MEANING MORE TO CLIENTS

I take several approaches when applying my sales techniques to the advisor interaction. Whether it's providing prospecting support, diagnosing client behavior, or strategizing around additional sources of prospects, I apply everything in the ProDirect tool kit. But I always look for one thing that's not in the tool kit when hiring salespeople: the desire to mean more to clients.

Meaning more to clients is about doing what the average advisor doesn't do. It's a belief that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. It's a credo that holds as its highest principle that mediocrity is not an option. And it's an ego drive that pushes you to make yourself indispensable.

For some advisors, this means touting their deep and rich expertise in alternative investments. For others, it's the portfolio construction aspect of separately managed accounts. But the real thrust of meaning more is to be better and different than any other advisor in every respect. The best relationships I've witnessed my clients develop are those where their client asks them for their advice in all things, not just financial. Call it going the extra mile, doing the unexpected, or doing the right thing, it's a mindset and belief that clients can feel. And most often, this is why you get hired. To grow, your prospecting efforts need to channel your "meaning more to clients" mind-set.

The "Meaning More to Clients" tagline was born over twenty-five years ago when I was working as a sales rep for a global consumer products company. Typically, territories are vacant before another salesperson fills them, and mine had been vacant for over six months. A lot can happen to candy bars and bags of chocolate chips in six months across seventy-five stores, most of it bad. Needless to say, I didn't have a first name for the first three months on the job due to the hundreds of dollars of damaged product left expiring in each store. A common callout was, "Yo, Nestle, your damages are in the back." Knowing I had to be in the job for another sixteen months drove me to find a better way ... at least to find a way to achieve first-name status.

I wanted badly to be viewed as a trusted resource to my store managers. I didn't want to be seen as just a rep. So I did whatever it took: tracked in and out of stock positions, noted pricing trends, and captured what customers said out of earshot of store employees. I was constantly playing ideas upstream and letting managers know what I did for them that day. Call it winning by a nose, running through the bag, or giving it 110 percent, I did it all. It became a way of being, a way of selling, and later a way of selling strategically to just about any buyer I encountered. I turned myself inside out and became the customer. My customers saw this and felt this.

So when I started my own firm, I wanted to teach people how to do this, that is, how to mean more. I was working with an advisor last year that wanted to mean more to one of his small business prospects. The prospect was the CEO of a $250 million sheet metal fabricator located in the Greater Washington, DC, area. My client had tried everything—logging phone calls, sending serial e-mails, and even faxing the prospect his bio. We had a "meaning more to clients" brainstorming session and came up with a different approach.

We learned that the prospect's son had been named to the starting defense on the West Point football team. Given the geography, we hypothesized that the client would be driving to Bear Mountain every other week in the fall, a five-hour drive. We did some more sleuthing and found that the prospect was a huge Tom Clancy fan. So to mean more, my client sent the prospect a note with four Clancy novels on CD, enclosed with a note congratulating his son and wishing the prospect safe travels with some words from "Tom." The prospect called a week later. The prospect is now a client.

As I progressed in my career and now in my own business, meaning more to clients started to take on a life of its own. So I decided I wanted to make it trainable. Many advisors call when they can, send the occasional direct mail piece, and run a prospect dinner with a wholesaler once a quarter. Meaning more is not something that just happens. Rather, it's an intentional process of engaging prospects that validates them across multiple interactions. I actually developed an entire sales model to embody the meaning more mind-set and sell the way clients actually buy.

Prospecting

Prospecting is more than just getting on the phone and dialing away. Your competition does this. In the Meaning More model, prospecting is about knowing more to mean more, that is, leveraging information and research to provide more insight when contacting and engaging a prospect. Successful prospecting leverages client type messaging that particular prospects can identify with, messaging that sounds different than the other advisors calling them.

A dear friend of mine, fellow sales coach John Orvos, says, "The goal in the first part of prospecting [sleuthing, as he calls it] is to come so prepared to the client meeting that you actually have a hypothesis on how you can help. The meeting then becomes an exchange of privileged insights with some mutually beneficial next steps."

"Sleuthing" is a term John and I use to describe the process of researching a prospect. I like to start with his or her client type (corporate exec, small business owner, large physician group practice, and so forth). When you can identify the client type, you can start connecting the issues facing these individuals and start aligning potential solutions at a high level.

For example, retiring corporate execs may or may not have financial planning assistance afforded to them upon their exit and may not have figured out an appropriate rollover vehicle for their assets. Large physician groups leverage economies of scale. One of those economies is profit sharing for its members. Someone on the management team is responsible for this and is typically under pressure to recommend the right solution.

So you might be thinking about how much sleuthing is enough. I like to say that, once you can assess what's changing in this person's environment and what his or her self-interests likely are, you're probably in a good place to conduct a meeting. One of the litmus tests for me is if I feel prepared to be spontaneous in the meeting with a prospect. With an agenda as your compass, you want to feel that, no matter what direction an interaction takes, you're prepared to engage. Once you've done your sleuthing, I recommend sending agendas in advance, asking the prospect to add or subtract to the flow. This starts you on an engagement path early and shows you care about the prospect's time.

Discovery Phase 1: Exploring Needs

This is not about asking a laundry list of clever questions or going deep into a prospect's personal finances. Too many advisors do this in their earnest due diligence, but it comes off as too penetrating too soon. Before asking qualifying types of questions that really benefit you the advisor, you need to earn the right. To do this, it's important to get a feel for what matters most to a prospect. I like to ask my own clients about where they are versus their vision of perfection—with their job, with their finances, or with themselves. Prospects are typically more forthcoming when you pose those types of questions. As part of discovery, be careful to not leave your agenda too open, letting the client dominate the dialogue. It may feel customer-focused, but this can actually work in reverse. Successful, busy prospects expect to be led through a valuable process that's well planned and prospect-focused and promises to add some value at the end. While you don't want to control the person, you can and should control the process. For potential investors, ask about what's not quite right in their current situation. Probe where they might be a little frustrated with what they're not accomplishing and by when. Meaning more in the exploring needs context is less about the questions you ask and more about the questions that help the prospect to self-explore, to hypothesize, and to speculate. In a way, it's more about the answers you want to hear instead of the questions themselves. I've heard many advisors tell me that they had so many questions to ask the prospect that the meeting ended and they weren't able to redirect on any of the answers.

In the discovery process, you also want to validate and affirm the prospect. For example, you want to show respect for what the prospect has already achieved and what he or she has already accomplished with his or her wealth. You also want to pay deference to what he or she already knows about investing. The best advisors we coach actually view this step as an opportunity in conversation to clarify what they're learning and to make sure they've heard the prospect correctly. So think of exploring needs as validating the prospect.

In our experience, less is best when it comes to asking questions of your prospects. In fact, we promote a prospecting dialogue that features three primary questions: priming questions, pebble questions, and payoff questions. The goal of these questions is to get the conversation off to a great start, to uncover issues in the prospect's world, and to start thinking about potential recommendations around how you and your firm can help.

But here is what's different: the primary purpose of initial meetings should not be to educate you. It's to establish mutual respect and to get the prospect talking about what matters most to him or her and what he or she wants to accomplish.

In using these questions, you want to get a sense of the relative value of addressing the prospect's issues. All three question types are designed to capture the spoken words of the prospect for your use in communicating your solution later. We all love to feel that we've been heard and understood, and this process will help you accomplish that. So let's look at some of the questions and statements that can help when exploring needs with prospects.

Priming Questions

Priming questions or statements set the tone of the meeting, connect the prospect back to the original purpose of getting together, and jump-start your agenda. Here's a sample priming question:

So, Jean, I thought what we could discuss today is your family's need for a financial plan, one that would consider the protection of assets for your retirement as well as the distribution of assets to your heirs. Would that be the right place to start?

Pebble Questions

Pebble questions uncover a prospect's frustration with a particular financial situation or some constructive discontent around where he or she would like to be with a certain issue.

Pebble questions focus on where the prospect is relative to perfection as he or she sees it. My experience shows that focusing on where a client is relative to his or her ideal situation yields richer insights than focusing on what's wrong. Here is a sample pebble question:

Great, Jean. So let me start by asking where you are relative to what your ideal situation would be for a comprehensive financial plan. Can you share with me some provisions you've been thinking about in advance of today that you'd like to see us include?

OR

So, Jean, it sounds like you've been thinking about a financial plan for your family, particularly as it relates to multigenerational wealth transfer. What would you like to see that some of the other firms you've interviewed are just not addressing?

These pebble questions do a few things:

• They validate that you've been listening.

• It opens the door for Jean in the prior example to tell you what she sees as her ideal situation and what she's not getting.

• These questions prompt the prospect to actually share why and where he or she is dissatisfied so you can gauge next steps and put yourself in position to make what I call an "intelligent recommendation."

Payoff Questions

When payoff questions are asked properly, these questions actually get the prospect to articulate the value of taking action. With payoff questions, you're looking to surface the benefit of doing something about your prospect's problems or issues. Let's look at a few examples:

So, Jean, what I'm hearing you say is that wealth transfer is not the only consideration for choosing a firm to prepare a comprehensive financial plan. You want provisions for family care and certain charitable contributions. If our team could create a plan that would provide you protection and guaranteed execution against all three of your wishes, what level of comfort would that give you that you don't enjoy now?

OR

So, Jean, what if we could deliver all the provisions you are looking for in a financial plan that would provide for systematic wealth transfer, the creation of a trust for your children, and a process for apportioning assets from your estate to the charities you designate? How might you gauge the value of that?

So with payoff questions, you're painting a picture of what you could deliver (based on what you are learning that's relevant to the prospect) and getting the prospect to share the value of taking action. Payoff questions can also act as a more authentic trial close because you're getting the prospect's opinion early on a possible course of action. This is important to protect against prospect procrastination later. These questions typically take place in your first few prospect meetings. What's been helpful for our clients is to actually ask for a separate meeting to present several options after your work in discovery.

Discovery Phase 2: Testing Options

This step acts as a playback of what you've heard from the prospect. This is an important step for three reasons:

1. You want to let the prospect know that you've heard him or her.

2. You want to make sure you've got the facts straight because this is what you will base your intelligent recommendation on.

3. Before you offer a final solution, you want to float your approach first without any fees or executional details.

At this stage, you want to anchor your directional thinking with the prospect by recapping what've you've both discovered thus far. The words I love to hear advisors say to their prospects at this stage are, "Based on what you shared with me, I have a few ideas for you." It's a more credible way to do a trial close, and you're not really closing here. You are looking for the prospect's early opinion. Here's an example:

So, Mike, based on what you shared with me, I would recommend an open architecture platform such as National Innovator. It's a sophisticated retirement solution with wide fund choice. We can execute your investing strategies within the products, and the technology makes that easy for us. Can you see the connection to what you were looking for?

In the previous example, you're reconnecting the prospect to prior stated needs and offering a rationale for your idea. As in all phases of the Meaning More sales process, you want a high level of prospect engagement. It serves no one well by skipping steps or rushing to the close. In my experience, this is the biggest contributor to prospect procrastination and even the loss of a prospect. It's always better to get buy-in now versus later. Plus, if you go to a hard-coded solution too soon, it can be too final for the prospect. Most people want to chew on your recommendation a bit. Some like to talk it out or "use the air as their verbal whiteboard," as I'm fond of saying.

I've also learned that rough layouts often sell better than polished ones. That is, clients buy into what they have a hand in creating. Think of it as a proposal without the money. One of our clients calls it a "proposure," a proposal and brochure all in one.

Often, advisors are too quick to present their solution, especially if they really believe in it. For all the right reasons, most want to appear knowledgeable and ready with an answer. But taking this step actually adds more momentum for a close because you're trading on what the prospect said about his or her problem (literally) and the value of doing something about it. Just be sure that your recommendation is couched in the prospect's spoken words with logical, easy next steps clearly defined.