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The core reason that many good-hearted advisers struggle to get new clients in today's business environment, is not because their prospects are unqualified or that they have too much competition.
It's because their sales process is outdated, disjointed, and hinges on the idea of the discovery meeting.
The typical process goes like this...
Initial Meeting: Spend time chatting with your prospect, getting to know each other, and talking about their concerns and future goals.
Discovery Meeting: Spend time gathering facts about your prospect to discover how you could help them, and finish by asking for their financial documents.
Sales Meeting: Spend time walking them through your financial plan (your solution) that you created from their financials, free of charge, and hope that it impresses them enough to hire you.
That’s a lot of time spent upfront.
Proving your competence and expertise might seem like a sensible way to sell on the surface, especially in a knowledge-based business like advisory.
But the problem is that instead of building trust and convincing your prospect to hire you, it encourages them to remain indecisive.
Sharing your solutions gives them something they need to “think about it”, then they compare your solution to others and use it to shop someplace else.
Here are the main reasons why the discovery meeting is a defunct sales concept:
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Your prospect doesn’t want to know how you’ll solve their problem, they want to know if you're the one they can trust to solve it
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Solutions have been commoditized to the point that they’re no longer unique or differentiable.
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Sharing your solution positions you as a “solution provider”, which invites a comparison to the many other advisors in your market -- you get price-shopped like a commodity, rather than trusted as an authority.
It’s time to get clear on what the advisory business is based on.
You solve people’s financial problems that they can’t solve for themselves.
That's it.
So, the initial meeting is not really a time to discover if they have a problem, and then prove to them that you can solve it.
It’s a time to clarify what their problem is and determine whether they want to solve it or not.
In other words, you don’t need a discovery meeting -- you need a problem-clarification meeting.
The traditional advisory discovery model also puts you on the wrong footing.
You feel obligated to share your solution pre-sale, in the hopes of impressing your prospect and proving yourself worthy.
But instead of confronting the truth of their financial situation, they’re let off the hook and given the power to assess and reject you.
That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.
You’re the financial doctor, they’re the patient.
They need you.
But the discovery meeting model has flipped this truth upside down, and dethroned you from your authority position.
It’s time to disband the discovery meeting altogether and collapse your process into one, trust-based conversation, where you get your prospect’s commitment to solve their problem at the end.
Here's how...
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Go down the iceberg
Help them see the totality of financial situation. -
Be problem-centric not solution-driven
Focus on clarifying and simplifying their problem. -
Operate a doctor’s clinic not a drug store
Don’t dispense advice or offer solutions pre-sale, position yourself as a trusted authority by maintaining the problem-centric bedside manner of a doctor.
It might seem difficult to suddenly abandon a sales process that you’re accustomed to, especially if it’s the only one you’ve known.
But this is what needs to happen if you want to go from doing free consulting and losing sales, to onboarding clients in one meeting only.
If you’re open to learning more about this new approach to selling, where a discovery process isn’t necessary, then order your complimentary books and consultation below.
Related: Rapport Isn’t Selling: Stop Faking Relationships
Get Ari’s 6 best-selling books for FREE 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 books "Are You Chasing Ghosts", "Trusted Authority" and "Trust In A Split Second" have become instant best-sellers among financial advisors worldwide, get your free books here.