Four Questions Prospects Need Answered In The First Meeting
There are four crucial questions that every financial advisor must answer if they want to grow their business. If you can answer these four questions, you will:
- increase your value as an advisor;
- clarify your message; and
- more effectively communicate with prospects.
This is the first step to creating your own sales system that consistently attracts new people to you. If you don't answer these questions, it's going to be a lot harder to grow your practice.
Question 1) WHO IS YOUR IDEAL CLIENT?
When advisors think about their business and how they help people, they tend to think about the services that they provide, but they rarely focus on defining who they serve.
The financial advisors who survive and thrive over the long-term don't define their business by their investment selection or products that they sell, their process or credentials or years of experience. The most successful advisors define their entire business, not by what they offer, but by who they serve. They know exactly who their ideal client is.
Question 2) WHAT VALUE DO YOU PROVIDE?
You undoubtedly provide a lot of great advice to your clients, but what do your clients value the most? What's the most important thing to them? Do they care about your investment selection and products and process and all of that? Well, I'm sure that they do, but there's actually only one thing that your clients really value above all the rest.
And, it’s transformation. People looking for financial advice are seeking a positive change. They want that end result. And how do I know it? Because people buy the destination and not the plane ride. What's the destination that your client is actually trying to get to? What is the ideal result that you can help them achieve? This is the real value that you give to clients and to prospects.
Question 3) HOW DO YOU CLEARLY COMMUNICATE YOUR VALUE?
If you're the greatest financial advisor in the world, but you don't know how to clearly communicate your value to your ideal prospects, then you won't be in business very long. Many good advisors have failed because they didn't know how to do this.
The best advisors are able to engage in conversation with a complete stranger, and in two minutes that stranger fully understands how this advisor helps people. That new contact is going to have enough curiosity and maybe excitement that they want to hear more from that advisor.
The goal of your business isn't to close sales or whatever other end result you've identified. It's really to just start the conversation. If you're able to naturally start conversations with people, then you should have no problem attracting people and starting to work with them, having those first meetings. At that point, if you can communicate your value, then you should have no trouble turning those people into clients.
Question 4) HOW WILL WE CONSISTENTLY ATTRACT AND AQUIRE NEW CLIENTS?
This is one of the most important questions that advisors need to answer. If we can successfully answer the other three questions, but then we can't figure this one out, growing our businesses going to be hard. And this is, unfortunately, the question that most advisors have the most difficulty answering. Look at some of the traditional ways advisors have attracted people to them using traditional sales methods––things like seminars, luncheons, asking for referrals, or even cold-calling and going to network events. I was never super comfortable doing those sorts of client attraction methods, and we figured out different ways to do it here at Streamline. Stay tuned to this blog for some of those ideas we’re utilizing here.
But now, I've got two action items for you:
- Go through those questions again and this time, write down your answers.
- Share this blog, or share the questions, with another advisor friend. Then compare your answers and start to talk about it. Watching a video is fine and good, but it's not until you think through these questions and actually start to take action that it's going to start to guide your conversations and have a positive impact on your business.
