Introductions, or referrals, are essential to a financial advisor’s marketing strategy.

Nothing beats a strong introduction, you’re relying on your client as the trusted go between to introduce you to someone who needs your services.

Unfortunately, many new advisors struggle with asking their clients for introductions. 

The struggle is amplified when dealing with prospective clients – advisors may not be confident enough to request an introduction from people who haven’t used their services yet. This can cause advisors to miss out on potential new business.

While it may seem counterintuitive, there’s nothing wrong with asking a prospective client for an introduction. 

It is recommended advisors focus on generating introductions from existing and prospective clients, however, there are effective and less effective ways to do it. 

In this post, we discuss some tips and review a script that can help you get comfortable asking prospective clients to introduce you to their family and friends.

How To Introduce Yourself To A Prospective Client

Asking for an introduction can be uncomfortable, even scary for some advisors and this is normal.

A crucial part of overcoming this fear is recognizing that you’re providing high quality services to your clients backed by the support of a reputable financial services organization.

Internalizing the belief that the products, your network and level of service is so high that it’s your duty to let others know so they can reap the benefits, is key to unlocking your confidence.

When asking for an introduction, understanding the above psychology can positively impact your tone and body language and help reduce nervous energy when speaking with clients.

Before getting into a referral script, let’s look at some less effective practices when asking for an introduction:

Avoid Pushiness 

Avoid appearing pushy. For example, don’t ask clients or prospects for their family and friends’ contact information.

Avoid Pressure 

Refrain from using guilt and other emotional pressure tactics when requesting introductions. It can come across as insincere and people see through it.

Avoid Desperation 

Don’t use phrases or language suggesting your business is slow, or sales are down as it weakens your brand.

Avoid Hard sell 

When speaking with clients and prospects, always keep them in mind and bring the conversation back to their needs, not your own.

Let’s look at a tested script when seeking an introduction. 

When you approach the end of a meeting with a client or prospect, consider the following script:

“It’s been great chatting with you today and learning about your financial needs and goals. I’m looking forward to continuing our conversation. As you’re aware, I’m working to get my business off the ground and if you have any ideas on how I can grow my business I’d appreciate it. I’m focusing on working with people going through significant life changes such as starting a new business, getting married, having children or retiring. It was great to meet you and please keep me in mind.”

This approach is more effective because it’s indirect and avoids the pitfalls listed above.  What’s more, it doesn’t directly ask for an introduction. 

Your delivery (tone and pace) is important and can affect the success of this approach. Again, the beliefs you internalize about yourself and the products and services you’re offering can impact how your request comes across to the client or prospect. 

Many other template scripts are available, and we encourage you to try and test them.

Using Introductions As Part Of A Successful Marketing Strategy

Advisors that attract the most clients usually have a comprehensive system of frameworks, habits and scripts that work together to project a compelling value proposition to clients and prospects. 

However, asking for introductions is the cornerstone of successful marketing strategies, and we suggest thoughtfully engaging all clients and prospects to generate introductions. 

Asking every client and prospect to refer you increases your chances of driving new sales and ultimately getting your business off the ground and growing faster.

Are you interested in becoming a financial advisor? At Canada Financial we offer excellent growth opportunities. Please fill out our form below:

Achieving success in the financial services industry depends on an institution’s ability to build strong and lasting relationships with clients. However, many firms struggle to implement client-centered practices in their day to day operations. Unlike these firms, CF puts the interests of our advisors at the forefront of everything we do. And there’s a good reason for that – if our advisors succeed, their clients succeed and our entire network thrives.

Since the inception of our business, we’ve consistently developed and implemented client-centric policies and practices giving our advisors a competitive edge in the Canadian financial services market.

Below we outline some of the best practices that continue to make CF Canada Financial a top destination for advisors to build successful businesses, helping Canadians grow and protect their wealth.

Onboard good people and deliver ongoing, tailored training and support 

Advisors need to feel confident with the products and services they’re offering their clients or they may not be able to get a strong foothold in the competitive financial services market.

We differentiate from the competition by recruiting well rounded, knowledgeable advisors and we provide them the training, tools and resources they need to grow their businesses. 

Moreover, we provide comprehensive financial education to advisors in addition to sales techniques and skills training. This builds advisor confidence which translates into business success.

From the moment you begin working with CF Canada Financial, you’ll have access to propriety training methods, a network of Managing Partners committed to your success, and a library of detailed training resources to elevate your confidence in your sales and business building process.

Coaching and education are a cornerstone of CF Canada Financial’s business. Joint fieldwork, mentoring and a network of producer groups and advisors are available to support you throughout your journey.

Since 2000, we’ve delivered over 1500 education events and continue to offer weekly product and skills training opportunities to hone your knowledge and technical competencies. 

Build efficient systems and communication channels to support advisors 

Intelligent and efficient front and back-end administrative processes are fundamental to the success of advisors because they enable advisors to spend more of their time on strategic activities.

We’ve implemented systems to streamline tasks such as document management, client communications and regulatory compliance, ensuring advisors can focus on their clients and growing their businesses.

A well defined administrative processes creates transparent workflows for advisors, reducing any confusion, preventing duplication of efforts and reducing errors that could impact clients. 

As a result of our efforts, our advisors work more efficiently and effectively, leading to stronger client outcomes. 

Offer true entrepreneurial opportunity

At CF Canada Financial, we have a unique model where advisors can build their businesses according to their specific goals.

As part of our community, advisors can expand their professional networks by connecting with other advisors, clients and industry-leading professionals. Gaining access to our network can generate new referrals, lead to new business prospects and provide opportunities for professional growth.

As with any entrepreneurial endeavor, there is the opportunity for higher earnings.  However, because the financial services landscape in Canada is highly competitive, advisors will need to draw on their creativity, entrepreneurial drive and strategic thinking to succeed at a higher level.

If you’re interested in learning more about working with CF Canada Financial and our network of advisors, contact us and we’ll put you in touch with our recruiting team. Do your business goals align with CF Canada Financial’s business model and overall vision?

Unfortunately, some entrepreneurs choose to forego developing business plans when they’re launching a business.

This is understandable as entrepreneurs are often creative big-picture thinkers who want to begin making money chasing leads, creating opportunities, and building connections.

While the above activities are important, if you don’t have a business plan, every opportunity, lead, or connection can look like a good one at the time. Pursuing them all can lead to wasted time and resources and ultimately, hinder the long-term success of your business.

However, even if a business plan does get written, it’s often ineffective at producing results because:

• The plan isn’t actionable – the plan is a collection of market research, statistics, and information on competitors, but this knowledge doesn’t lead to concrete steps the owner needs to take to achieve their business goals.
• The plan is vague – there may be a lot of business jargon and fancy charts, but ultimately the plan doesn’t outline how strategies will be implemented.
• The plan is poorly researched – for a plan to be meaningful and inform decisions, real research must occur. This means talking to potential customers and reading research reports – a Google search won’t cut it.
• It’s missing a financial section – it’s important to develop sales targets and cash projections to set realistic expectations about your revenue and expenses.

The key to developing an actionable business plan is to treat it as a living document that’s part pragmatic projection and part sales tool.

Here are five key tips to help you develop a business plan you’ll follow.

1. Start small and informally

Don’t treat your business plan as a chore that must be completed as soon as possible. Adopting this mindset will increase your chances of feeling overwhelmed and you’ll rush to get it done, making the plan less useful.

Instead, reframe how you think about business planning – ask yourself, what can I learn from the business planning process?

Over the course of a week, set aside 1-2 hours a day to think about your:

• Business idea and model;
• Target audience;
• Goals and objectives; and,
• Marketing strategies and tactics

Treating business planning as an iterative process right from the beginning helps you see the business plan for what it should be: an evolving document you’ll continue to come back to and build on.

You may want to try to get your entire business plan onto one page to start to keep things simple. Check out the business model canvas to help get you started.

2. Set SMART goals

Your business goals are a key element of your business plan as they’ll impact all other areas of your document. Furthermore, they’ll inform and drive your day-to-day tasks.

If your goals are poorly defined, then they won’t be purposeful, and you’ll have a difficult time developing and implementing the right strategies to achieve them.

To create purposeful goals, you must draft your goals to be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and timebound – SMART; an example of a SMART goal is:

“I will obtain 50 new clients [measurable] in the consumer discretionary category [relevant] this fiscal year [timebound] by employing a multipronged marketing strategy [actionable] consisting of traditional and digital tactics.” [specific]

SMART goals can guide the rest of your business planning by giving you something tangible to work toward.

3. Strike the right balance between strategy and tactics

It’s easy to get hung up on researching your ideal customer, their journey, and the marketing strategies you’ll use to engage them.

While you may correctly identify a social media strategy as the most effective way to engage your audience, you’ll need to dig much deeper into the operational details regarding how to execute the strategy to be successful.

For example, in the case above, you’ll need to setup a website, understand digital analytics tools as well as search engine optimization to execute your strategy. By unpacking the day-to-day work underlying your strategies, operational activities will begin to naturally emerge.

These work plans will be task-driven and identify the things you need to do to accomplish your goals and objectives.

4. Throw out the idea of the perfect business plan

You’re never going to be fully informed about your market, target audience, and competitors as business landscapes are constantly changing and evolving.

This means your business plan will be built on assumptions; assumptions are things we presume to be true at a point in time.

Over time, your assumptions will change as you learn new information about your customers and the market your business operates in.

It’s important to identify the key assumptions that your business plan relies on and review them on a regular basis to confirm if they are or are no longer assumptions.

For example, when you first start your business, you might assume that a segment of your target audience prefers your flagship product. However, through online sales and ongoing customer surveys, you discover they prefer a different one. This new information alters your assumptions and impacts how you market to your customers in the future.

Ultimately, assumptions can solve the dilemma about how to manage change over time and help reduce the stress of the unknown.

5. Build a roadmap

Your business plan should not only provide you with an overview of your business in the short and long-term, but it should also lay out exactly how you’ll get from one stage to the next. For example, how will you move from the initial start-up and growth stage to the expansion stage?

In other words, your business plan should function as a roadmap for your business and be as specific as possible. Ideally, it should identify key milestones, set major targets, and outline the key steps you need to take to meet these important deadlines and goals.

Takeaway

Successful business planning is about adopting a continuous learning mindset and coming back to your plan on a regular basis to check your progress and update your assumptions. Following the above five tips will help you work more efficiently and effectively, stay motivated, and reduce stress.

Interested in starting a career with Canada Financial? Join us at our next Carrer Webinar.

For new financial advisors, cultivating clients is top of mind.

Many advisors start building their businesses by reaching out to their personal contacts and networks to let them know they’ve launched an exciting new career.

While some advisors simply pick up the phone and start calling, there is a better way to effectively engage with your prospects.

Instead of “winging it”, a better approach is to put a framework in place to increase your chances of sales success.

The framework I’m referring to is called a “sales cadence”.

A sales cadence is a sequential order of different outreach methods that salespeople can follow to meaningfully connect with prospects and increase their chances of closing a sale.

It’s an intentional approach to sales.

I’ve used many sales tools over the years including detailed buyer personas, expert-crafted call scripts, clever marketing email templates, competitive intelligence, and sales playbooks hundreds of pages long.  By far, a sales cadence framework produced the best results for me.

Here’s how you can begin to create your sales cadence:

1. Develop a plan
   • Determine your target prospect and the number of touchpoints you’d like to have with them
   • Choose which value propositions you’d like to convey at each touchpoint
   • Identify any levers of influence you’ll employ at each step in your sales funnel (e.g., statistics or social proof)
2. Decide how you’ll engage your prospects
   • Outline the channels through which you’ll engage your prospects (for example, you might start out with an email introduction and follow up with a LinkedIn invite)
   • Be thoughtful about the channel used for each touchpoint (for example, if your prospect isn’t active on social platforms, it’s probably not a good place to start a conversation)
3. Establish your purpose
   • At every touchpoint, you should have a clear purpose to move your prospect down your funnel – know exactly what you’re trying to achieve with every email, phone call, or social comment
   • Ensure each call-to-action is aligned with your purpose at each touchpoint
4. Space out your engagements
   • Timing is everything – space out your touchpoints and think about how you’d react to your methods if you were your prospect
   • You want to stay fresh in your prospects’ minds but don’t annoy them!

Here’s an example of a sales cadence that’s worked wonders for me:

In the above example, notice how I’ve used various channels and spaced out my touchpoints. Ideally, at some point prior to day 21, I convert the prospect to a client.

By using a sales cadence, you’ll increase your productivity because you’ll be focused on completing the sales activity and not on what to say – in fact, you’ll have determined exactly what you want to say before you engage your prospect.

Furthermore, by having a clear, defined sales cadence you’ll reduce any anxiety you might have and build your confidence.

As you develop and implement your own sales cadence, you’ll likely refine the order of your steps and actions based on feedback from prospects and clients. (For example, you might find that an introductory call is more effective than an ice-breaker email and leads to a 10% bump in sales).

At every touch point, you should record the outcome of your actions to ensure you’re gathering data. Over time, data turns into information which can lead to improvements in your sales cadence. If you have access to a CRM, use it! If not, you’ll need to find another tool that works for you.

The top companies have been effectively using the above methods for years to gain an edge against their competition – take a page out of their playbook and put the sales cadence framework to work for you.

*Make sure you follow CASL and DNCL regulatory guidelines.

Interested in starting a career with Canada Financial? Join us at our next Carrer Webinar.