You know that the right affluent clients are the lifeblood of your business. But developing a steady stream of ideal clients isn’t always easy.
Affluent clients are busy. A vast majority are professionals or entrepreneurs who are working hard every day. What’s more, they are bombarded with advertising, so they’ve learned to ignore typical marketing tactics.
That’s why elite advisers take a different approach to attracting affluent clients, employing a combination of strategies.
These strategies don’t rely on traditional marketing or advertising. Instead, they use emotion and fascination to position advisers as go-to experts in their markets. They leverage existing relationships in creative ways to help advisers get more introductions to new prospects. And they use technology to help advisers reach out to the exact types of clients they are seeking.
Alone, each of the strategies can rapidly increase your AUM and net income. They help turn skeptical prospects into fans. And they can improve your quality of life. When you use these strategies together, you can create exponential growth in your practice.
TELL YOUR PERSONAL STORY
Advisers are great at using data, logic and facts with prospective clients. But that might not resonate as much as you think. A CEG Worldwide study shows that 84% of affluent clients want to connect with you emotionally first — and then use logic to justify their desire to engage with you. This means who you are and what drives you as a person has a big impact on whether affluent investors will want to work with you.
Therefore, you need to develop and perfect your own compelling personal story to tell to prospective clients. This story should convey, among other things, the passion and commitment you have for serving your specific types of clients and your motivation for wanting to help them make great decisions about their assets. It might be because of financial hardships your family faced when you were growing up or experiences that made you want to help others.
The key is to make it resonate with people on an emotional level so you start to build a strong connection right away.
TAP SOCIAL MEDIA
When you have the right social media strategy, you can show affluent prospects why you’re the best adviser for their distinctive needs. You can explain your competitive advantage and stand out from the crowd.
The right social media platform, as far as I’m concerned, is LinkedIn. A prospective client with wealth will Google you and check out your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn gives you the ability to customize your profile to target your ideal affluent clients.
To really shine, take these steps:
• Use a professionally taken headshot.
• Create a compelling headline. Instead of describing yourself as an adviser, try something like “I help investors build the wealth they need to live their dreams.”
• Be selective with the information. Your hobbies and interests may be a way to connect emotionally with prospects. Where you want to high school — not so much.
• Personalize with apps like SlideShare, which enables you to leverage your personal story and create powerful emotional connections with prospective affluent clients before you meet with them face to face.
• Make it easy to reach you. Advisers commonly forget to give prospects contact information like a phone number or email or website address.
OFFER YOURSELF AS A RESOURCE
Instead of taking the tired old route of asking existing affluent clients for referrals, offer something to them of real value: a second opinion service for people they care about.
When you provide such a second opinion review to clients’ friends, family and colleagues, you help them identify the gap between where they are now financially and where they want to go, and identify whether they are well positioned to close that gap. It’s all about helping the people they care about most — not hitting them up for new business for you. And that makes all the difference.
Even better, offering second opinions to garner introductions is straightforward and not the least bit pushy. At each meeting with clients, simply let them know that:
• You offer a valuable second-opinion financial review service to people they care about. In this review, you’ll look at where they are today and where they want to go and identify any gaps.
• If you feel that they are well-positioned financially to reach their goals, you will say so and encourage them to continue down the path they are already on.
• If they aren’t being well served, you will explore if you are the person to help them.
• If you aren’t, you will point them to an adviser who would be the right fit.
BUILD OUT A WEBINAR
If your firm offers the technology, use webinars and presentations that allow you to communicate to large numbers of ideal prospective clients at one time, instead of having tons of face-to-face meetings. Today, webinars generate nearly half of our new clients at CEG Worldwide.
You already have everything you need to create a successful webinar. After all, a webinar isn’t much different from the face-to-face presentations you do now. The only difference is that you can record a webinar once and use it to attract affluent clients over and over again. It’s an evergreen asset that can have a profound impact on your practice.
To create the webinar, do the following:
• Identify a great topic of interest to your target clients, such as the big financial challenges they face and how to solve them.
• Organize your materials. Gather up research and your insights and organize it into an introduction where you tee up what you’re going to tell viewers, a main body where you give the “meat” of the presentation and a conclusion where you recap what they’ve just learned.
• Create PowerPoint slides to support the things you’ll talk about in the webinar.
INSPIRE ACTION
Remember, webinars are meant to help build your business. So after you’ve presented the main material that you built in Step 4, inspire the audience to take action. Example: Offer them a chance to get a second opinion on their current adviser’s financial blueprint. (Be sure to frame the offer as a valuable and free service. You need to make it 100% clear that you’re not going to subject your prospective clients to a sales pitch.)
After you’ve made your second-opinion offer, you’ll want to give prospective clients a chance to interact with you one on one.
I recommend including a Q&A session in every presentation. A good Q&A solidifies your expert status, demonstrates your skills and gives hesitant prospects another reason to consider raising their hands to explore working with you.
