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The discovery meeting as part of your sales process has always been considered unchallengeable.
Why?
Because for years, even decades, advisors have been taught to always include these components inside the initial meeting with their prospect:
Relationship building (or rapport)
Fact finding
Showing value
Illustrating potential solutions
Asking the prospect to bring their financial documents to a second meeting to review
The rationale behind the last step is to develop a financial plan from those documents and for the prospect to review the plan in the hope they’ll engage you to continue handling their portfolio.
There are two issues with this:
The process can break down when your prospect goes away to retrieve their documents and never gives them to you, forcing you to pursue them
Assuming they bring their documents, you’re then doing all the upfront planning work for free, with no guarantee you’ll be paid
I want to challenge this idea of free planning and the entire process itself.
The truth is that if you simplify your sales process to one single meeting focused only on building deep trust (not rapport building), your prospect will happily pay you for your planning process.
You’re probably thinking that building trust is the whole point of the discovery meeting.
But my idea of trust is very different from what most people think of when they hear that word.
The closest example that illustrates this best is how a doctor approaches their intake process.
Doctors don’t dispense medicine to their patients, they provide them with a treatment plan or the prescription for the medicine, and they get paid for that --it’s not free.
In fact, the pharmacy won’t even sell the medicine without a doctor’s prescription.
In the medical industry, the prescription and the medicine are viewed as one and the same in the overall paid treatment process.
The financial plan you prescribe for your prospect (their treatment plan) and the services required to implement that plan for them as your client (their medicine) should also be viewed and presented as one and the same.
Many advisors do all of that treatment planning work up front for free, hoping it will convince their prospect to become their clients to “get the medicine,” almost like it’s a separate event.
This is where the discovery meeting sales process falls over.
A doctor’s process works because of its simplicity and clarity.
To solve your problem, you pay for the treatment plan first and then the medicine.
There is zero confusion about that, and so trust is built in from the beginning.
The steps involved with the typical advisor’s process create complexity and work for the prospect, so the path to solving their problem becomes complicated and laborious, which makes them question its value.
If you eliminate these unnecessary steps in the discovery meeting and focus on building trust only, you can get paid from the outset for your process (not your solution) because it will have made the value of engaging you clear from the beginning.
I call this approach, the “One Call Sale.”
It’s about a mindset shift that needs to happen around simplifying your sales process, so that you can onboard somebody into a committed monetary relationship from the first meeting.
I know that sounds like a radical and even scary idea, but it’s only because most advisors are conditioned to using the old selling norms engrained in their industry.
But once you realise how these norms are getting in your own way and you can refocus your process to deliver to your prospects what they really need (which is clarity around solving their problem), then engaging you from the first meeting will feel natural and logical to them.
If you can simplify the complexity in your sales process by eliminating the normal steps (discovery meeting, document retrieval, financial plan, review meeting, for free), and distil it down to one single meeting that lays out your process (not your solution) in simple terms, then you will build trust and onboard new clients much sooner than you ever thought possible.
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