In the past, being friendly and knowledgeable during your sales conversation was all it took to build trust with a prospect and make the sale.
It was relatively easy to impress prospects and have them feel they had discovered a true authority who cared (which was all they needed to make a decision).
If only those days still existed, life would be wonderful.
Now, your prospect won’t assign you that authority and trust.
They expect you to impress them. They are shopping you against other advisors.
Here’s what your prospects are doing: They’re shopping for their advisor by speaking to as many as they can, and then comparing them against each other, deciding whom to choose.
Most advisors have no choice in this new market environment but to adapt to this shopping process.
To break out of your prospect’s selection process and avoid being commoditized as an advisor, you must shift them out of their shopping-mode mindset.
The shopping-mode mindset comes from your prospect thinking they fully understand their issue or situation, and therefore have a sense of what they need (they think they know what they’re shopping for).
If this mindset isn’t challenged, it leads to two problems:
1.) You aren’t being perceived as the expert; your prospect assumes that role.
2.) You can’t assess the depths of their issues; instead, they’re assessing you.
The truth is that your prospect is operating on false assumptions.
Chances are high there are underlying factors they’ve never considered and couldn’t consider because they’re not a financial expert. But they are the root cause of how their situation has become a problem in the first place.
The traditional advisory sales process, which focuses on building rapport and trying to sell value, overlooks this fact and leaves these assumptions unchallenged.
It leaves your prospect unaware or without deep enough insight into their own situation, so they continue their casual shopping-mode approach of gathering information first, to decide later.
This is the reason for the classic indecisive response you often hear: “I need to think about it.”
To shift them out of this behaviour, you need a process that takes the focus off you and your expertise as an advisor, and places it on them and their situation.
You can no longer impress them with your knowledge.
You can impress them by using a finely tuned diagnostic process that takes a deep dive into their situation and brings any underlying assumptions to the surface, where they can be examined together.
The clarity your prospect gains from going through this leads to a very different mode of thinking. They begin to:
You become more than just an advisor to them… you become an authority that they feel they’ve discovered and can trust.
This is what it takes to shift your prospect out of shopping-mode into decision-making mode, where they feel it’s necessary to go with you.
To learn how to reach this level of trust with your prospect in your sales process, order your complimentary book and consultation below.