Prospecting process steps for Financial Services

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are you an aspiring financial advisor well today i want to show you the fastest most effective ways to build your clientele time to think like an investor welcome back to the channel guys if you're new here my name is josh i'm a certified financial planner and i run my own wealth management business and what that means is i help people work out their financial plans and their investments and all sort of financial products but it took me a long time to get here and i made a lot of mistakes along the way but today we're actually up to the point where we're just shy of about 300 amazing clients and we're managing over 10 million dollars in assets and i think we're actually getting closer to 12. it's it's just growing all the time this was even this past week was a really great week and i just want to explain it was not always this way i did not get here easily i started this business back in 2016 i believe is when it began so it's almost been a full five years and it is crazy just how much easier it is now to grow now that i know what i'm doing and i've had that experience of grinding through those first initial years and if i can remember back to what you might be going through if you're new and aspiring it's absolutely terrifying because yes there's so many great things about this business and this career you get to help people achieve their goals and plan for their future and give them that incredible mind-boggling experience of showing them compound interest for the first time and how they can build wealth and retire one day it's so exciting but the problem is is you have to find people to talk to you have to find your own clients which is petrifying for a lot of people and i remember when i first got into the business it was absolutely petrifying for me too because you know i wanted to be successful but i was super apprehensive because who knows if you're going to get rejected who knows if anyone is going to want to sit and talk to you whatsoever and you might have a mortgage debate you might have car bills and how in the heck are you going to make enough money and build your business enough to survive those are probably the big questions going through your head and that's certainly what was going through mine now to set the expectations and if it makes you feel better i absolutely grinded my butt off i was always the first one in and the last one out of the office and i went through a full year of trying to do business and i ended up with 80 clients now 80 is a lot because you have to do a lot more meetings than that to actually get to the point where you've closed 80 different clients and at the beginning they're all going to be very small for me i was at a firm that didn't have a minimum investment requirement and i think that out of those 80 clients we just had shy of a million dollars in assets which means it was like less than you know for sure less than twenty thousand dollars per client i mean some would have fifty thousand but most were starting from scratch and i was just helping them get started so this was by no means some fast track to a high income because it was an absolute slog for the first couple years now there's no getting over the fact that you do have to pay your dues at the beginning there's no way that this is going to be easy but there are certain ways you can do it better and there were some things that i really wish i would have known when i got into the business but before i get into that there's something super important to understand and it's this psychology of scarcity when you are trying to i don't want to say the word sell something but in the reality you're trying to convince someone to do business with you and you're trying to convince them to trust you with your life savings so there's this element of sales involved and the trickiest thing about sales is the scarcity mentality that you have when you need the sale there's a massive difference between dealing someone who you know needs and wants something from you versus dealing with someone who's kind of impartial sure they'd love to make a win-win happen if it's there but if nothing transpires and there's no deal to be done that's just fine that is a way more laid back to the sales process as opposed to you have to buy this you have to do this or else i can't pay my bills that is something that you have to get over and the reason the first few years are really difficult is because you need it you need those deals you need those clients and everyone that rejects you kind of gives you a down vote but the great news is that once you're past that it gets a lot easier once you can go into a client proposal meeting and be completely kind of impartial to what happens you can release your attachment or your connection to the outcome and you can just be yourself that is when things get much easier but before that there's a lot of things you're going to have to do and there's a lot of action you're going to have to take to get to the point where you're at least self-sustaining now in all likelihood you're going to have some form of sales trainer a person in the business who is trying to mentor you and show you how it's done now the problem with that person is they're probably 70 they might even be older and what that means is they're pretty much completely out of touch with how communication goes on nowadays for instance one of the number one ways we are taught to get clients is to cold call that is a horrible idea i remember getting into my mentor's office or my director's office for the first time and he said okay time to start getting clients i'm like oh great i'm all excited he's like all right open up your contacts and i'm like what he's like yeah open up your contacts we're gonna call every single person in your phone contacts and i said excuse me we're gonna call everybody right now it's like 8 p.m on a thursday so yeah we're going to start calling people and i had to get on the phone and try to convince people to come in for a meeting and i had i was completely blindsided i didn't know this was gonna happen that was terrifying and guess what it never works my success rate was zero percent and if you are into this business and you're kind of afraid of cold calling well great news you shouldn't be doing it you don't have to do it it doesn't work anymore what you need to replace that with is something similar but modern and what i believe and i've said this before in other videos is the number one way to get publicity is to start producing online content okay it's like its own version of cold calling you're getting in front of people showing them something of value or something of interest and seeing if they can reciprocate or correspond or message you back and what i mean by this is while you're going through your career you're probably learning all sorts of things you're reading all the most important books on investing you're reading the foundational books of financial planning while you're going through and learning these things document them put them into a youtube video put them into a blog post and what you have is a piece of content that you can share across all of your social media now instead of going one by one to each person and messaging them or cold calling them which is frankly very weird you can blast out something that you're genuinely passionate about and see who reciprocates over time certain people are going to be liking your posts and certain people be commenting or engaging what you do from there is you just keep track of those people and if someone's very engaged over time you can reach out to them and say hey are you open to having a conversation i think that is probably the number one way i was able to get clients and my manager frankly was blown away that i could do that he was like that works that's so weird and i looked at him and thought he was a freak because he randomly called people now the next thing everybody talks about is networking you have to go network and meet people and go to events and i frankly i just hate that word and the reason is because networking doesn't work you go to a networking event and everyone's nervous to talk to each other because everybody in the room knows that they're all trying to get something out of each other and everyone's trying to sell you this that and the other thing the reality is is that you need to redefine networking because it is extremely important to network but don't think of it as networking with an objective see the thing about networking is the best way to do it is to have zero intention it's more like socializing you see for me i was always really fascinated with people and i think this is an advantage i had as i always you know in my high school i knew the name of every single person for some weird reason you could point to a face in the yearbook like that's that person there in that grade for some reason i was very obsessed with who is that person who are they what's my connection to them and over time as i started socializing and meeting different people it just expanded the range of people that might follow me on social media or someone that might be interested in what i do so i wouldn't consider it networking but you have to be socializing part of your job is going to be getting out there and meeting more and more people so that you can capture more potential opportunities so it's massively important to be a very social person something else that i was advised to do was always try to see where there was a money-making opportunity instead of maybe having to go and get more clients try to maximize the money you could get out of one that seems obscene it seems totally outrageous you should almost be thinking in the complete opposite way and i want to talk to you about something that actually worked unbelievably well for me it seems pretty counter-intuitive and my thought was provide free value give away free information whenever someone dm's you or whenever someone asks you a question or whenever you can give away as much value for free as possible and you know that goes against all the business sense that people have which is make sure you can get a paying customer but the reality is is that when you have no paying customers and you have nowhere to go but up you have to think about getting your value out there and a lot of the time you know you could think of this like you know being a videographer being a photographer you want to do free work for people so they can see how good you are or you want to provide people advice for free so that they have that social credit with you they feel like they owe you something and not in some sort of terrible way but they feel as if you've provided them value and they want to return the favor and reciprocate that way so i think in terms of producing online content or socializing being someone who is always giving and being someone who's always responding and providing value to people who have questions is a massive leg up for finding more clients and the last thing that comes to mind is i was always pressured to ask for referrals once i got a new client i was supposed to sit down with that person and say okay mr and mrs smith who else do you know in your constituency who would have a relatively large amount of assets and blah blah blah it was just terrible like how do you talk to someone like that and say hey i've sold you something do you have any other friends i can sell stuff to it doesn't really go over that well so i want to think about it a different way what i would do is make sure i did a tremendous job of pitching that client and giving that client a fantastic experience and also making sure that i followed up over time every single year getting in front of them every couple months getting into contact seeing how they were doing with life in general and kind of having more of a friendship and over time what that did is it created referrals for me it wasn't as if i had to beg for them or ask for them you know it took a little bit of time for those start to roll in but right now today by far and away my largest source of new clients is referrals and when i started by far the biggest source was social media so over time you're kind of building this presence as someone who provides value and you're giving away free value and attracting attention that's what's going to get you the clients at the start and as you do great work for them they're going to start to refer by the time you're in your third or fourth year all of these seeds you've planted and been watering are going to start to actually grow and bear fruit and you're going to have more clients than you know to deal with which seems like a really good problem but then you're on to the next problem but anyways guys thank you so much for watching this video and spending your time here if you learned anything from this video whatsoever and want to support the channel make 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