National Underwriter Sales Essentials (Life & Health): Prospecting

William H. Byrnes

• Verlag: The National Underwriter Company
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781939829641
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Sales

The National Underwriter Sales Essentials Series combines all of the most practical, proven sales techniques advisors, agents, brokers, producers, sales managers or agency owners need to convert prospects into customers, win new business, and to grow sales. The Life & Health Sales Essentials focuses on the selling skills and techniques essential to achieving success—prospecting for new business and the demands of running an agency.

Chapter

1

Prospecting in the Twenty-First Century

The bad news about being a financial advisor in the twenty-first century is that it’s so much more complicated than it used to be. Think back to 1980. As few as thirty years ago, the profession of financial advisor, as opposed to that of seller of financial products, scarcely even existed.

The Internet has empowered individuals to conduct their own financial transactions quicker and more simply than anybody in 1980 imagined. Meanwhile, financial affairs have grown too complicated for most individuals to handle comfortably. Consider the effect of the defined contribution model. In 1980, employer-sponsored defined benefit plans and indemnity-model health insurance were commonplace. Since the 1970’s, the 401(k) begat the IRA which begat the Coverdell Education Savings Account which begat the Health Savings Account which begat the proposed partial privatization of Social Security, and so on, and now the notion of an “ownership society” in which people are required to look after every aspect of their own financial futures is in the ascendant.

That’s the good news about being a financial advisor in the twenty-first century. Twenty-five years ago scarcely anyone really needed a financial adviser; within a few years, if not already, virtually everyone will. The numbers will be bigger than ever, the opportunities will be greater than ever. That makes prospecting more indispensable than ever, part of your daily routine—but the right kind of prospecting, smart prospecting. Not all prospects are created equal: success as a financial adviser is not just a matter of volume, volume, volume. You must constantly strive to increase not only the number but the quality of your prospects.

That fits well with the changing face of the industry. In 1980 financial services workers were primarily vendors of financial products. In 2013, clients don’t need you to execute their stock trades. They need you to tell them how their investment portfolio can best fit with a galaxy of other assets to enable them to achieve life goals. They don’t need a salesman; they need a trusted advisor, someone who can diagnose and solve their problems. The old transactional model is so twentieth-century; the twenty-first century embraces a new model of client service. (Advisors are coming to understand this. In a recent survey by Thomson Media/LPL, the leading answer to the inquiry “The single most important personality trait for success in financial planning is:” was “A service mentality,” at 31.6 percent.) But stellar service requires a greater investment of time, which means fewer clients you can serve this way, which means they had better be of commensurate quality.

This article is the introduction to a series that will rethink prospecting from the ground up. What methods of prospecting best fit the twenty-first century idea that financial advisors are service professionals whose mission is to solve financial problems in their context as part of a person’s, indeed a family’s, entire life? And how do these methods result not only in better client service, but better clients?

Prospecting with Referrals: Start at the Top

Everyone needs a financial adviser: everyone is a potential client. But of course not everyone is the right client for you, an individual with particular knowledge and talents and tastes and requirements. How do you find those individuals who can be quality clients for you?

The method outlined in Chapter 2 has two steps:

1.    Describe your dream client. No client will measure up to your ideal, but you can stack the deck in your favor by seeking prospects that are more like the ideal than less. But only if you know what you want: if you’ve done the homework of formulating an explicit profile of your ideal client. This article will show you how.

2.    Seek referrals from your best current clients. Who are the clients for whom you’re providing the best service? Who are the most satisfying to work with? Which current clients come closest to your ideal? These are the clients who will be most willing to give you referrals and to work with you to ensure that those referrals also come as close as possible to your ideal.

Turning Prospects into Clients

The third chapter in this book explains a strong service-centered approach to turning those referrals into clients. Two points are central:

1.    One way in which the referring client should help is by introducing you to the referral, whether in person or otherwise. Though cold procedures have their place, this means that every step in the process described here will be warm.

2.    It’s essential that every referral be prequalified, to maximize the chances of success and minimize waste of time and resources—yours and the referral’s. This chapter will lay out the questions you need to ask.

Partnering with Professionals

The fourth chapter emphasizes that there’s more to this prospecting procedure than direct referrals to potential clients. Your referring clients should also be referring you to other professionals, such as CPAs and attorneys, with whom you can form strategic alliances. This will have two principal benefits:

1.    Both sides of the partnership will be able to offer their clients new services, increasing the partnership’s competitiveness and capacity to embody a service model—a win/win/win situation.

2.    You will be able to use the professional as a referral source, exactly as you do your best clients. The lessons of the first article are entirely applicable here.

That is, you can prospect with everybody you meet—literally. So the first thing to consider is all the different ways you can meet people. The second is to bear the essence of prospecting clearly in mind. You’ve conveying a message: “I am a financial adviser. I solve people’s financial problems.” The message doesn’t vary, but the way of conveying it does.

Being a financial services professional promises to be more challenging, but also more rewarding in more ways than one, than ever. We hope that the three articles that follow will help you rise to the challenges and savor the rewards.

Chapter

2

How to Clone Your Clients (Part 1)

Ask Your Best Clients for Referrals

As Chapter 1 observed, these days everyone is a potential client. But of course not everyone is the right client for you, with your particular knowledge and talents and tastes and requirements. How can you target your prospecting on the kind of clients you want?

The three chapters in this series are each devoted to different aspects of a technique for finding great clients. In a nutshell, the idea is to seek referrals from your best current clients, including referrals to other professionals, such as CPAs and attorneys, with whom you can form strategic alliances. The whole process breaks down naturally into three phases:

• Determining who your best clients are and approaching them effectively for referrals;

• Gaining introductions to those referrals and presenting your services effectively enough to gain their business;

• Seeking introductions from your best clients to other professionals, such as CPAs and attorneys, with whom you can form strategic alliances.

This chapter will explain the three steps that constitute the first phase of the process—obtaining referrals from your existing clients. As in everything, preparation is two-thirds of the job.

• A referral is worse than useless if the prospect wouldn’t be a good fit for you, or turns out after many time—and resource—consuming meetings to be unwilling or unable to commit. So before you start looking for referrals you have to have the clearest possible picture of what you want in a client. The first step is to construct a profile of your dream client, an idealized template that embodies everything you want in a client. Needless to say, no referral will ever match, or even approach, this ideal picture, but the closer they come, the more desirable they are for you and the more attractive you’ll be to them. Besides, knowing what you want empowers you to go after that and not waste time on prospects who offer less promising returns.

• So, later in the process you’ll evaluate referrals by seeing how they stack up against the dream client profile. But before that, the profile has another job. You’ll compare it to your current top clients (your “A” clients) and rank them. Those who come closest to your dream client are the ones you’ll approach first for referrals. As your best clients in every way, they’re the ones who will be most willing to give referrals, to choose referrals who also score high on your wish list, and to help you turn them into clients.

• Finally, the time has come to approach your selected A clients and ask for the referrals. Aggressive, self-centered tactics are bound to fail. The key is to frame your request in terms of client service. You’ve rendered valuable services to the A client, and you’re committed to offering similar services to others like him. You’ve come to the client because you want to expand the base of people whose needs match your skills. You’re asking him or her to be a facilitator, an ally in this endeavor.

Develop the Profile of Your Dream Client

What are the characteristics of your dream client? If you answered “profitability” without thinking, stop and think again. Of course revenue is important, but it’s not the decisive feature of your dream client.

At least it isn’t if you are truly working according to a service model—if your measure of job satisfaction is not the money you’ve made but the problems you’ve solved for others. Your ideal client isn’t the one with the highest revenue yield but the one whose problems you are best able to solve and most enjoy solving. Furthermore, a service relationship is necessarily a personal relationship: it requires trust and confidence, and on a different level, at least a compatibility in personal tastes, since your dream client must be someone you like to deal with.

Question 1: Who Do You Like to Work With?

Thus, start to develop the profile of your dream client by brainstorming a list of the qualities you like in a client. Begin with features of personal style that are relevant to your goal, problem solving. Is your ideal client risk-averse or a risk-taker? Hands-on or hands-off? Sophisticated or novice? And so on.

Next, move on to core values. Your ideal client, for example, will certainly be ethical, highly motivated for financial success, enthusiastic and optimistic, and concerned about the larger world. Next, consider subjective, extracurricular preferences. It wouldn’t hurt if a client shared some of your recreational or hobbying interests. And you may have preferences on such matters as: Older or younger? Male or female? And so on…

Keep asking questions in these three areas—problem-solving style, core values, and subjective preferences—until it feels right to stop. You’ve completed the first third of the task: outlining the qualities that make someone fun for you to work with.

Question 2: Who Can You Help Most?

The second stage of the process is your assessment of your skills and preferences. Your job is to solve problems, but you’re better at solving some kinds of problems than others. You enjoy some kinds of problem solving more than others. You may be a generalist, or have carved out a niche specialty. Ask yourself: What kind of services am I best positioned to provide? This exercise should teach you some truths about yourself that are well worth knowing independently of your dream client profile. Once you’ve made this comprehensive assessment of your strengths, use it to deepen the profile. Your dream client is one whose needs match your skills. (Of course,...