Do you love to prospect? Do you get into the office and can’t wait to make that first call? If you are like most advisors and agents, you don’t! You probably look for anything else to do rather than prospecting. Does this sound like you?
Most advisors and agents don’t have a well-thought-out process for prospecting. The reason is they’ve never learned a step-wise approach to understanding what it takes to love prospecting. And how to do it successfully so that they create unlimited success!
Brian Tracy says, “Keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them.”
Let’s take a look at a step-wise approach to understanding what it takes to foster a love prospecting:
Step 1: Understand the Reality of Not Prospecting
Let’s face it, if you don’t prospect, your business doesn’t grow. And, since a business can only go in one of three ways (increase, decrease, or production plateau), you are setting yourself up for failure because staying on a production plateau is never permanent due to client attrition. And that is why you have to face the reality that when you don’t prospect, you continue to contribute to the eventual decline of your business.
Step 2: Schedule a Time for Prospecting
At this point, if you have accepted the fact that you need to prospect, it’s time to schedule a time to do so. I recommend that you schedule at least forty-five minutes to prospect and make it the very first thing that you do each day. That way, you can start the day off prospecting for new business and filling your pipeline.
Step 3: Prepare Your Prospecting Process
It’s important to understand that your time is valuable, and you need to prepare what you are going to say the minute the prospect picks up the phone. When that moment arrives, you have about 60-90 seconds to do the following:
- Introduce yourself and where you are from
- Explain why you are calling
- Give the prospect at least three great benefits
What I have just explained is a technique called “Framing the Conversation”. Once you do this, the prospect will most likely give you an objection, which you must be ready to overcome.
Step 4: Leverage Your Efforts
In order to have an entirely new level of prospecting success, you need all the help you can get! In other words, you need leverage, new tools to get better results. The tool that I use with my financial advisor and insurance agent clients that creates the most leverage is called The Advisor’s Edge Worksheet, an Excel spreadsheet that helps you to overcome any and all possible objections when prospecting. This takes all of the guesswork out of knowing what to say when in the midst of a moment. Some of my clients also use this tool as a way to memorize their rebuttals.
Step 5: Play the Prospecting Game
One of the best ways to turn your newfound activities into old habits is to turn prospecting into a game and play the game each day. When you gamify prospecting and attach a reward system to winning the game and a punishment system to losing, you change your focus to turning prospecting into a fun activity.
In addition, you can always try to beat your high score to have a record day! One advisor did this for months while trying to overcome objections and realized that his high score was 27 objections in one day. Years later, I asked him if he had ever beaten that record, and he simply replied, “Every day!”
Step 6: Be Accountable
The next step is to find an accountability partner, which adds an extra level of leverage because you are emailing them each day to tell them your prospecting score, if you won or lost the game, and if you rewarded or punished yourself. In addition, they are doing the same to you. This creates camaraderie as well as ancillary learning because you both can learn from one another’s successes as well as failures.
Step 7: Have Fun
The final step is the byproduct of the previous steps because once you put all of these steps into place, you will have more success than you ever had. As a result, you will be having fun while prospecting!
Why Learning to Love Prospecting Works
The reason why “What it Takes to Love Prospecting” works is that it’s a step-wise approach to enjoying the process of prospecting. When you use all of the previous steps along with other strategies that I discuss in The Advisor Solutions Podcast Episode #62, Learning to Love Prospecting, you will find that prospecting is something that you embrace, as it is just a natural part of building a better business. And that is something I’m sure you will love!