by Tony Vidler 
Imagine the difference to your business if you were able to convert twice as many opportunities. You spend the same money and effort but get twice as many sales as a result…it would add a bit to your bottom line wouldn’t it?
The decades old strategy of crunching through the numbers is dead. The idea of spending all that effort to generate 10 new opportunities and then maybe turn that into 3 prospect meetings, and THEN maybe turn that into one client is just woefully inefficient. I’d suggest that it doesn’t really help your business brand either. After all, 90% of those opportunties decided you weren’t right or weren’t good enough. Even if they are fundamentally not unhappy with you, that is a lot more detractors than supporters out in the marketplace who have experienced your professional service.
That’s pretty poor whichever way you look at it.
To recap some points I have made many times in many previous articles:
The missing ingredients for most financial advisers that would change all of this is
PATIENCE plus PROCESS.
Patience is needed for many prospective customers to get to know you and build confidence….and patience is needed for many prospects to get to the point where the time is right for them to act…..and patience is certainly needed if we want prospective customers to feel as if we are actually providing professional advice and service. Relatively few good future clients like dealing with people who are hustling and pushing them to buy something. So patience is essential in todays mad, chaotic, and busy world.
Patience has to be supported with process though if it is to be successful in converting those opportunites. You can be as patient as a Buddhist monk, but if you are not maintaining top of mind awareness with the prospective clients of the future then your patience is worthless. They will forget you in the busy-ness of their lives. So patience is essential, but it is not enough to increase those opportunity conversions.
Having a process that maintains communication and allows the relationship and levels of trust to develope is needed. Consumers will most frequently choose to work with the professional adviser who demonstrates knowledge and expertise in advance, and who shows that professional patience…..as long as they remember them!
Get them to agree to receiving your newsletters or blogposts….send them to your website to access useful information and tools and calculators…have them come along to seminars….whatever it is, develope a patient process of engagement which they opt in to. It is powerful, because one of the universal principles of influence is “commitment”, and it is an important component in todays successful marketing plan. Showing a commitment to delivering value, and obtaining a series of small commitments to engage a little more, and edge a little closer, is the key to higher conversion of the marketing opportunities you have created.
Thinking about how – and where – customers will begin their engagement (whether you are entirely ready or not!) after you have their attention will highlight the engagement system you must build. By creating the right presence and the right support systems to deliver meaningful and relevant content as they move through the buying cycle is the difference between blowing 70% of the leads your marketing generates, or converting 70% of the leads into customers.
It is relatively easy to get the attention of your chosen market today. It is harder to keep it. To do so, build an en engagement system that drives interest through to the desire phase for potential customers. The sales process doesn’t really begin until customers are already moving into the desire phase of the buying cycle, and if that is done well then the sales process is an anti-climax.
Patience plus process produces much higher conversions of the opportunties you work so hard to create.
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