Want an Immediate, Powerful and Sustainable Boost to your Revenue? Perfect your Approach to Strategic Pre-Call Planning

Pre-call planning, once perfected, is one of - if not THE - most powerful practices we know of to accelerate revenue growth while enhancing your teams’ ability to consistently deliver truly differentiated value in their prospect and client calls

Yet, the reality is that many do not even do pre-calls prior to a prospect or client meeting, and when they do, often lack the proper focus and framework that will ensure maximum impact and results in the calls.

Our clients often engage us to work with their teams to better position themselves to win new opportunities with prospects and clients. Through our participation in numerous pre-call sessions over the years we’ve gained incredibly valuable insight on how the typical pre-call plan transpires and, more importantly, some specific mistakes that are consistently made that lead them to be less productive than they should be.

For some of these insights and actions you can take to enhance the impact of your prospect and client calls, read on.

“Changing the focus and format for our team’s pre-call sessions has been transformative for our team. More than anything we’ve ever done, this has helped us translate the training we’ve had into real-life application”.

The Core Issue – Self-Centric versus Other-Centric

Before getting into the common tactical mistakes we see, there’s one overriding issue (thread throughout the list below) that if addressed will significantly enhance the impact of your prospect and client calls. It essentially comes down to asking,

Are we genuinely focused on the interests of the client and what matters to them, or on our own interests?

Most-often unknowingly and due to habit, the focus tends to be on what WE need to do to accomplish OUR business objectives. Clients can innately read which of these are driving you, and rarely do they meet with an advisor solely focused on THEM, detached from their own personal business objectives.

Be pure in your intent and trust the results!

Making this critical shift in your pre-calls, is a game-changer. Those advisors and teams who do so – with a commitment to serve this client or prospect with unequivocal purity of intent – clearly differentiate themselves from other advisors by delivering a more valuable and impactful client experience while simultaneously realizing greater success and meaning in what they do every day.

Take your Pre-Calls to the Next Level – 6 Key Mistakes to Avoid

With that in mind, here are six of the most common pre-call planning mistakes we see that if avoided, significantly enhance your ability to deliver a differentiated experience and convert more opportunities into actual revenue.

Based on our years of experience participating in pre-call planning sessions, we’re left with absolutely no doubt that Strategic Pre-Call Planning, when perfected, will have a profound impact on your clients, your prospects, and your results. Recognizing this, we’ve developed Pre-Call Planning Frameworks for both prospect and client calls that have consistently helped our clients achieve three important outcomes:

  1. Clarity around the goals and tactics in each call that lead to:   
    • — Maximum impact in every prospect and client call
    • — Significantly enhanced potential to generate immediate revenue,
    • — A noticeably accelerated sales cycle for prospect calls,
    • — Enhanced loyalty and advocacy with existing clients.
  2. Development of the skills and practices that will improve performance in the specific call you are preparing for AND for future calls.   
  3. The assurance of greater consistency from advisor-to-advisor and team-to-team in the delivery of your intended client experience.  

Take Action to Improve your Game 

Drawing from our experience in so many pre-call sessions, we’ve developed a series of real-life case studies, each highlighting in more detail one or two key tactics that served to transform the focus of the pre-call and the success of the actual call. To access these, simply click this link Client Experience in Action Pre-Call Case Studies.

About Rick Swygman and David Greene