Some financial advisors use prospecting strategies that create the incorrect potential customers (i.e. poor sales leads). I define a wrong prospect as a person who\’s not actually interested, not qualified or difficult to cope with. Essentially, somebody who wastes your precious time and, if they do turn out to be a client, they use up so much of your time that you wish they weren\’t.

You produce these ill-qualified prospects by making use of unfocused mass marketing and advertising approaches. As an example, in the event you telephone a list of individuals age 65+ attempting to obtain long-term care appointments, you\’re generating the wrong prospects. You\’ve got no idea if these folks have an interest or are qualified. So you waste a great deal of time contacting and then meeting individuals who\’re not qualified or interested. I call this becoming a “sales laborer.” You waste large quantities of time on non-revenue-generating activities.

With such un-targeted marketing and promotion methods, you start the business relationship by giving the power and control to the prospect. You made the request of them for a consultation. Does your doctor call and request a consultation of you? Of course not as this is not what professionals do. When chased in this fashion, the prospects are able to accept or decline and they have the power. You come after them. Wouldn’t you prefer they pursue you?

Would it be smarter if you only met with the serious capable prospects and spent a lot more of your time in a sales presentation? Would it be much better should you attract these interested folks to you and operate as a “sales professional” and not a sales laborer? Here’s the secret to appealing to qualified prospects and serious prospects: set up your advertising and promotions to be sure that prospects show their interest prior to you ever making contact with them. Let them to request your contact!

Instead of plowing through your suspect list with cold calls, send a well-penned, direct response mailer. Even in the event you receive a 1% response to 1,000 items mailed, that’s 10 engaged folks who took action. They reached you and requested something of you. You begin in control of the relationship.

Once you call them, you qualify them and get rid of, say 50% from additional consideration. You get five appointments. These are the identical five appointments you\’d have obtained with the cold calling, but look just how much easier this was. As opposed to talking with a thousand individuals, you talked to 10 individuals. As opposed to meeting with 10 men and women, you met with five. You conserved perhaps twenty-five hours of your precious time and invested $500 on postage and mailing. (In other words, had you cold-called, you put a value your time at twenty dollars an hour for the mailing cost you saved. Is that all you’re worth–twenty dollars an hour)?

As you now know that you are able to get more appointments by sending direct mail, you may not be so desperate for each and every scheduled prospect visit. You are able to qualify individuals well and weed out those that have a low odds of being a client. You invest your valuable time meeting with the most encouraging prospects and your closing percentage rises since you meet with a lot more qualified prospects.

In the event you ran an advertisement within the local senior magazine or on the web, “Avoid Errors in Acquiring Long-Term Care Insurance–Get the Totally free Guide for Seniors.” You then have a several prospects to call who\’re engaged and motivated. You\’ve preserved your time and limited the prospects you deal with to those that take initiative. These are the kinds of individuals you would like as clients. You don\’t want folks who need to be convinced and persuaded, which is the sort of prospect that\’s produced with unfocused cold calling. Sales laborers spend time with prospects that require persuading. Sales Experts spend time in sales presentations with serious, determined prospects who take the initial step.

Or what about putting a flyer within the main newspaper for your next class.

Say it\’s an LTC seminar: “90% of Seniors Have Inferior Health Protection.” In our tests, 10,000 inserted flyers (for about $500) generates 25 individuals to a workshop. You give a presentation to 25 inspired individuals at one time and then have individual appointments. Classes make super-efficient use of your time (you give the identical presentation at as soon as to 25 or much more folks). Folks who attend seminars are really motivated as they had to post the activity on their schedule, get prepared and get to the location on time. Should you use classes to market your expertise, you\’ll generate really targeted prospects, a higher percentage of which grow to be clients.

If price will be the hang-up to pursuing intelligent marketing and advertising as illustrated above, contemplate that if you keep doing what you\’ve been doing, you insure that your earnings won\’t improve simply because you throw away your selling time and effort on improper prospecting. Even when you have no funds obtainable for advertising, just take a $500 loan from your credit card. You will produce a many-times ROI and you’ll be determined to earn and pay back this credit card advance prior to your credit card statement arriving.

If you want to be a very large producer, a quick approach would be to invest cash into your organization, not your time. Your time should be committed to sales activities and absolutely nothing else. It is the model utilized by probably the most effective businesses in existence today-invest cash at the start and grow huge and profitable rapidly. Invest the cash to ensure that your time could be utilized for appointments with qualified prospects. As an excellent instructor said to me, “You are required to put wood inside the fireplace first before it emits any heat.

If you’re sick and tired of prospecting, burnt out and feel that good prospects are hard to find, observe how the above ideas may be simply applied at the blogs listed below.

Author Bio: See Bob Richards blog on tips for anyone doing direct sales and marketing, especially if you sell any type of financial product, at Insurance Marketing

Category: Marketing
Keywords: financial services marketing,insurance marketing,insurance prospecting