My previous article, The New Rules for Client Communication, described how one large team ramped up its contact level with clients and saw a big payoff in satisfaction, retention and growth in client assets as a result. While the increase in contact was aimed at deepening client relationships, it also led to a jump in prospects. The team has begun talking to these prospects and bringing them on board.
Chances are that you won’t be able to replicate everything that this team did, but their experience provides some important lessons for every advisor on what it takes to convert clients today.
Prospect funnel versus prospect pipeline
How to win multi-million dollar clients
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Historically, firms focused new recruits on building a prospect funnel and driving awareness among as many prospects as possible. Those prospects were then winnowed down through three stages. This four-step process was summarized using the acronym AIDA:
A – Awareness: Get the attention of potential customers
I – Interest: Engage customers and capture their interest
D –Desire: Convince customers that they need the solutions that the advisor is selling
A – Action: Lead customers towards taking action and making purchases
Numbers drove this prospect funnel; if enough prospects entered the funnel, gravity would take hold and some would inevitably reach the bottom as clients.
While these four steps still apply, what it takes to create desire and lead to action has changed. Today’s advisors need to think about creating a pipeline of prospects. With a funnel, gravity works for you, but with a pipeline prospects only move towards taking action if advisors do things to cultivate and nurture them, building their confidence in the advisors in the process.
Engaging prospects
Recently, I spoke with a 40-year veteran advisor. He told me that when he started, he would go to community events with the goal of engaging people in a conversation about the markets. If the person he talked to seemed receptive, he’d suggest meeting so that he could provide a second opinion on their portfolio. Should the response be that the prospect was happy with his advisor or too busy to meet, he’d answer: “I absolutely understand, but if it’s okay with you I’d like to check in from time to time to see how things are going.”
Few advisors would use that approach today. Instead, most advisors would offer something of value, so prospects would agree to the advisors’ staying in touch. They would recognize this as the first step in building a prospect pipeline. The most common method to get that agreement is for advisors to offer to add prospects to an email list for newsletters. Once someone says yes to that, the advisors are in front of the prospects on a regular basis. The advisors can call periodically to see if the prospects have any questions or would like to meet to talk about the ideas in the most recent newsletter. That call won’t come across as “Just checking in to see if you’re ready to buy yet.”
Going beyond newsletters
While newsletters and articles are helpful in getting prospects into the pipeline and creating a predisposition to meet with advisors, newsletters have their limitations. People are overwhelmed with email and the amount of information online. This was the topic of my conversation with William, one of three partners in a large team that I profiled in my previous article.
His team supplements client calls and meetings with three kinds of communication:
- Written communication – quarterly market letters, monthly articles and weekly blog posts
- Quarterly webinars and conference calls
- Monthly lunches and an annual outlook event over lunch and in the evening.
Here’s what William had to say about the impact of this communication on prospects:
Depending on the client, different communication has a different impact. In fact all of our communication vehicles have roles to play. The advantage of sending newsletters and articles is that it keeps us in front of prospects all the time. We’ve had new clients say, “One of the reasons that I moved over was that I heard from you much more often than I did from my advisor at the time.”
The limitation with sending something in writing, though, is that it’s hard to really convey your philosophy, who you are and how you’re different. That’s why our webinars have been especially effective in getting prospects interested in meeting. In the perfect world, we’d get prospects to come into our office to attend one of our monthly client lunches, but for many that’s too big a commitment.
That’s why when we talk to prospects, we really focus on our quarterly webinars to discuss what’s happening to markets. We keep these webinars to 30 minutes. People are busy and we want to keep the barriers to participation as low as possible. We follow up with everyone who listens to our webinars to see if they have any questions. If it’s a prospect we’re talking to, we will suggest coming into our office for one of our client lunches. What we’ve found is that once people have spent 30 minutes listening to a webinar, they are more comfortable coming in for a lunch presentation. And once prospects have attended one of those lunches, the odds of them coming to a meeting and becoming clients go way up.
Triggering introductions
William also discussed how he and his partners use their client communication to create introductions to their existing clients’ network.
We don’t ever ask clients for referrals in the traditional sense of asking who among their network we should be talking to. Instead, we leverage our existing communication.
For each of our key clients, we try to identify one or two people that they know well. It could be a relative, a partner in their business or a golf buddy. When we follow up after our webinars – and if clients say that they found it to be great information – we thank them. Then we say that we’d be happy to forward a link that they can send to anyone they know who might find the webinar useful, perhaps their brother-in-law or business associate. We find that about 10% of the time, the person that we suggest actually logs on to the webinar – whether because our clients don’t always forward the link, or their friends don’t actually go on.
We do the same thing with our lunches. When someone signs up for a lunch, we ask if they’d like to invite someone along to attend as their guest. We are careful not to hound clients on this. We try to keep these kinds of requests to about once a year.
There’s no magic bullet when it comes to landing new clients. That said, since William and his partners added webinars and client lunches to their roster of client communication, they’ve seen a perceptible increase in the number of prospects they’re talking to and the number of introductions from clients. And the choppier that markets are, the more interest they have; their webinars at the end of January had a record level of attendance from both clients and prospects.
For more about building a prospect pipeline, you can click on the articles below:
Low-Pressure Ways to Follow Up With Prospects
Three Ways to Turn Casual Contacts into Clients
What to Say When a Friend Doesn’t Want to be a Client
How to Turn Acquaintances into Clients
Accidentally Landing a $3 Million Client
How to Follow Up Without Being a Pest
How an Advisor Doubled New Clients
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.
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