Six Key Steps to Build Prospecting Momentum in 2015

Build new client focus into your routine

In his classic book “The habits of highly successful people,” the late Steven Covey talked about the trap of allowing the urgent to push out the important. Given immediate demands from existing clients, it’s all too easy to allow attention to shift away from developing new clients. But remember – even if your clients are happy and you bring up referrals in every meeting, for most advisors that won’t result in enough new clients to get dramatic growth in your business.  That’s not to say that you shouldn’t talk about referrals but that those conversations won’t typically be sufficient.

Carve out time in your calendar to focus on new clients. If you’re serious about attracting new clients, block half an hour a day each morning and schedule 90-minute time blocks on two afternoons each week.  (Research shows that 90 minutes is the optimum length of time to work on something before productivity fades.) 

And don’t forget to add a section on prospecting status to your Monday-morning team meetings – some time ago I wrote about one team meeting that spent three minutes reviewing the top 20 prospects under development, with a view to identifying articles or newsworthy events that would create an opportunity to get in touch with someone on that list. 

Taken together, you end up with six hours a week that is focused on attracting new clients. If you aren’t prepared to spend six hours a week on this, then you aren’t really serious about bringing new clients on board. As an aside, it may seem odd to set aside the time to focus on client development before deciding how to spend that time, but my experience is that for most advisors the big barrier isn’t the lack of desire or absence of knowledge on how to attract clients; it’s the discipline to build regular prospecting time into your routine.

Decide on your time frame

If an advisor wants to know what she should be doing to best position herself to attract new clients three years from now, my answer is very different than if asked how to attract new clients in the next 12 months. For advisors with patience and a mid-term timeframe, there is incontrovertible evidence that the best route is to focus on becoming one of the go-to advisors within a defined client community.

This is not new advice. Any advisor who’s been around for a while has heard talks and read articles on becoming a niche specialist. The sad fact is that most advisors lack the discipline to stick to a course of action that doesn’t provide short-term rewards – which is what creates the opportunity for those advisors who have the mental toughness and patience to persist without seeing an immediate payoff.

Shifting your focus to a niche doesn’t mean that you have to be a micro specialist in orthodontists born in the 1960s – advisors have built successful practices on broad niches such as medical professionals and retirees. And it doesn’t mean that you have to abandon your existing clients – most specialist advisors have transitioned gradually over a period of time.

One option is to split your efforts: Employ the 30-minute daily prospecting time blocks for activity focused on generating clients in the near term and use the two 90-minute afternoon time blocks each week for activity to position yourself for a mid-term payoff. These articles on The Surprising Number One Driver of New Clients,  How Specialist Advisors Earn Twice as Much and Becoming the Safe Choice for Your Target Clients outline how reputation and specialization drive long-term success and map out a course of action on how to proceed if you want to pursue this route.

Focus on your pipeline of prospective clients

In 2013, my article titled Why Landing Clients Is Like Dating and Seven Other Rules for Prospecting outlined some realities for anyone looking to attract clients today. Key among those was the need to invest the time and effort to build a pipeline of prospective clients with whom you regularly communicate.

Thirty years ago, advisors would meet with a prospect who’d never worked with a financial advisor and walked away with a clear sense of how successful they’d been. Those meetings with prospects were events – the answer wasn’t always yes, of course, but at least the feedback tended to be fairly immediate. Today, attracting new clients has increasingly become a process that unfolds over weeks, months and sometimes years, as I described in Accidentally Landing a $3 Million Client

That means that one of the key determinants of the number of new clients you’ll land in 2015 is the number of prospects that you’re communicating with already. One of the keys to building a pipeline of qualified prospects is having a communication catalyst, something of clear, concrete value that you provide to existing clients and that you can offer in conversations with people you know who with whom you’d like to begin communicating. For some advisors this is a regular newsletter or video that they write themselves or get from their firm. In other instances, it’s articles or videos from fund companies. And in still other cases, it’s a monthly article from a credible third-party source such as the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes or Bloomberg Business Week.

Whichever approach works for you, if you aren’t already sending clients regular communication that you can use as a communication catalyst when getting prospects to agree to receive your emails, now is the time to start. Even prospects who have been referred to you will often take time to decide – and regular communication from you can tip the balance in your favor. There’s no better use of that 30 minutes a day that you have set aside to focus on new clients than developing a robust pipeline of prospective clients. For more on this you can read Three Ways to Turn Casual Contacts into Clients or How to Follow Up Without Being a Pest 

Stand out when you talk to prospects

Some advisors believe that when they land a meeting with a prospect, the war has been won. Given the increasing number of clients who solicit multiple referrals and interview multiple advisors, that meeting is only the first step to success.

The question becomes how to differentiate yourself and maximize your odds of success when talking to prospects. In 2013, I wrote about how advisors need to Get Past “Blah Blah Blah” When Talking to Prospects.  And last year How to Connect with a $3 Million Prospect  and The Four Questions Every Prospect Wants Answered  outlined some new thinking on how to engage prospective clients in meetings, spending three to five minutes getting through the preliminaries about your background to shift the focus on the client’s situations.

Whether you adapt some of the ideas in these articles or develop your own approach, it’s never been more important to tell a succinct, compelling story. You can do everything else right but won’t get the full payoff if you fail in this final step.

Make prospecting a habit

The final key to prospecting success is to make it an automatic, instinctive part of your daily routine. Research shows that one of the best ways to build a prospecting habit is to start and end each day with simple questions. At the beginning of each day, write down the answer to the question “What am I going to do today to attract new clients?”And before leaving each day write down the answer to the question “What did I do today to attract new clients – and what did I learn from the experience.”

You can find more on creating new habits in Turning Resolutions into Reality.

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 commentaries, go to www.danrichards.com or here for his videos.

Read more articles by Dan Richards