Welcome back to the 88th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.
This week’s guest is Nancy Bleeke. Nancy is the founder of Sales Pro Insider, a sales training platform for financial advisors that teaches how to better turn prospects into actual clients.
What’s unique about Nancy is her somewhat non-traditional sales training approach, which isn’t about pushing features and benefits and going for the hard close, but simply about having a structure to the conversation that occurs in an approach talk with the prospect to ultimately help them make a decision or take an action at the end. Because the reality is, even if you’re in the business to get paid for your advice and not to sell your company’s products, you still have to sell someone on the reason why they should hire you and pay your fee in the first place.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about Nancy’s WIIFT structure to the sales conversation, which is both focusing on the “what’s in it for them” of the WIIFT acronym, but also a five-step conversation process of wait and prepare, initiate, investigate, facilitate, then consolidate. The importance of asking more questions to really understand a prospect’s context so that you can refine and right-size the information that you give them, and the dangers of giving prospects more information than they actually need in a manner that can just put them into analysis paralysis instead of helping to motivate them to take an action or make a decision.
We also talk about the actual key questions to ask a prospect throughout the meeting process. From setting an agenda with them in advance of every meeting to ensure you’re really discussing what they want to discuss, by asking what it is that brought them to the meeting to begin understanding what their real problems, opportunities, wants, and needs are, asking prospects for feedback about how your services and proposal sound to them as you describe it to them, and being certain at the end of a meeting to actually ask for their business and making it crystal clear what the next step would be in order for them to proceed.
And be sure to listen to the podcast end, where Nancy explains why the biggest and most common problem that financial advisors make in trying to get new clients is the tendency to try to convince clients that they need a financial plan in the first place, instead of listening to what they actually want and need, and relating the benefits of financial planning to their problems and concerns.
So whether you’re interested in learning about building a more effective framework around your conversations with clients, how to demonstrate your expertise in a way that builds trust, or how to structure meetings to increase conversion rates, then we hope that you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.