Blog

All successful and experienced attorneys and accountants have referred clients to financial advisors at one time or another. They have done so because they realize that at some point, they have had clients who have needed financial advisory recommendations.

Do prospects view you as a product pusher or a problem solver? It’s a tough question you may not want to know the answer to.

Are you on a production plateau and you need a little nudge to get going? Most advisors are because they’ve never learned how to create the perfect campaign to grow their business; as a result, they leave their success up to chance.

Benjamin Franklin said it best when he said, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

I believe that is true. The best way to plan is to design a campaign, an organized course of action to achieve your goal, and take the right steps to do so.

Do you love to prospect? Do you get into the office and can’t wait to make that first call? If you are like most advisors and agents, you don’t! You probably look for anything else to do rather than prospecting. Does this sound like you?

Most advisors and agents don’t have a well-thought-out process for prospecting. The reason is they’ve never learned a step-wise approach to understanding what it takes to love prospecting. And how to do it successfully so that they create unlimited success!

Do you ever feel like your pipeline is stuck? You know why prospects need to take the next step, but for some reason, they don’t seem to have any urgency to want to meet, send you their statements, or even make a decision on the recommendations that you’ve worked so hard on to help them reach their financial goals.

Kevin Brady, a former U.S. Representative said, “Urgency creates action.”
Therein lies the problem; most advisors/agents don’t have a well-thought-out process for creating urgency in their sales pipelines and for maintaining the momentum!

Let’s take a look at just a few examples of creating urgency, in each stage of the pipeline and how one advisor did just that.  

Have you noticed that you get more emails now than you ever did before?  After constantly being interrupted by emails you most likely have become conditioned to feeling obligated to view each email the minute it arrives.

David Allen, the author of the book Getting Things Done writes, “There are no interruptions, only mismanaged inputs.”

In many respects, this is very true­, in that the emails that you receive all day are merely as important as you perceive them to be and the way that you react to them can either be a positive or a negative depending on what type of time management boundaries you establish.

Have you ever run into the same business challenge repeatedly and you just couldn’t get past it? If so, you are most likely on a production plateau and in need of a tool or technique to create a transformational moment. In other words, you need a Game Changer! 
 
Mickey Mantle, who had an impressive 536 home runs during his baseball career, said, “It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life."

Let’s take a look at a few Game Changers that can have a lasting impact on your business.

How do you convey your message to a client without seeming “needy” in the process? By understanding how clients think!

Clients give referrals for two possible reasons. First, they want to help you grow your business. Second, they want to help friends and loved ones. Of these two reasons which one do you believe is a strong reason to give you a referral? If you said to help friends and loved ones, then you are right!

If you are like most advisors and agents you know that there are only three ways that your production can go: rise to a new production peak, backslide to a production valley, or cruise control onto a production plateau. Two out of three of those are not good states to be in your business and most people that reach a production peak don’t remain there for very long.

So, where do you currently find yourself? Most of us need a strategy (or several) to move from where we are to where we want to be.

If you are like most advisors, you have aspirations and dreams to build your business. You may have thoughts of creating business plans to assist you in reaching your goals. However, ask yourself this question: “How many times have I created a business plan only to file it away or lose my motivation to follow it through?”

Oftentimes, advisors start out their business plans with the best of intentions, only to get sidetracked by the day-to-day operations which leave those plans unattended and ultimately unfulfilled. If this has happened to you, rest assured that you are not alone. So what is the solution?

No matter what time of the year, no matter what stage of your planning, a business plan is not enough, you need a business blueprint!