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The Wedge for Financial Advisors
Randy Schwantz
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eBook - ePub
The Wedge for Financial Advisors
Randy Schwantz
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About This Book
Want to achieve your personal goals of doubling or tripling your income? Want to have more time to invest in your family and personal relationships? Like its popular predecessor The Wedge, The Wedge for Financial Advisors offers a powerful, proven technique to distinguish you from the incumbent advisor and help you increase your sales and win new business. It begins with a single truth most clients do not want to be sold, they want to buy.
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Chapter 1
Stop Selling and
Start Winning
Start Winning
âWhat you do that your competition doesnât is where your prospect is underserved. Knowing that is the key to Winning and Growing Up Market!â
This book is the result of literally thousands of hours I have spent working with professionals like you who were motivated, intelligent, productiveâŠand frustrated. Frustrated because they were not achieving the high goals they had set for themselves.
What I have learned in the past fifteen years has helped many of them achieve their personal goals of doubling or tripling their income, of having more time to invest in their families and personal relationships, and of achieving the professional success that eluded them for so long.
They couldnât understand why they werenât successful more often, why some opportunities that seemed all but certain one day frequently disappeared the next. What were they doing wrong?
Nothing. And everything.
Their mistake, the most common mistake made by businesspeople in America today, is their belief in âselling.â Selling is important, but it is not the goal. Winning by helping your clients win is the goal, but you canât help them win unless theyâre your clients! Until you stop selling and start winning, you will never have the financial or personal success you desire.
âBut Randy,â a client asked me once, âHow can I stop selling? Iâm in salesâŠ. Iâm a salesperson for cryinâ out loud! What am I supposed to do?â
Iâm not a motivational speaker or New Age guru. Iâm not selling chicken soup for the salesman or the seven habits of the happy closer. I donât believe in magic formulas or psychic energy.
Iâm a businessman and a sales coach. I believe in techniques, strategies, and sales tactics that have been proven to work because theyâve been tested under fire, in the conference rooms and business suites and at the kitchen tables of America. No stunts, no tricks, no gimmicksâjust results.
Because I have spent so many years looking at the sales industry from a practical, bottom-line viewpoint, Iâve learned, in a very practical way, that the obstacle most professionals must overcome to succeed is their dependency on âselling.â
What is Selling?
The simplest definition of selling I can give you is this: Every time you sit down with a prospect without a specific, well-developed, and effective strategy for winning, you are just selling. Period.
âIf people understood how good you really are, who wouldnât want it?!â
Selling is killing you out in the marketplace. It is wasting your time and your prospects. Anyone who says selling is hard is wrong. Selling is easy; winning is hard. Selling means making a good presentation. Winning means walking out with a rollover or transfer of a clientâs portfolio.
Selling is about looking good, prospecting, networking, âcocktailing,â color-copying, binding, packaging, and e-mailing. Winning is about putting money in the bank for you and your family!
In other words, selling is believing in the process, while winning is focusing on the results and crafting a specific, workable, well-rehearsed method to achieve those results.
When you stop selling and start winning, you and your family, but equally important, your new clients, win!
Winning is when your client is significantly better off and so are you! (CBO & SRU)
What is Your Focus?
The difference between selling and winning is focus. When youâre selling, youâre focused on yourself. You know everything there is to know about your product, your service, your company. But you know almost nothing about the prospect you are calling on.
Because youâre so focused on yourself, you can probably think of a hundred reasons why everyone ought to hire you and fire your competition, but you probably canât come up with one specific reason why it would benefit the prospect sitting right in front of you. Instead of a strategy to win by connecting with the prospect, your hopeââhopeâ is what you have left after you abandon hard work and planningâis that your products and services will somehow appeal to the prospect and that he or she will make the connection for you.
As a result, your success depends completely on others. Even if you have the best proposal, the best presentation, and the best personality, you are no closer to winning than the most amateur of your competitors. Youâre just counting on luck to get positive results for you.
What is Your Intent?
Another key difference is intent. The intent of the âsellerâ is merely to stay in the game, to have a shot at proposing or making an offer. Sellers are focused on opportunities to pitch and present.
The winner is looking for opportunities to win. He enters every prospect meeting with the intent to win. Winners arenât playing numbers games, they arenât throwing their ideas and proposals against a wall and hoping some will stick. They want every shot to count.
An example of this difference in intent would be two skiers at the top of a mountain. One skier is focused on just making it down the hill and nothing more. He just wants to make it back to the lodge in one piece so he can come out another day and do it again. Whether he makes good time or not doesnât matter. He just wants to make it down one more time.
The other skier is focused on the course. Heâs looking at the turns, the curves, the trees, and the obstacles. Heâs not thinking about himself, heâs focused on the course and how it needs to be skied. He begins the course with a plan specific to this course that will let him make the best possible time.
Which skier is going to finish first? Which skier is going to be the most successful? The one whose focus is not on himself and whose intent is to master the problem at hand.
How To Tell If Youâre âSellingâ
As a sales coach, Iâve worked with thousands of professionals, and Iâve noticed that many of them consider it a âwinâ just to get the chance to meet with a new prospect and propose a new opportunity. They interview, run plans, they crunch numbers, package it up, run it through the color printer, put it in a glossy binder and hand it to their prospect, and then take a victory lap.
This is the epitome of traditional selling: put a proposal in front of the prospect and either the prospect will hear something he likes, or he wonât. The salespersonâs job is simply to get in front of as many prospects as possible, propose, and try to close and wait for lightning to strike.
Whatâs Wrong With âSelling?â
Selling wastes a lot of time on unqualified prospects. When youâre selling, youâre going through the motions: making calls, looking for a chance to prepare a proposal, playing the percentages. This makes advisors, in essence, peddlers. A peddler is a guy that knows his product pretty well and goes out telling everyone they should use it. Itâs a numbers game. âIf I call on enough people, Iâll make a sale.â Itâs a low percentage game however; too much time is wasted in the process of preparing proposals for non-buyers. Time that could have been used to sharpen skills, investigate further the real needs of true prospects, and execute strategies to break incumbent relationships as your prospect wins and so do you!
Selling allows the prospect to âuseâ you. When you go into a meeting with a prospect who has no intention of buying, you arenât just wasting your time, youâre wasting his or her time, too. How does the prospect benefit from this meeting? By using you as an educational resource. You spend an hour telling him about potential gaps in his financial plan; then, after youâre gone, he calls the incumbent advisor to talk over those ideas and see if they should make a change to his current investment strategy.
The incumbent is the advisor who is currently providing your prospect investment products and services.
Selling keeps the focus on you and your efforts, not on the real problem. To sellers, sales is like Olympic ice skating, a solo sport in which the performer wins or loses based solely on his or her performance. If you prepare yourself well, have the right attitude, hit all the marks, and dazzle the crowd, you will score enough points to skate away with a gold medal contract and a bouquet of lucrative clients.
But sales isnât a solo sport. Sales is a contact sport. Itâs not figure skatingâitâs ice hockey. Sales is a sport in which, more often than not, someone elseâthe incumbentâis on the ice, controlling the puck.
And until you take the puck out of the incumbentâs control and put it back in play, there is no opportunity to succeed. You can have a presentation direct from Cecil B. de Mille, along with the positive attitude of Norman Vincent Peale, but as long as the incumbent is in control, the person you are meeting with is not a real prospect. Heâs just someone you are âsellingâ to.
The Two Problems Selling Canât Solve
The reason selling is so inefficient is that it is based on the faulty premise that there are two people in every prospect meeting (you and the prospect) and that the most important person in the process is you, the advisor. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are, in fact, three people in every prospect meetingâyou, the prospect, and the incumbent advisorâand you are the least important person in the group. The other two people will determine whether or not you win, and before you do, you must solve two key problems.
Problem Number 1: A Lack of Trust
The number one problem facing people in sales is building trust, enabling prospects to easily tell the truth. Overcome this problem, and you will become the most successful advisor in America.
Why do prospects hold back? Because they have no desire to be sold. Their job is to check out their options, so they want to meet with you and get educated without actually buying from you. However, most people find hurting the feelings of others by rejecting their offer to be an unpleasant experience, so they tell you âlittle white liesâ instead.
How do they do that? By giving you part of what you wantâthe opportunity to compete and for them to review your offer. In your meetings they nod politely as you spew out the familiar ...