The End of the Discovery Meeting

The rationale behind the last step is to develop a financial plan from those documents and for the prospect to review the plan in the hope they’ll engage you to continue handling their portfolio. There are two issues with this approach:

1. The process breaks down when your prospect goes away to retrieve their documents and never does, forcing you to pursue them.
2. Assuming they bring their documents, you’re then doing all the upfront planning work for free, with no guarantee you’ll be paid.

I want to challenge not just this idea of free planning, but the entire process.

If you simplify your sales process to a single meeting focused only on building deep trust (not rapport building), your prospect will happily pay you for your planning process.

You’re thinking that building trust is the whole point of the discovery meeting. But my idea of trust is very different to what most people think of when they hear that word.

The closest example that illustrates this is how doctors approach their intake process.

Doctors don’t dispense medicine to their patients; they provide them with a treatment plan or a prescription for the medicine, and they get paid for that. It’s not free.

In fact, the pharmacy won’t provide the medicine without a doctor’s prescription.

In the medical profession, the prescription and the medicine are viewed as one and the same in the paid-treatment process.

The financial plan you prescribe for your prospect (their treatment plan) and the services required to implement that plan as your client (their medicine) should also be viewed and presented as one and the same.

Many advisors do all of that treatment planning work up front for free, hoping it will convince their prospects to become their clients to “get the medicine,” almost like it’s a separate event.

This is where the discovery-meeting sales process falls over.

A doctor’s process works because of its simplicity and clarity. To solve your problem, you pay for the treatment plan first and then the medicine. There is zero confusion. Trust is built in from the beginning.

The steps involved with the typical advisor’s process creates complexity and work for the prospect. The path to solving their problem becomes complicated and laborious, which makes them question its value.

If you eliminate these unnecessary steps in the discovery meeting and focus on building trust, you get paid from the outset for your process (not your solution), because it will have made the value of engaging you clear from the beginning.

I call this approach the “one-call sale.” It’s a mindset shift that needs to happen around simplifying your sales process, so that you can onboard somebody into a committed monetary relationship from the first meeting.

I know that sounds like a radical and even scary idea, but that is because most advisors are conditioned to use the selling norms engrained in their profession.

But once you realize how these norms are getting in your own way and you refocus your process to deliver to your prospects what they need (which is clarity around solving their problem), then engaging you from a single first meeting will feel natural and logical.

Simplify the complexity in your sales process by eliminating the normal steps (discovery meeting, document retrieval, financial plan, review meeting for free). Distil it to one single meeting that lays out your process (not your solution) in simple terms. Then you will build trust and onboard new clients much sooner than you ever thought possible.

Ari Galper is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling and is the most sought-after high-net worth/lead generation expert for financial advisors. His newest book, “Trusted Authority” has become an instant best-seller among financial advisors worldwide – you can get a free copy of Ari’s book here and, when you click the “YES” button in the order form, you’ll also receive a complimentary “get new clients” lead generation consultation. Ari has been featured in CEO Magazine, Forbes, INC Magazine and the Australian Financial Review. He is considered a contrarian in the financial services industry and in his book, everything you learned about selling will be turned upside down. No more chasing, no pressure, no closing.

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