Three tips on successful prospecting
By Dan Richards
Recently, I talked to three advisors who have had significant success bringing in new clients this year.
They have different approaches, book sizes, length of time in the business - and are located in three different cities.
Despite this, some consistent themes emerged. Here are three things that came out of our conversations.
You don’t win clients - other advisors lose them
The first advisor talked about an old adage in politics - Governing parties don’t get defeated, they beat themselves.
In essence, given the choice most people would rather stay with an incumbent government.
They only change when they lose confidence in the party in power - it’s at that point that they look seriously at opposition alternatives.
In this advisor’s view, the same applies to winning new clients. They’ll move on their schedule, not yours - generally when they’ve become disillusioned with their existing advisor.
This advisor believes two things have led to his success in attracting new clients:
- He works to position himself with as many prospects as possible as the logical successor should they become disaffected with their existing advisor.
- He tries to accelerate this process of disaffection by sharing the communication going to his existing clients.
The harder you try, the less successful you’ll be
The second advisor believes a key to his success is his low key approach - he tells prospects that he’d be happy to sit down with them any time that they feel comfortable doing so.
In this advisor’s view, the least amount of pressure gets clients guards up. And the harder you try, the more your approach smacks of desperation and scares prospects off.
Like the first advisor, he has focused on building his pipeline of prospects to whom he sends information going to his clients. He also touches base with every prospect once a year (more often if the prospect seems close to making a change) with a view to seeing if they’d like to sit down to talk about their situation.
Reduce the risk of meeting
The third advisor has found that once he gets in front of prospective clients for the first time, their comfort level in sitting down further goes up dramatically.
His branch runs quarterly lunches with outside speakers - typically one of their economists or research analysts or a portfolio manager on the firm’s managed money program.
He always buys a table to these lunches - while the bulk of the people he invites are clients, he also aims to get one or two prospects out. He’s found that prospects are more comfortable being one of six or seven at a table than meeting with him one on one - and once someone has come out to that lunch, his success rate at booking a follow up meeting goes up dramatically.
If you’re in the Toronto area and like this idea, below is a link to information on a luncheon presentation by Mark Carney on December 16.
Tables of 10 are $700 - consider splitting a table with a colleague and inviting three key clients and one prospective client you’ve been talking to.
http://www.canadianclub.org/do/event?event_id=3102
If you’d like more ideas on what’s working today to attract clients, here’s a link to a recent conference call:
Conference call: Making 2010 your best prospecting year ever - with Duncan Macpherson:
To read the original article, go to www.getkeepclients.com.