Pay $0 for your next financial planning client lead and pay 1x$1 for your next financial planning client base

How'd you like to pay $0 in marketing costs for your next financial planning or insurance lead? That's right, no telemarketing costs incurred marketing to your existing client base or leads that you've paid for or clients that you've purchased.

Speaking of books of clients that you've purchased, just how much did you pay? A multiple of 2 times? 3 times? Surely not 3.5 times? In this market?

How'd you like to pay a multiple of 1 times for your next client base if not less?

This is the reality that financial planning and insurance professionals are creating for themselves by asking the right questions.

It is the people that they are posing these questions to that delivers this reality.

They are conversing with and engaging their existing client base.

Pay $0 for your next financial planning or insurance lead

Pick your top 25 clients and ask:

1) Who do they work for?
2) What community or social groups do they belong to?
3) Who do they employ?
4) Who are the related to?


Let's start with who do they work for or who do they employ.

If they are employers themselves - what about that pay packet they pay staff - (that their staff rely upon) - it can be taken away from that staff member in an instant should that person be unable to work due to illness or an accident away from the workplace. Is that something they as an employer thinks is in the interest of the well being of their staff and is a positive outcome? Of course not.

If they are employed. Contact that employer. Offer that employer a free statement of advice (financial plan/insurance recommendation). Why? So they can experience the service and outcomes that one of their staff has experienced. And upon experiencing the positive outcomes and process - should that not be something of value they could expose the remainder of their staff to?

Pay a multiple of $1 times for your next client base

Pick your top 25 clients and ask:

1) Who do they obtain accounting and business advice services from?


Contact the accountant and yes offer that accountant a free statement of advice (financial plan/insurance recommendation). Why? So they can experience the service and outcomes that one of their clients has experienced.

Maybe they won't buy in to that process that easily. No problem. Send them a sample statement of advice. Make sure it's one that aligns with the accountants niche (if they have one). Highlight in a cover letter / presentation the cross referral opportunities.

If you have constructed your statement of advice in the way we here at PCE have talked about (in our previous posts) then it's most probable they have not seen a document like it in the way it speaks and communicates to the client.

One business we know did just this.

A request came back from the accountant to takeup the free statement of advice. But it was not for the accountant. It was for the accountants mother.

Following the perparation of the statement of advice the recommendations were accepted and implemented. Within a short period of time (6 months) the accountant referred with such regularity that the main adviser based themselves out of the accountants office 2 days a week (7.30am until 5am) engaging with staff and clients.

That adviser now owns 50% of the accountancy practice (bought at 0.90 times).

All that by asking their top clients who did their tax.

Writing a Great Sales Pitch - Statements of Advice written by your client

So last time we promised that the next step was to discuss what to say in your sales presentation and importantly how to say it.

Well it's a little more involved than that BUT it's paradoxically simple.

Great sales presentations in financial planning and insurance do not depend on being a great presenter. Rather you need to have a great presentation as a base.

This point should instantly ease the minds of those insurance and financial planning professionals who HATE "presenting".

Even a poor presenter can make a few lines from Shakespeare sound good. Who couldn't?

It's the content of your pitch that is critical.

This means it's the right story for the client to hear and see. Using the right words that will resonate with the client. It's about using their words - the very words they've used when answering your lifestyle questionnaire. By doing that you capture the emotion of the core motivating drivers that are in play for the client.

So what's the lesson here when writing your pitch:

1) Use the clients words to show that you appreciate and respect thier values and dreams

2) Connect your financial planning and insurance solution to those values and dreams

3) Do it with a mix of visual, audio and text content

4) Describe it in broad terms

5) Make sure that what you are saying has a structure around it

6) Make sure that you repeat the core essence of the outcomes of your recommendations over and over and over and over again throughout your presentation

Do this in a cover letter, in a visual slide show and in words. Three ways of communicating the same message. Punctuate your Statement of Advice with bold double font quotes from the client lifestyle questionnaire as the "sub-headings" for each relevant recommendation.

The Statement of Advice will then be transformed from a document that is disconnected financial planning jargon to a document that is signposted with the clients words, thoughts, hopes, dreams and ambitions.

It will become a document that they have immense ownership of and when you own something .....you protect it.

In otherwords - they become your client and your advocate.

Next Time:

- keeping it simple
- and the power slide/page in your pitch

Sales Presentations That Win!

We hope you've started 2012 ready to embrace the opportunity that awaits those financial planning and insurance businesses that have developed the capabilities to positively engage clients with depth relevance and meaning.

That means you'd be familiar with the concepts around client engagement that are regular features of our writings:

- using smart questionnaires that embed communication models within them
- you have a great story
- you use a family tree in your dicussions with clients

And most of all you have developed capabilities in your business to engage the client throughout the buying process and made the financial planning and insurance strategies, relevant by using techniques that ensure the client projects and assesses the future and can see what your strategy looks, feels, even sounds like to them, thus providing compelling reasons for action.

Now you just need to make your final pitch.

In the financial planning and insurance business - you need to present your Statement of Advice.

The next phase of our writings in the coming months will be focussed on making sales presentations.

A good reference for anyone making any sort of presentation is a wonderfully engaging book by Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity - "Life's a Pitch: How to Sell Yourself and Your Brilliant Ideas" (2008).

As Bayley and Mavity point out, "when you are pitching to someone, you're asking them to judge the future.....their judgement won't be based on logical fctors, but on emotional factors, trust, confidence, hope, ambition, desire".

In the financial planning and insurance world this point is incredibly relevant.

If you have not engaged clients for example with an understanding of the four drive theory - then you have not engaged your client with emotion, trust, you have not inspired confidence, demonstrated the ability to deliver hope and the ambitions and desires they have.

Your sales pitch is doomed.

Re-read our previous articles for help if you have no idea what we're talking about at this point!!!

Next time we'll look at what it takes and how to write a great presentation and over the coming weeks, we'll discover:

- what to say and how to say it
- keeping things simple
- the power "slide"
- where to put your executive summary
- the power of practice
- language that resonates, is remembered and illicits a response