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How Coaches Help Financial Advisors Exceed Client Acquisition Dreams

By Ray Sclafani | February 12, 2013


Our recent focus in the blog has pinpointed how the successful financial advisor can excel at their client acquisition strategy and process: 

 Today, we bring it all together by explaining how working with a coach can directly accelerate the client acquisition process in your practice, and helping you to meet, and exceed, your client acquisition dreams.

The Client Acquisition Vision

For many successful financial advisors, the client acquisition process is a foundational activity for the top performing financial advisor. It is about creating a vision for your business that will serve your clients, and yourself. A financial advisor might say, “I want to be an $(X) million advisor!” However if the advisor is not passionate and focused about what they are creating, and what clients they are serving, the number is just a number, and not sustainable during challenging times.

Working with a coach can help a financial advisor become really clear and focused on their vision for their business. For example, a coach might help you explore and identify your core values, what you passionately believe in, and how to apply this to the vision for your business. This can become the underlying foundation for building a viable enterprise that will grow over time.

 

Playing to Your Strengths

Client Acquisition is a multi-faceted process. It is rare that any one financial advisor is great at all aspects of this process. Some financial advisors are terrific at building sales and marketing plans that can be implemented by the team. Other advisors are good at the old-fashioned “schmoozing” that works really well during business and social situations. Some advisors are great at detail and processes that are essential in building the client acquisition pipeline. Still other financial advisors are charismatic leaders who are especially adept at exhorting a team to improbable client acquisition goals and achievements.

A good coach understands the value and importance of integrating your strengths into the client acquisition process, as well as identifying those strengths and leveraging them to achieve even greater client acquisition success.

 

Staying Accountable

Accountability can be defined as “the obligation of the individual, firm, or institution to account for its activities, accept responsibility for them, and disclose the results in a transparent manner.”  All coaches work with accountability at some level or another. When the coach is an ‘agent of accountability’ that is focused on the personal actions of the client with respect to client acquisition, the coach might ask:

  • What happened with the commitments that you took from our last coaching conversation?
  • So, what have you learned from this experience?
  • I am noticing that we you are saying now contradicts with what I heard during our last meeting. What's happening here?

 

Setting “Courageous” Goals

Traditional goal setting, e.g. the S.M.A.R.T. goal approach, can be rational, well balanced…and boring. In the new book Challenging Coaching, authors Blakey and Day advocate for “courageous” goal setting. A courageous goal might have the following characteristics:

  • Excitement
  • Buzz
  • Fear
  • Inspiration
  • Imagination
  • Wonder
  • Adventure

 

Working with a coach, can inspire financial advisors to leap-frog the traditional goal setting exercise by challenging the advisor to set goals that are improbable and transformative.

We trust this helps. We wish you the best in your client acquisition efforts. And we invite you to stay connected to ClientWise with regard to building a client acquisition strategy and process that serves your clients, your team, and you.

 

 

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Topics: Client Acquisition

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