Combine your advice and sales process to scale

The Conundrum

As a financial advisor, you are in a unique position that you essentially need to look after 2 different stakeholders when you perform your duties.

Firstly, you need to look after your clients because your core function is to make sure that they end up in a good financial position.

Secondly, you need to look after yourself. This may sound controversial, but at the end of the day, you need to eat and survive.

Historically, the view of financial advisors is not positive. If you don’t believe me, google “can financial advisors be trusted?” and see for yourself.

You see, most people view advisors as dodgy salespeople who are only in it for the money.

Why is this? Historically an advisor’s sales process took the front seat when dealing with a client and the actual advice process was left cowering in the back seat.

The reason for this is not that advisors are “dodgy”. It’s not even because Advisors need to feed themselves and their families. The main reason is that the advice process and the sales process are so far removed from each other that one will always be more prominent than the other. Unfortunately, because these are usually 2 separate processes clients often felt that the sales process was more prominent and therefore labeled the advisor as a product salesperson.

This is how it usually goes

An advisor spends a lot of time getting to know their client and understanding their needs. Even after the discovery stage advisors have to do a lot of work to get clients to tell them everything, because clients don’t easily trust advisors and so they hold back critical pieces of information. This leaves the advisor with an incomplete picture (We’ll see the problem with this later).

The advisor would then go away and spend time creating a plan for the client based on the information they have and the client's current affordability. Hours would be spent creating a large document filled with numbers, jargon, and recommendations.

Days or even weeks later the advisor would be happy enough to meet with the client and present their proposal to them. This is where the tough sale starts and the advisor pulls out all the stops running through the proposal with confidence and has their shiny “Deal Pen” ready for the client to sign the proposal.

This is often the point where clients start saying things like, “why this product?” or “Do I really need this?” or the dreaded, remember we mentioned this earlier, “but doesn’t my (product advisor didn't know about) cover this?”.

At this point, the advisor would gently place their shiny “Deal Pen” back in their pocket and start scrambling. They generally use more and more Jargon trying to see if they can get the client over the line. Eventually, the advisor asks the client about the products they hadn’t mentioned previously and agrees to start the process over.

The advisor goes away and comes back with a new proposal and has to work even harder to explain why the recommendations in the old proposal are now incorrect and convince the client that this is now the best solution.

This process goes back and forth until either, the client agrees and the advisor’s shiny “Deal Pen” gets some action or the client decides that they are no longer interested in speaking with the advisor.

Whatever the result, the client has the same feeling and remembers the advisor as the salesperson who sold them X product.

In a world where your client's opinion matters, this is not ideal.

How do we fix this?

The process is obviously broken and wastes time. We want clients to get a better outcome by using the best solutions for them, while still making sure advisors can scale and grow their businesses. Most importantly, we want clients to view you as an ally and an important part of their future.

There is really only one logical solution…

The Advice process and the Sales process should be One Process.

This sounds obvious, but the reality is that the general way of providing financial advice has made this impossible right? I’m here to tell you, there is a way…

Imagine this

During the discovery phase, you, being the rockstar advisor you are, sit with a client and cleverly use technology to guide the discussion. Every time your client speaks about an asset, it is added to their profile and they see their projection adjust in real-time. Now that they're intrigued they say “what if we add my X asset?” and this goes on until their entire financial roadmap is complete right in front of their eyes.

They understand where they are, where they want to be and where their shortfalls are. The next question is usually “so how do I make this look better?”. At this stage, you show them what adding an extra asset does or what increasing a contribution would do, and even how switching to a more suitable asset allocation would benefit them. All the while your client is watching their portfolio projection adjusting with each suggestion. Eventually, all the levers have been pulled and together you and your client have created a new plan for them. This is not a plan that has been forced upon them or sold to them, but rather this is their plan, one that they have helped create.

Your client understands why certain products are necessary and why certain recommendations have been made and they decide to implement the solution.

This is a win-win situation for both you and your client. You don’t have to spend hours preparing proposals and selling these to the client. Your client understands the best course of action because they were involved in the process all along.

Ultimately, the sale has happened as a by-product of an incredibly engaging and robust advice and sales process.

The irony is that both of the above processes often result in similar recommendations, the difference however is the opinion that your client will have of the process and of you.

The choice is yours

You see, in the past Advisors didn't have the choice. We had to be salespeople to succeed, but times have changed and so have the resources that are available.

The choice is how you want to be perceived by clients and whether being a “salesperson” in today’s world is sustainable.

Our clients decided that it wasn’t and now they're loving closing and onboarding clients quickly and efficiently.

You could do this too, your future clients and future self will thank you.