Acquiring Clients

Here’s some things you might want to know about what allows our methodology to yield such transformational results. As a Financial Advisor, I feel like I was lucky. By the time I was hired by a Wall Street based investment company I had already figured out that the more successful and the more affluent the Potential Client the less they like the traditional sales process or traditional sales tactics.

I replaced the sales process with an approach that work better for me and for my potential clients. The more my firm tried to persuade me to use the same sale tactics as a successful veteran in our office the more I pushed back saying those sales tactics may work. I’m not saying they don’t but I’m not going to use any of them because I know that people prefer doing business with people that they know and that they like.

I also know that there are more people out there looking for a skilled Financial Advisor than I could possibly ever serve. I’m just going to go out there and:

(1) Place myself in the pathway of lots of potential clients and to do that I’m going to figure out where they hang out together.

(2) I’m going to build my reputation in their eyes since most of them don’t even know I exist.

(3) I’m going to look for potential clients who are already seeking a highly skilled Financial Advisor who’s competent and worthy of trust. Someone who put their interest first.

(4) I’m going to do this because I know there are more clients out there already looking for someone like me than I could serve in ten lifetimes.

I refused to use traditional sales methods to acquire clients and it worked for me because mainly I began consistently adding clients so my supervisory firm stayed off my back but there were still a few pieces of the Business Model that I hadn’t figured out.

For example: After I met a Potential Client my instincts told me that offering a free meeting or doing work at no charge for potential clients reflected an image that’s diametrically opposed to what appealed to the best clients. No other competent professionals who are worthy of trust do that and I was right.

I also realized that investing extra time with my best clients and with other centres of influence that my potential clients respect was a good investment of my time just to get to understand them a little bit better and they provided tons of clues for what potential Ideal Clients want most from their Financial Advisor and what they’re willing to pay most for. And I was right, I could learn much from these people so this was a high pay off activity and also I was shocked to discover that even the most well to do financially successful people sell them at any kind of a written overarching strategy or any consistent oversight in place to regularly determine if they’re on-track or off-track to their goals and I was right.

This was a profitable gap to fill and it still is. I recognized that potential Ideal Clients are even more motivated to seek advice when they have a major financial decision to make especially ones that have deadlines.
I was not only right, but as I focused on building my reputation I discovered that the larger my network the more those already in my network were able to refer because they knew lots of people who are worried about financial deadlines in their lives.

The larger my good reputation network the more frequently I was introduced to people who had major financial decisions to make and also, it seem to me that most potential clients who were already looking for someone like me only had about Ten Pivotal Questions in their head so I started looking into why clients with so few questions still couldn’t find a Financial Advisor to their liking and it turned out that the vast majority of Financial Advisors simply have poor answers to one or more of these questions either poorly articulated or even elusive responses that weren’t clear cut or not clear enough cut to clients.

The remaining Advisors actually have clear responses to those questions but they’re not offering what the potential clients are looking for. Only an infinitesimally small percentage of Financial Advisors have clear, concise responses to what I call “The Ten Pivotal Questions” that were align to what the potential clients are actually seeking.

I had identified the ten areas I needed to master but it took me about a year and a lot of focused effort to master all these elements and reach the tipping point where acquiring clients became easier but it turned out that there was one master skill that served as the catalyst for all the rest. After figuring out this piece of the puzzle everything else fell quickly into place and my results accelerated at that point. That piece was mastering The Initial Client Interview™.

I’m not talking about a scripted presentation. No! I established 15 essential elements that had to be present in The Initial Client Interview™ process. Most important was that the process itself has to be both compelling and valuable in the minds of the potential clients regardless of whether we ever did business together or not. Once I was able to deliver a compelling initial Client Interview Process –a process that at least met all 15 Of The Essential Elements I acquired 83 Ideal Clients in 34 months time exceeding 1.6 million in Annual Recurring Revenue and none of my coaches or consultants had ever seen Ideal Clients acquired at that pace before.

I acquired an average of 2.4 Ideal Clients per month. Month after month. Year after year. And with all the world class coaches who have worked with me. Do you know that none have ever seen my record broken? Which is why I’m sharing all these.

I was told that many years ago by a Financial Advisor, a friend of mine from England. I walked up behind him one day and he was talking to some other people and he said, “The most amazing thing about Mark Little is there’s nothing amazing about Mark Little.”

It sounds, I don’t know, mildly humorous and maybe insulting. Actually, it’s not. Nobody we know of has yet beat my record. Many have come very close using my methods and you know what? I can’t wait until someone does. I’ll be a proud papa, so why not you?

I’m recording this because I want to encourage you to do what nearly every Financial Advisor fails to do.
Make the effort to string together all of these common sense and simple concepts and do them all. Not just a few because the more of sensible and forthright elements that you master the more Ideal Clients that you’ll appeal to and the faster you’ll acquire them as clients and someday, Ideal Clients will be seeking you which is a very refreshing twist.

If you’d like to invest more time understanding how to acquire clients steadily without any sales tactics or methods, you can do so by becoming a free member of The Mark Of Mastery™. You’ll get full access to all the Financial Advisor resources available at no charge to members including the free course –The Only Game in Town™: Ten Game-Changing Strategies For Financial Advisors, which includes an entire lesson about Client Acquisition called “Attracting Ideal Clients”.

That lesson, along with the free workbook provided will give you more ideas about how to master the client acquisition problem, once and for all.

My name is Mark Little, and I welcome you to join us in The Mark Of Mastery™ community.