March 3, 2009
“At this point, what’s less important than what happened last year is what we’re doing today. I wonder if I could take a few minutes to walk you through our current outlook, the kind of investments we currently favor and the process we have in place to build portfolios given the prospects for the period ahead?”
By taking this stance, you are reinforcing your credibility and candor, while focusing prospects on the future rather than the past. What’s critical here is that you walk the fine line between how much time you spend talking about yesterday versus today and tomorrow - you don’t want to be dismissive of what happened last year, but nor do you want to fixate on it.
Stage Three - Moving forward
If you’ve spent sufficient time in the first two stages, the final stage in the process should flow naturally.
You might say something like:
“I’ve enjoyed the chance to chat today and hope you have also. What questions do you have that we haven’t touched on?”
Assuming that you’ve dealt with their concerns, you might continue on with something like:
“From our conversation, I believe we would work together effectively and that I can help you achieve your objectives going forward.
“If you agree, the next step would be to set a time to sit down and get into a more detailed discussion of your situation and your current portfolio. Is this something you’d be interested in proceeding with?”
At this point, the prospective client might agree - or you might hear that they want to think about this further or want to talk to other advisors. If that’s the answer you get, respond that you absolutely understand and would like to touch base in ten days or so - and in the meantime you would like to add them to the distribution list for information you are sending to your clients (assuming of course that you are regularly sending existing clients something you could extend to prospects).
Whether or not this dialogue leads to agreement on the part of the prospect to move forward in the near term, consider adapting this three-stage process to structure your conversations with prospects for maximum impact - and to answer prospects’ questions about how your clients fared last year.
* Dan Richards conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written and video commentaries and to reach him, go to www.strategicimperatives.ca.
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