Devising the right prospecting strategy

If you ask an established advisor how she gets new clients, she’ll probably say through referrals. The implication is she prospected in the early days of her practice, but at a certain point stopped actively looking for clients.

Don’t believe it. Even high-calibre advisors still have a client-acquisition strategy.

Read: Reassure antsy prospects

What makes a strategy work?

You try a strategy and it yields results. The advisor in the next office does the same and she comes up dry. What makes a prospecting strategy successful?

• Proactive – You drive near-term results. Referrals are great, but they’re reactive. You can’t lean on others to send you more people.
• Attracts target audience – You want prospects at specific asset, income, age or sophistication levels. If you hold a seminar, 30 people attend yet only 10 will qualify.
• Delivers key message – Don’t overdo the soft sell, and stay on point with what prospects need to do next.
• Cost efficiency – Mailings, dinners and seminars aren’t cheap. Your strategy needs to yield prospects who become paying clients.
• Measurable – Is your strategy working? How do you know? You need metrics to reveal how many suspects became prospects and how many prospects became clients.

An advisor I know based in Northern California shared an important lesson. “You can chop down a tree with a hammer.” Obviously a chainsaw is much more effective, but his point is persistence usually yields results. Many advisors implement a strategy, get it to the point where it’s just about to generate results, and then discard it, thinking it isn’t working. These advisors spend time and money implementing a series of failed strategies. Their success rate would be much better if they chose carefully and stuck with one approach, fine tuning along the way.

Examples

Welcome to city – An advisor I know targets recently relocated senior executives. Regular reading of the local business journal yields names of newly appointed managers in the executive suite. Most major cities have a lifestyle magazine bearing the city’s name. Once a year they run an issue based on top-10 lists summarizing the best golf courses, school districts, neighborhoods and jewelers.

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The advisor writes a very short letter welcoming the executive to the city. He encloses the magazine and overnights the package to the company’s headquarters. A few days later he calls and speaks with the gatekeeper, referencing the magazine. The executive is often open to taking the call.

Why does it work? The executive is new to the area and needs to make lots of decisions quickly: where to live, where to send his children to school and which golf club to join. The “best of” magazine supplies a lot of useful information exactly when he needed it., and using overnight mail makes you stand out.

Executive conference calls – Most people have no time to attend seminars. But conference calls are a major part of the workday. An advisor gets permission to send a mailing to members of a professional society. He uses a wedding-style seminar invitation listing the topic, date, time and conference call or webinar details.

Why it works: Executives like these calls because they’re time efficient. They can hop on and off. The invitee calls to register and get the password. The call starts and ends on time. Either the advisor calls the participants afterwards to set up appointments or keeps interested callers engaged answering their questions. The topic can be sophisticated because a home office specialist can be featured on the call. It’s virtual so no one is flying anywhere.

Read: Prospecting on the golf course