Target Marketing to Affluent Clients
By Duncan MacPherson
With all that has transpired in the financial services industry over the last year, it is essential to take a close look at your target marketing strategy if you are striving to stand out from the pack and take your business to the next level.
With so many affluent investors disillusioned with their current financial advisor, there has never been a better time to reach out and make contact with prospective clients.
We have a process that has been proven to not only be effective at consistently attracting good prospective clients but it is also philosophically consistent with our ‘stewardship over salesmanship’ model. In other words, this process will reflect very favorably on you as a professional financial advisor.
Allow me to begin by taking one step back. You’ve heard the expression that it is more important to reach people who count than it is to count the number of people you are reaching. It is essential that you get focused and establish what are called your MVP’s before you get started.
MVP stands for your most valuable prospects. There are all kinds of prospects out there. The key is to zero in on and consistently attract those who are the most valuable and who meet your AAA ideal client profile based on their assets, attitude and advocacy.
I mention that because as productivity consultants to high-caliber financial advisors, we often see advisors who deploy a target marketing campaign but haven’t done a thorough job maximizing their existing client relationships as well promotional partners. As a result they start trying to convince new people while the leave the people who are already convinced to some degree twisting in the wind. Clearly the friends and family members of your existing clients are your best MVPs. The key is that your clients will have far more persuasive impact on their friends than you ever will. So be certain to use our referral process to convert your clients to flag waving advocates. The clients of your strategic influencers are a close second so you’ll want to use our process to uncover those opportunities too.
That said, if you have done a good job maximizing your existing client relationships and you have professionally engaged strategic influencers such as accountants and lawyers, and you still find yourself with some time to deploy a pure prospecting campaign, well then let’s get started!
The first step is to understand the difference between narrowcasting and broadcasting. Broadcasting consists of classic marketing concepts such as direct mail, cold calling, newspapers ads, tradeshows, etc. We liken to this kind of marketing as ‘spray and pray’ and it is often about as effective as cutting down a tree with a hammer. There is an old saying in marketing that half of all advertising is wasted, we just don’t know which half. Broadcasting is expensive, time consuming, laborious and worst of all it sets you up for the most brutal emotion in marketing – its called anticipointment. You pour so much into a campaign and it turns out to be incredibly anticlimactic.
Narrowcasting on the other hand is far more effective. You simply pin point a specific geographic, demographic or socioeconomic sector in your marketplace and you methodically and relentlessly turn it upside down. Broadcasting is a mile wide and an inch deep. Narrowcasting enables you to go deep and literally turn a target market into an impenetrable proprietary asset that your competitors will never crack.
So how do you identify a target market to narrowcast? The first place to start is to look at your favorite clients. What do they do for a living? I know of a financial advisor who had a great client who was an audiologist. We suggested that he contact the client and ask him out to lunch. At the meeting the advisor simply said, “Look I really enjoy our relationship and frankly I’m fascinated with what you do. I want to become a specialist in your field rather than a generalist trying to be all things to all people. Tell me, what do I need to know, what do I need to read and where do I need to go to be a specialist to people just like you?”
The lunch meeting lasted a couple of hours. The client did a majority of the talking first by applauding the advisor for his initiative and then went on to counsel him on what it would take to be a specialist to audiologists. The rest as they say is history. A few years later and after a lot of effort and homework this advisor pretty much owns that space.
The first thing he did was identify an inside champion ~ someone with whom he has a relationship who would mentor him and light the path. He then, with the help of the inside champion, began the process of developing an insider’s reputation. This simply means that he could connect and relate with his target audience in a way that made him compelling and unique.
And there are no limits. I’ve seen an advisor who owned a BMW motorcycle accidentally uncover that one of his best clients also owned a BMW motorbike. After making the connection that owners of BMW motorcycles are usually somewhat affluent, he approached the local dealer to see if he would sponsor and help promote a fundraising ride for the local children’s hospital. That was just the beginning to what has become an incredible target marketing effort.
I’ve seen seasoned advisors establish target markets with orthodontists and other professional sectors within the health and wellness community all stemming from one existing relationship. I’ve seen newer advisors establish target markets with franchise owners and other entrepreneurs. You can pretty much name it. From airline pilots to zoologists, advisors have built target markets based on a diverse array of affinity groups. Still to this day, one of my favorite examples is an advisor whose assistant’s father, who happened to be a dairy farmer, became a client and quickly developed an incredible relationship with the advisor. That one relationship along with some sustained effort led to dozens of new clients. And talk about an insider’s reputation, this advisor went to county fairs, wrote financial planning articles in trade publications and today is the go-to person for dairy farmers in his area. He lived by the mantra that you have to pull in the direction that people are already pushing you. That is where momentum develops.
Clearly, identifying an inside champion is a lot easier than it is to develop that insiders reputation. This is what separates the best from the rest in target marketing. And based on our many years of consulting advisors in this area, I’ve created an acronym to frame a proven process and game plan to help you get started. The acronym is DRIP.
The D stands for Discipline. As easy as this is, ultimately it’s easier not to do. A lot of advisors will get excited about this approach and then realize that it looks a lot like work.
This really applies to two aspects of the process. First, you have to delay gratification and dig deep to gather the knowledge capital necessary to be attractive to prospective clients in your target market. You have to be excited and passionate about the target market. As the saying goes, in order to be convincing, you have to be convinced. Fortunately in this era we have search engines that can help you track down pretty much any information you need.
When you approach your inside champion to ask for his or her guidance, you are essentially using a variation of permission marketing which creates a deeper level of chemistry, respect and ultimately reciprocity. Most people you approach will gladly share more information than you could ever need. I remember in one scenario, the advisors inside champion offered to help the advisor organize a variation of a client advisory council where the client filled the room with entrepreneurial friends of his to help the advisor get inside the heads of a typical self made successful entrepreneur.
The second factor related to discipline is that as you start reaching out to other prospective clients in the sector, you have to resign yourself to patience. As with any process where you are trying to build a relationship first and then do business second, it takes a little time. But keep your ultimate objective in mind. Every person you contact will already have a financial advisor. Your goal is to position yourself as number 2 and over time enable the prospective client to contrast your approach to that of his or her existing advisor based on how you conduct yourself. There is a stage of readiness where the prospective client has to come to his or her own conclusions that switching to you makes absolute sense.
The R in DRIP stands for Respect.
In this entire process you have to lean respectfully by not looking needy and not potentially causing any collateral damage on your existing relationship let alone on the sector itself. For this reason, I ask you to resist cold calling in the classic sense where you simply have a dialing for dollars mindset. Yes, you want to smile and dial, but you aren’t connecting to have them buy something, you want them to buy into your story. Facts tell, stories sell. If you call up with a data dumping sales pitch and elevator speech, you are chasing the person. And what you chase often eludes you. When you make contact with a compelling hook and promise statement that explains why you are working with this specific sector and you offer up information and a sounding board session rather than an offer to buy something, you are attracting the prospective client. Everything you say is either a “me too” or a “so what.” Be mindful of that. When you meet with people for the first time, use an agenda and have no hidden agenda. Don’t use a sales process, use a professional fit process.
The I in DRIP stands for Inform. You have to be informative yet with some personality and vibrancy. As Warren Buffet said, the marketplace will pay you more to entertain it that it will to educate it. Rehearse, refine and reflect on all of your scripting. Is it compelling? To paraphrase David Ogilvie, you can’t bore someone into taking action. Your events and lunch & learns have to be unique and have a hook that resonates with the target audience. You have to build chemistry with prospective clients. Look at the word inform – the last four letters speak to FORM – your conversations have to be balanced. Ask questions about their Family, Occupation and Recreational interests, not just about their Money. As an example, you know when you are talking to a prospective client and you ask him what his kids are into and he tells you that his 10 year old is really into hockey. And then you mention that your 10 year old is also a hockey nut and next thing you know you are talking about hockey for 20 minutes and then you realize that you have made a deeper connection? You aren’t just trying to be interesting, be interested. Be Socratic. Ask questions. Every answer gives you permission to go deeper.
And finally, the P in DRIP stands for Persist. You have to be persistent. It takes time. It’s not unusual to need 7 drips on a prospective client before he or she will agree to meet with you. As the saying goes, water dripping on a stone will eventually leave a mark. But with every drip you are building contrast with the prospective client’s current advisor and distancing yourself from anyone else who is dabbling trying to get them as a client too. And have a process to invest every drip into the rest of the relationship. A relationship journal within your CRM will help you keep track and convert all the knowledge you glean from every encounter into an invaluable intellectual property. I don’t want to oversimplify this approach; this is just an overview and framework. But if you follow it you will realize that Margaret Thatcher was right when see said, “It’s good be a starter but you have to be a sticker too. It’s easy enough to start a job, but it’s harder to see it through.”
Duncan MacPherson is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Pareto Systems and Pareto Platform. You can find his blog on LinkedIn under his name – Duncan MacPherson. You can also follow Duncan on Twitter at Duncan8020. For additional resources, please visit www.breakthroughbusinessdevelopment.com.