The Mistake – Most advisors position themselves using the traditional value proposition or the “elevator pitch” describing who they are, what they do and the types of clients they work with. This traditional approach is misguided and ineffective for two main reasons. First, it’s solely focused on YOU. Second, in today’s marketplace, it’s very difficult to articulate something about YOU that truly makes you different from any other advisor out there. We see an almost universal use of the same phrases that advisors use when we ask them how they position and differentiate – “team of experts,” “comprehensive/holistic wealth management,” “great people,” “local service,” “we focus on planning”.  Advisors must have a better approach to differentiation!

The Correction – To make a better, more immediate impact on your prospects, position yourself and your firm in a way that is relevant to them and not just about you. One way to do this is to articulate the role you play in the lives of your clients, how you deliver on that role, and the outcomes they can expect in working with you.

The Mistake – This is a huge mistake that too many advisors make. They often ask for general objectives and/or simply assume what the prospect’s priorities are based on basic, “shallow” questions, and then hastily transition to a focus on financial discovery.

The Correction – As Joe Duran proclaimed in a 2020 interview, to be successful, “you’d better be singing a song that’s better than everyone else.” The key difference – which he refers to as “the magic pill” – is your ability to DEEPLY understand your prospect through the discovery process. This crucial element of the sales experience is about asking the right questions with “authentic curiosity” to understand your prospect more intimately than anyone else … not just financially, but knowing their personal, family and business priorities as well as the values behind them.

The Mistake – Too often advisors go into new prospect meetings focused solely on what the prospect wants to address, while overlooking a significant opportunity to deliver unexpected value that leaves the prospect seeing you as uniquely valuable. This is not to say that an advisor should ignore the prospect’s agenda in any way – that must be part of the discussion. But the best advisors expertly analyze the situation comprehensively and identify additional issues and challenges the prospect should be addressing.  The result is delivering clear expertise and value even in the first interaction in a way that solidifies their true breadth of your wealth management expertise.

The Correction – “Unexpected value” can be achieved with thorough pre-meeting research, leveraging the deep understanding you gain in #2 above, and employing your team’s expertise to analyze their current situation to identify the key issues they should be addressing, above and beyond their stated issues, and often of which they are not aware.

The Mistake – Our industry has a habit of presenting or explaining to prospects our ideas and advice. While it’s important that our clients recognize and understand these things, just listening to you explain them more likely results in a lack of engagement and full understanding … just like your high schooler who fails to fully pay attention to the “advice” you are giving them!

The Correction – It’s important to remember that people can avoid an assertion, but they can’t avoid a question. To maximize engagement and understanding, we should be ASKING QUESTIONS that require our prospects to think through and articulate how they are addressing the specific topic or issue we want them to recognize and together, assess and confirm how effectively they are addressing it. And please note, this is NOT just about asking “open-ended questions;” it’s about engaging the prospect with specific, well-structured, process-oriented questions that compel them to think through the issue and as a result more likely recognize the importance and urgency of addressing it.

The Mistake – We’ve found so often that one of the outcomes advisors hope for in a first meeting is simply to get another meeting to remain engaged with the prospect. With that underwhelming objective (often the result of lacking a tight, intentional, and repeatable sales process), the focus at the close of the meeting is solely on the next step in terms of what we will discuss or do in that subsequent meeting. Lacking clarity on what the entire process will entail, when it will end, and what the prospect will get from it tends to leave them somewhat reluctant to move forward.

The Correction – If the prospect is a fit for you and you know you are the right solution for them, confidently and succinctly explain the process you will go through with them, including the commitments, steps involved, and the outcomes they can expect, clearly defining when the process will end whether they become a client or not. And don’t be afraid to accelerate the process! If truly differentiated value is delivered in this first meeting, the next step – as happened in a few of the opportunities in our example at the top of this post – could very well be formally initiating the new relationship.