You Don’t Need More Leads to Get More Clients

Ari GalperAdvisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.

Many advisors jump to the conclusion that their leads who back out of coming on board simply weren’t ready or qualified.

Then advisors say: “I just need more leads.”

If this happens to you, it may spur you to launch into time-consuming marketing projects, like building out complex email series, hiring LinkedIn consultants, starting social media campaigns, and buying expensive CRM systems.

But those can ultimately prove to be rabbit holes that can lead you away from the real issue. In a low-volume/high-margin business like advisory – where one new client can easily be worth $10K-20K in annual fees – a lack of clients is not a lead generation problem. It’s a sales conversion problem.

The truth is that most of your prospects have some kind of financial problem or issue. Otherwise, they wouldn’t agree to meet with you. Their lack of commitment to you at the end of your process is not necessarily because they're an unqualified lead (there will of course be some of those). Rather, it is most likely because they didn’t trust you enough to open up to you and tell you the truth of what is really going on behind the original challenge they shared with you.

If you’re getting around eight leads per month, that’s plenty. You should be converting at least four new clients per month from that.