
The sound practices and principles that established you as a professional in the first place, get lost in the lack of appreciation by your potential new prospects who are comparing you to other advisors.
If the four steps above are in your sales process, then chances are you are following the rest of the industry in that downward direction – requiring you to always need “more leads” to fill the gap of those you lose in that process.
The good news is that changing direction and moving back upward is relatively simple, but only if you can grasp some key ideas.
Firstly, you must start by rejecting the notion that on your first meeting with a potential new client, you need to do anything except provide deep clarity on their issues.
What do I mean?
“Isn’t that the free financial plan” you might say, which you meticulously build from the discovery meeting and the prospect’s financial documents?
No, knowing the intricate and technical details of how you’ll solve their problem is not the clarity they’re looking for at this stage of the process.
It’s the clarity you’re looking for, in your own mind, as the expert.
The clarity they’re looking for is not about the solution, it’s about knowing you are the advisor they can trust.
Rather than trying to woo potential clients by providing free value and doing essentially free consulting for non-paying clients, consider:
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Positioning yourself as being different from other advisors – stop following industry established norms taught by the “elders” – who only know one way of doing what used to work for them, before the industry got commoditized
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Go deeper on your prospect’s issues and emphasize the impact of not addressing them sooner, rather than later
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Stop providing free advice – your hard-earned knowledges and expertise should be integrated into your paid services they receive as a client, which they should commit to first
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Provide your prospect a clear understanding of how you work (your process, not your solutions) and of what to expect from you if they were your client – this is called a sales “road map”
The above is very similar to how doctors operate their business.
If you re-engineer your sale process around these four concepts, based on the central principle of building trust and clarity (not value, artificial rapport, a quasi-business relationship that doesn’t exist because there hasn’t actually been any business), you will find your life simplified and the quantity of new clients (and their quality) greatly improved.
Why?
Because your prospects will no longer be able to compare you to other advisors, who all use the same basic sales process, which doesn’t provide the clarity they’re ultimately looking for.
Instead, they’ll see you as unique, a category of one, a trusted authority.
Related: The More Meetings You Have, the Less Clients You’ll Get
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.