What Business Are You Really In?

As an advisor, it’s important to realize that you’re not in the financial advice business.

First and foremost, you’re in the problem-solving business.

The reason this shift in thinking is important, is because it doesn’t matter how competent you are or how long you’ve had your practice, if your potential client in your initial conversation with you, doesn’t fully grasp the totality and impact of their issues, they’ll never agree to move forward to solve them with you.

Shifting from being solution-centric to problem-centric is the key to creating deep trust in your sales process…and shortening your sales cycle from multiple meetings.

This sounds like a simple and obvious shift, but often times your prospect will tell  you what they want from you — and you’ll be tempted to respond with education and potential solutions to prove your value.

It’s easy to assume they fully understand what they need and respond to them from there.

Yet, not challenging their assumptions and helping them see things they can’t see about their own situation, keeps the ball in your court to provide answers.

The key to earning respect and trust is to not assume that a potential client knows what they want, nor understands the truth of their problem in its entirety.

What they’re really looking for, which they can’t always articulate, is a truth-teller, someone to show them what they don’t know about their own challenges.

For example, your prospect says to you: “I’m retiring soon and am looking to hire a financial advisor”.

That statement doesn’t describe their problem, it only describes what they want and bypasses the big picture underneath their initial request.

Rather than running with what they describe to you as their initial issue, instead say:

“Not a problem. Happy to help you with that. What might be helpful is if we can take a step back for a moment, so you can walk me through your background, your situation and your biggest financial concerns and we can go from there. Would you be open to that?”.

This puts you in their world and avoids the possibility of dangerous assumptions being made that could derail the sales process later, or worse, makes it easy to place the blame on your shoulders when you give them what they want but, it doesn’t match exactly what they need.

If they try to skip forward and take you down another path, continue to stay present in their world and explore questions where they begin to go below the surface level of their issues.

Whatever the details may be, the point is to continue going deeper underneath their problem until it feels like they understand the urgency of wanting to solve it.

When you get to this point and the problem becomes undeniably clear, finish the conversation by asking this: “Is this a priority for you to resolve once and for all?”.

Your job in your initial sales conversation with a potential client is not to make the sale. It’s to help them get to the truth of their problems, so they can own them and commit to solving them.

By helping them own their challenges this way, you’ll minimize the possibility of having to “chase” them after the initial conversation.