“Tire Kickers” – Is More Leads The Solution?
I spoke with a very experienced advisor recently, a 69-year-old who has been in the game for 36 years.
He told me that although he was financially secure himself, he was still working to get the business in good shape, before he passed it on or sold it.
His number one struggle was (in his own words), “too many tire kickers”.
He had leads coming in, but not enough were becoming new paying clients, and this was placing an immense burden on him, as well as frustrating his desire to feel at peace about retiring.
Having enough leads, but not enough paying clients, is a perplexing problem most advisors struggle with.
The initial conclusion is that the problem must be with lead generation in general – people are just more skeptical and less trusting these days, which is partially true.
What if we stop thinking of prospects who don’t commit as “tire-kickers”, and instead view them as potential clients we lost?
That would suggest that the problem could be with us, not them.
A scary thought to digest at first.
Clearly they have an issue they’re looking for help with, but there’s something about us or our process that causes them to remain indecisive.
Let’s examine this closer.
A lead or prospect (I prefer the term “potential client”) has an initial meeting with you.
You obtain their financial documents and create a financial plan for them.
They come back for another meeting for you to show them the financial strategy you’ve prepared, hoping they’ll feel comfortable committing to a paid client relationship with you.
But what usually happens next?
They often times say: “Thank you, let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.”
It’s as if they see the value in plain sight, but something prevents them from making a decision to onboard with you.
Here are some possible blind spots to consider, that could be the source of this problem:
1.) Waiting for your turn to talk instead of listening
As experts, we often feel we need to prove our credibility to the prospect by asking fact-finding questions. This can cause us to interrupt the sales conversation prematurely, making assumptions about the prospect’s situation, not allowing deep trust to be created.
2.) Educating about solutions, instead of thoroughly diagnosing their problems
Your priority in the sales conversation should be to help them “own” their problem by taking them through a diagnostic process (I call it “going down the iceberg”). Unless they fully comprehend the financial impact of their problem, they won’t agree to solve it.
3.) Building surface level rapport instead of trust
You’ve been taught to build relationships with your prospects, but instead, you should be building deep trust. Without that, all that “relationship-building” amounts to is surface level rapport. A relationship comes after the sale, not before.
4.) Presenting future benefits instead of quantifying their present losses
Future benefits = something to think about
Present losses = something to act on now
The solution to having too many leads who don’t become clients is not about getting more leads, it’s about fixing sales conversion first.
After all, there’s no point in filling the bucket with more leads when it still has holes at the bottom.
Stopping the losses by plugging up the holes in your sales process is the less obvious solution, but it has the greatest ROI.
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Ari Galper is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling and is one the most sought-after sales conversion experts for Financial Advisors.
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