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5 Summer Sales Jobs

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It’s that time of year again… The weather is great and everyone is trying to spend a bit more time outdoors. The downside is that business may be getting just a little quieter for the next month or two.

So here lies the opportunity! It’s quite likely that you’ll have a bit more spare time on your hands over the next while; the question is how will you use this time? We all know how hours and days can just get “lost”; where you get to the end of the day and realise you actually haven’t done a whole lot that day! It can be hard to keep your focus when there’s not the pressure of constant phone calls and emails and achieving deadlines to meet client expectations.

It’s easier to keep focused though when you have a plan. So what sort of things might be in that plan for the summer months? Here are a few ideas;

Arrange to meet your key clients

This is a great time of year for catching up with key clients, outside of your advice process. This is not a business meeting; it’s a game of golf, a coffee, an early pint – whatever works best for them and you! This is an opportunity to show your interest in their business and lives without looking for anything back in return. The cost is small for both of you as you probably both have the time to meet. However there is real benefit in it for you, as the client will appreciate your interest without it being an “advice” or “sales” meeting.

Revisit your LinkedIn presence

As you’ll know from previous posts of mine, I rate LinkedIn as a highly important tool for financial planners and brokers. When prospective clients are researching you, they’ll check your company website and your LinkedIn profile. It’s really important that you’re putting your best foot forward through both of these.

In relation to LinkedIn, there are 2 areas to concentrate on over the summer.

The first is your profile. Go through your profile section by section? Are there areas that you can expand the information a little to make it more engaging? Are there new areas that you can add to your profile? Are there clients that you could seek recommendations from? All of these will provide prospective clients with richer information about you, hopefully making them more inclined to actually do business with you. LinkedIn will also help you edit your profile by prompting you to complete certain areas.

The second area is expanding your network of connections. There are 3 ways of doing this;

  1. Check the “People you may know” section to identify people suggested by LinkedIn.
  2. Check the connections belonging to your existing connections. Are there people here that you should seek an introduction to?
  3. Search for people using the search bar at the top. There are new people joining LinkedIn all the time. They just might not have found their way onto your LinkedIn radar as yet.

And then when you find people that you want to connect with, remember to personalise every invitation. Don’t just use the default LinkedIn invitation.

Update your CRM system

Rather than wasting an hour or two mindlessly surfing the web, set yourself a target to review the records of a number of clients every day within your CRM system. While you may have all the data in the system to meet you compliance requirements, maybe now is the time to populate some of the softer information that can help you build really rich relationships with your clients. Information such as;

  • Their stated life aspirations
  • Their financial goals and objectives
  • Their communication preferences
  • Their interests and hobbies
  • Wider information in relation to their families

Develop a plan of attack for the rest of the year

Plot out how you’re going to approach the final four months of the year, from when everything “gets back to normal” on 1st September. Who are the prospects / clients that you need to contact in plenty of time before “pensions season”? What will this contact consist of? How are you going to get these prospects to engage on the subject of pensions, and equally importantly, how will you ensure they engage with you? Which other clients need to be contacted, either for a regular review or indeed because you’re aware of a change in their circumstances?

While you have a bit of time, put a structured plan in place with clear actions and dates to make sure these contacts then happen.

Take a holiday & recharge your batteries!

The most important one of the lot! Nothing helps you get your focus and your energy back better than a well earned break. I hope you and your family have a great holiday and enjoy the summer!

Photo Credit: flickr

Why do clients leave you?

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We’ve all cheerily picked up the phone at one stage or another when a client calls, only to suffer that sinking feeling as the client goes on to explain that they are in fact moving their business to another adviser. Often you don’t even get a call, the business just quietly moves. So why do clients actually move their business and put themselves through the hassle of agency transfer letters, bringing a new adviser up to date with their affairs etc.

It’s not about price, or at least very rarely.

The management consultancy firm Bain carried out research some time ago among a large group of accountants, 360 of them in fact. While I know they are not financial advisers, it’s a relevant survey as accountants are service providers in the financial space with SME’s and professional clients. When asked, 80% of the accountants felt they delivered above average service. The researchers also asked the same question of 360 clients, one from each accountant. Just 8% of them felt they got above average service. What a perception gap!

They also asked the accountants why clients leave them. The number one reason given was price. This was number 8 on the list of clients. Their number one reason was they just “didn’t treat me right”.

So what’s the lesson in this for all of us service providers? Worry about your proposition more so than your price, and work on effectively communicating your proposition to your clients so that they never forget the value that you are adding. Make your clients feel loved by you!

While we all might go through a short period of reflection when we lose a single client, it may be necessary to take a bit of a deeper look if you find that a steady stream of clients are heading out the door. So what are some of the questions you might ask yourself?

 

How good is your proposition?

Picking up on the Bain findings above, how good really is your proposition? Has it actually kept pace with developments in the marketplace and are you competing with the best advisers out there who may be wooing your clients away? As clients experience the benefits of structured budgeting support and the really valuable insights that future cashflow planning delivers to them, how are you competing with this? At the end of the day, are you really offering true financial planning rather than just a transactional product focused service?

 

How good are you at keeping your clients engaged?

Your clients receive great advice from you at the commencement of your relationship and receive the benefit of a review each year. But what value do they get from you in the other 11.5 months of the year? More and more advisers are making great strides at improving their communication with clients, enabling them to add value to clients throughout the year. However, they also target these communications at prospective clients too – and these might be your clients currently….

Are you satisfied that your ongoing engagement of your existing clients will keep these threats at bay? Do your clients see you as the important cog in their financial affairs?

 

What are your competitors doing differently?

There may be other areas that are influencing your clients to move to a competitor. Are your competitors more active than you at networking locally, or seen as a valued support within the business community? Have they just developed a bigger and better (and more influential) brand presence than you that is swaying clients to move? Are they very clever in the marketing of their business? While their proposition may be no better than yours, does your client as a result of their greater presence perceive them as a better proposition? It might be time for you to revisit your marketing activities and bring more structure and focus to them.

 

Is price a factor?

While price is not the usual reason for clients leaving you, it can be a contributory factor if you are way out of line. You need to satisfy yourself that your price is in the ballpark. If it’s higher than the norm, can you back this up by demonstrating that your proposition is better than the norm? After all, clients will only pay a premium for a premium service.

 

These are just some of the reasons why clients walk. If possible, talk to clients who are leaving you and try and get to the nub of why they are going. They may at first be slow to give the real reason in order not to hurt your feelings. However, if you persist with professional questions asked with grace, you might just uncover some nuggets that will help you avoid the loss of clients in the future.

What do you Measure in your Financial Advice Business?

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At the end of the day for most advisers, there’s one measure that stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of importance – profitability.

Until recently, many firms actually didn’t view profitability as their key metric; their main focus was on income. This was usually backwards looking, i.e. examining income in the last 12 months, or sometimes also looking out at the next 12 months. Many firms have now switched this focus to looking further forwards – based on their increasing trail commission and fee incomes, what is income forecasted to be next year / in 5 years time / in 10 years time? This now gives a real sense of the future health of the business.

While income is a very important metric, profitability tells a truer story of the health of the firm as it takes account of the expenses of the firm, and helps to better determine the future value of the business. Now this is what you (or other shareholders) are really interested in!

However there are so many factors that can impact your profitability, most firms will look to dig a little deeper to examine some of those factors that are impacting their profitability. Set out below are just some of the metrics used currently by different advice firms, that help them to determine the performance of key inputs to their profitability. Which ones might it make sense for you to start tracking?

 

Client metrics

There is a range of metrics that can be used to measure the success of your client activities. These include;

  • Number of clients: this can be measured at an overall level and also within segments of your target client groups.
  • Average revenue per client: this will give you a sense of whether you are building greater value into your propositions and whether you are reaching your ideal clients. Again this may be carried out at a segment level.
  • Average recurring revenue per client: this will give you a good sense of the future health of your business.
  • Number of new clients: always a good measure of whether you are growing as a business or not!
  • Client satisfaction: this will give you a sense of your likelihood to hang onto your clients into the future. Again this can be carried out at a segment level. The Net Promoter Score is a very simple but useful measure of client satisfaction.
  • Risk register: Are there problem cases that need to be monitored? If so, a firm oversight needs to be maintained, both in relation to the number of cases and progress of these cases towards a solution.

 

Staff measures

Again, there is a range of measures that you can use to ensure your staff are performing to their maximum potential;

  • Sales Performance: This may be based on volume, margin or other relevant measures.
  • Activity: This may be the number of new clients secured, first meetings secured, financial plans completed etc. It is always useful to get a good sense of the activity levels of each of your sales team.
  • Staff satisfaction: Similar to client satisfaction, this is important too! Are your staff happy and committed to the long term health of your business or are they just waiting for an opportunity to jump ship? Staff satisfaction measures can help you uncover these insights.

 

Marketing Metrics

Yes, most marketing activities can actually be measured! Here are a few that will help inform your marketing activities;

  • Contact data quality: This might be as simple initially as tracking the number of client email addresses you have secured. Email offers you a no cost method of getting marketing messages out to your clients.
  • Numbers and source of leads: Tracking the numbers and source of new lead is one of the best inputs into decision making around future marketing activities. If it worked before, it might be worth repeating!
  • Website analytics: Google analytics will give you a wealth of data in relation to your online marketing activities. For more detailed information in relation to how Google Analytics can help financial advisers, check out our previous article here. Google analytics can tell you;
    • The number of people finding your website
    • Where website visitors came from – Search terms, social media, directly accessing your website.
    • The content that attracts people to your site…. and also drives them away.
  • Social media interactions: Likes, +1’s, comments, Retweets! These terms are “Double Dutch” to some people, highly valued endorsements of your content to others!

There are of course many other measures available to be used within your business, these are just a few that are available to you. However the list is also potentially endless! For most advisers, the starting point is to identify a few metrics that you feel will make a real difference to your business, and then track them diligently.

There are many metrics that people use that are not listed above. Which ones do you find particularly useful? All your comments are welcome below.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/glitch_nitch/

Increase the Value of your Financial Advice Business

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I’m often asked how an adviser can increase the value of their business beyond the discounted value of your future income stream. This is particularly relevant for advisers who are looking to exit, and want to achieve the greatest sale price possible for their business.

It’s an area that I’ve written about before, but you might want to consider in a bit more detail a few of the factors that could drive up that sale price in your favour.

 

The Shape of your Revenue Model

One of the key factors in driving up the value of a business is the shape of revenue in the business. Is the business mainly living off high upfront commission payments with smaller future payments due, or has the business moved to flatter commissions on protection business and trail commission / fees as opposed to upfront commission on investment and pensions business?

Obviously the latter will be far more attractive to a potential purchaser. There are many advisers actively making this shift or looking to make the shift at the moment, either on their own or with the guidance of some of the product providers.

The size of this future income stream is important, but equally so is the persistency of it. A buyer will look to see your firm’s ability to both build up and then retain clients, to ensure that this income stream will continue into the future to their benefit.

 

Your Brand Value

Is there equity (value) in your brand? Having a brand that is well known, respected, considered better than a competitor’s brand is strategically really important. It is also famous for being very difficult to measure! But there are ways that you can influence this really important factor, to help you achieve a better sale price for your business.

How well known is your brand? How much time and effort to you put into building the awareness and credibility of your brand among your target audience? Is your brand positioned where you want it to be, and equally importantly where a potential purchaser will see as attractive?

Does your brand then actually deliver? Can you prove this through any quantitative measures (brand awareness measures, customer satisfaction results) or through qualitative feedback such as testimonials from clients about their experiences of working with your business?

Being able to demonstrate this brand equity could very positively impact the value of your business at sale time.

 

Your Sales & Advice Proposition

Has your business been built successfully (but solely) around your great relationship building and client acquisition skills? While this has undoubtedly been really valuable for you, what value does it hold for a potential buyer if you are planning on walking off into the sunset?

Alternatively, some advisers have built on these skills, for the benefit of other members of their sales team by developing processes and supports to acquire and deliver advice to clients. These processes and supports ensure that if you are out of the equation, your business should continue to develop sales and deliver excellent advice-based solutions to clients. Now that is really valuable to a buyer!

 

Clear & Valuable Target Markets

A buyer of your business will place a lot of value on your business offering “something different” to them. This might be particular expertise, skills or indeed access to a corner of the market that they have failed to access themselves.

Can you offer a potential purchaser access to a new segment of the market? This might be based on a product offering (for example the corporate pensions market), a geographical area where they currently don’t have a presence or a sector of the economy (a particular business sector or group of professionals). For this to be credible, you need to be able to demonstrate a genuine focus on the area, a differentiated approach that you utilise with this segment and demonstrable results in successfully gaining traction in the target segment.

After all, if your target market is “anyone”, what are you then actually bringing to a potential purchaser in terms of new opportunities?

 

Operational Excellence

A worry for someone buying a business is the skeletons in the closet. Are they suddenly going to be faced with a load of legacy problems – poor advice that will come home to roost, poor documentation that could leave them exposed, lots of clients who are completely disengaged from your business and who really have little loyalty towards it.

These factors will seriously undermine your price. Indeed they will often completely undermine the sale of your business at all, as a buyer just won’t want to take on these challenges. That is except possibly at a real knockdown price.

The challenge for you is to deal with these issues now and address them so that you are handing over as healthy a business as possible. And getting the best price as a result!

 

These are some of the factors to consider when looking to “fatten up” your business for sale. For any of you looking to buy or sell, do these match your experiences and what other factors do you consider? All comments as ever are welcome!

Beat your competition all ends up!

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You’ve been approached to pitch for the opportunity to advise a really great prospective client, maybe a wealthy individual with a lot of assets to manage or a pension scheme for a local company. However you also know that another adviser has been given the same opportunity….

So what do you do? One route obviously is to go in “as cheap as chips”, provide your advice for free and cut your transaction price to a level that just about makes it worth your while. Yes, you’ll win some clients this way, but not the ones you really want. Because every future conversation will result in a haggle over your price – no surprise really as you started it!

The alternative is to beat the socks off your competitors and demonstrate to the prospective client that you’re the only game in town for them to consider. Your challenge is to have demonstrated this by the end of your first meeting (your pitch) with them. Here are 5 ways you might achieve this;

 

Know the customer better than your competitor

Today there are so many ways to learn lots of really valuable information about your prospect before you meet them. This can give you a real edge, enabling you to anticipate questions or issues and to chat knowledgeably about areas of interest to them. At the very least, it shows your interest in them and their business.

Starting with their company website, you can learn about their business, getting a sense of their markets, their size and what is important to them. The prospect that you’re about to meet might feature in the “About Us” section so check this out too.

Check out their social media profiles. In particular LinkedIn may give you very rich information about the person. You can learn a lot about the person professionally, as well as their interests etc. You can also see if you have connections in common – this can be useful for the social chitchat at the start of the meeting.

 

Focus on their objectives and outcomes, not yours!

At the meeting, your initial goal needs to be to connect with the person and build trust before you can get into problem solving. To do this, you need to find out what their problem or challenge is and fully understand what their actual objectives and goals are. What will success look like for them? What will they consider a good result?

Your questioning style is very important here. The key is to use lots of Open questions; “what is your biggest challenge”, “why is that challenge so significant for you”, “how have you addressed this so far”, “when are you expecting a result” etc. Questions that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no!

This initial stage is all about getting the client talking. Once they are talking, their issues will become clear and then you can start to think about demonstrating how you can address the actual challenges that they are facing!

Hopefully at the same time, your competitor will dive in and start setting out their credentials and their approach to solving the client’s problem – quite probably not the right problem at all!

 

Then demonstrate your credentials

Once the client’s problem is clear to you, now is the time to set out why you are the answer to their prayers! This is a critical step – after this the client will decide who he is appointing to look after his affairs!

First of all, you can demonstrate your professional approach easily and effectively by walking your client through your planning and advice approach. This will give the client comfort that you are a professional with a robust approach, helping to build that all-important trust. I believe that this is best delivered using a short presentation on an iPad or similar device.

Case studies (anonymous) are another effective way to demonstrate your credentials. They allow you to showcase innovative approaches that you might have used in the past. They also demonstrate your experience in dealing with challenges similar to that posed by the prospective client.

Finally testimonials are a great endorsement of your capabilities. I always encourage financial advisers to seek permission to use the full name of the person giving the testimonial, as it gives it credibility – does “John T, Dublin 6” really exist?

Hopefully your competitor has just been having a chat with the prospect, saying how good they are but not really backing it up at all…

 

Practice – it’s not easy!

These last two areas of questioning the prospect effectively and then demonstrating your credentials are not easy. Road test them on your staff, friends and family. Get people to critically appraise your approach. Like all similar tasks, it’s going to take a few goes before you get it spot on. The last thing you want is to be trying it out for the first time on the best prospect you’ve had in a long time!

 

Start delivering value long before your pitch

This point should probably have been made at the start but I kept it to the end as not all advisers are in a position to deliver it at the moment. Providing ongoing content to clients is so important, deepening the relationship, demonstrating expertise and adding value. This might be in the form of an email newsletter or other such communication. If you do this, add your prospect to the list as soon as the first contact is made (get any necessary permission to do) and start sharing your content with them straightaway.

This will immediately set you apart from your competitor, giving the prospect a taste of what they can expect from you – a valuable, professional, robust approach to all that you do!

At this stage, hopefully you see the other guy’s white flag!

5 elements of a winning client proposition in 2014

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I’ve been lucky to spend the last couple of years working with a broad range of financial brokers and planners, and as a result have been fortunate to gain great insights into some really great advice firms operating in the Irish market.

A question I’m sometimes asked is; “What’s different about the winners?” Now there’s no easy answer to that, but there is one theme running through the successful firms and that is a clear client proposition. These firms tend to be clear about their target markets, their ideal clients, what they offer (and don’t offer), what makes them special and how they get paid. And very importantly, they are also very good at articulating this to clients.

The whole area of client propositions is very broad though and can encompass many different elements. So here are 5 activities that I believe will help advice firms to really differentiate themselves from the rest in 2014.

 

No more chats!

Spend some time over Christmas developing a presentation for delivery at your first meeting with prospective clients. If you get a new iPad for Christmas, even better still! Use that to deliver the presentation. Meeting a prospective client and having a chat is fine and maybe not hugely damaging. But it’s hard to make it memorable. However if you have a well-crafted (and short) presentation, that you walk through in an engaging manner, and that includes some provoking questions for your client to ponder later, you’ve a much better chance of leaving a positive impression and getting that prospect coming back for more.

 

Spend time on income and expenditure

One of the unfortunate traits of some of the less successful firms out there is their rush to “get to the money”. While their intentions are noble, in that they want to sort out the investments for their clients, in fact what happens is that the client gets forgotten as the focus is on the money. And once you forget the client, your future with the client is inextricably linked to the performance of the money. Which is difficult if markets go against the client.

The successful firms out there tend to focus more on the client and one way they demonstrate this is through helping clients really examine their income and their spending. And then going through a rigorous process to help them balance the personal books better! They don’t do this in a superficial way, but in a way that is really valued by clients, most of who are very poor at doing this themselves!

 

Build future cashflow planning into your proposition

My prediction for 2014 is that there will be a steep increase in the use of future cashflow planning by financial advisers. Why? Because more and more clients will become aware of the value of it by those financial planners already offering it, and those clients will demand it.

Future cashflow planning completely changes the conversation. It lifts the conversation out of the past and the present and focuses both the adviser and the client on the future objectives of the client. And it gets them really working together on trying to achieve those objectives.

However the real benefit of it to me is the reliance on the annual review happening every year to track progress. Clients demand their reviews – do your clients?

 

Develop powerful review meetings

Again, another observation… Lots of financial brokers and planners have recognised the importance of a compelling client proposition and are furiously working on developing a compelling one at the point of sale with the client. However relatively few are working on developing a compelling review proposition, to deliver to their client year in and year out. And most of these brokers are attempting to justify a trail commission basis!

If you want to receive an ongoing payment from your client every year into the future, you’ll need to develop a review proposition that the client values and that they demand actually happens every year. This is achievable – there are many clients out there who experience a truly valuable review service and these clients happily pay ongoing fees as they recognise the value they are receiving in the review meetings.

Do your clients demand their reviews with you? Do they feel the meetings are worth more than the ever-growing trail commission that you are receiving? If not, you’re at real risk of losing these clients in the future, just as they become very valuable to you.

 

Think engagement

It is so important to engage your clients on an ongoing basis, outside of your sales and review meetings. You need to stay in their minds through gently adding value throughout the year, so that when an unexpected financial challenge or opportunity arises for them, you are their first port of call.

Yes it’s hard work and takes a lot of time. If you don’t have the time or the inclination to do it, pay someone else to do it for you. If you don’t, someone else will begin to engage your clients and leapfrog you as a financial expert worth talking to.

If you make these changes to your client proposition, I can pretty much guarantee that they will have a material impact on your business. You’ll value your own proposition more and as a result, your confidence will increase, enabling you to communicate your value better. And your clients will love it!

Very best wishes in developing your proposition in 2014! If you have any comments in relation to my suggestions, please leave them below.