Properly Preparing for a Closing Appointment

Before meeting with your prospects, map out the conversation points you need to have with them.

Most financial advisors wouldn’t dream of not preparing appropriately for a second appointment. However, finding out what your prospects need to do to reach their financial goals is not enough. You need to also properly plan out conversation points to have with them.

When I coach financial advisors and agents, they often want to focus our session on how to prepare for an important upcoming appointment. Many times, it is their second appointment with a high-net-worth prospect that they want to close. However, rarely do they initially understand that there is a psychology to closing a second appointment, which, if done properly, will have prospects wanting to buy well before they are shown any recommendations. My secondappointment formula has several strategic steps that work. You may want to skip a couple in the process, but don’t. Each step is vital to the next.

• Preparing your questions. It’s no secret that first appointments are typically introductory meetings when you ask the prospect a number of questions to get to know him and uncover his specific needs and financial goals. This will help you put together your recommendations.

Unfortunately, after that first meeting, most advisors don’t take the time to ask some necessary additional questions. If you ask those questions before presenting your recommendations, you can actually take the prospects down on what I call the “Questions Path” to help them uncover what it is they need. As a result, they will end up telling you what they should “buy.” If you do this successfully, they will see the need for your recommendations even before you show them what those recommendations are.

• Preparing to listen. It’s been said that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Try using a technique I call “ The 4 Levels of Empathetic Listening.” When a prospect says something, most advisors often mimic what they hear or rephrase what they hear.

While I don’t recommend mimicking, I do recommend rephrasing. If you want to make an even better connection, reflect on what a prospect is indicating that he is feeling. An example may be, “That sounds frustrating, is it?” After you’ve started incorporating this, try reflecting the feeling and then rephrase it as: “That sounds frustrating because it sounds to me that you really aren’t sure what to do to reach your financial goals?”

• Preparing the close. Once you use a combination of questions and empathetic listening, the prospect will hopefully come to the realization that he needs YOUR help. At that point, simply explain your recommendations, but also reiterate how this will help him fill his need.

Use a question like this: “Based on what we talked about, how do you think these strategies will help you the most to reach your financial goals?” If you used the aforementioned techniques, he should be able to answer this question. When he does, simply ask, “What do you think is the best course of action for you?”

Putting it all together

To implement these strategies in your practice, use the formula: Think Question, Answer, Filler. Ask a question, let the prospect answer, use empathetic listening, and then repeat the process. When you prepare your questions ahead of time and practice your listening skills, you will make it easy for your prospect to want to work with you.

Daniel C. Finley is the President and Co-Founder of Advisor Solutions—the Premier Financial Advisors Business Consulting and Coaching Service dedicated to helping Advisors Build a Better Business One Solution at a Time. He can be reached at dan@advisorsolutionsinc.com or via 715-262-2040.

The new Life Underwriter Training Council Fellow - LUTCF® - Designation Program is gaining positive momentum among NAIFA members. And now, you have the option to take the LUTCF® Designation Program online or in a live classroom setting. No matter which option you choose, both follow the same course curriculum, each achieving outstanding results! The online program offers an element of flexibility while the more traditional live classroom program provides more face-to-face communication and social interaction with your peers.

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What You Should Know

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By Brian Ashe, CLU

Disruption

Today, a little stability would be a welcome oasis in a sea of uncertainty.

Disruption. That’s the catchy, cool new byword for business progress. Its proponents believe the new pathway to success is paved with tearing out the old by its roots, constantly questioning established business models and replacing them with new structures that are perceived to be more flexible, more consumer friendly, more adaptable and more appealing than anything that currently exists.

Now, in my 47 years in the financial-services business, I’ve seen lots of change, some of it good and some of it bad. Regardless of the actual result, we tended to refer to the process as “innovation”—with an emphasis on bringing about something new, something fresh, a progressive iteration of something that existed before—not a process that seems to have the negative connotation that “disruption” seems to carry.

The real disruptions

And as I survey the current environment in the financial-services business, I kinda think we’ve had enough disruption in our business already. The latest has been the onerous new regulations imposed by the Department of Labor on retirement plans and IRAs.

And the drumbeats have already begun to empower the DOL to have a much longer reach into our products once someone has actually retired. Think about the DOL controlling whether a client can use his own, personal taxable IRA withdrawals to purchase cash value life insurance without DOL’s approval!

The current environment

We have the lowest interest rates in 40 years, an interest trough that wreaks havoc on company reserves, challenges the long-term viability and premium predictability of our life insurance policies and limits the attractiveness of our fixed annuity products.

We have attrition in our advisor ranks that experts say will eliminate about 30 percent of them in the next 10 years or so, right as 76 million Baby Boomers are retiring and need more help than they ever needed before.

Today, I believe only about 30 or so life insurance companies in the United States actually recruit and train a captive field force anymore. Field associations are, and will continue to face, declining membership, weakening the “voices” that speak to legislators and regulators about legitimate concerns of advisors and consumers.

Companies, focused on tighter budgets, are cutting back on their financial support for these same organizations. In response, the destructive specter of “cannibalization” looms in the shadows as associations seek to convince varied supporters that “only they” have the answers, only they, have the resources to make a difference.

Over the years, these “disruptions” have reduced life insurance ownership in the United States to its lowest levels in 50 years, left 40 percent of the adults in the country uninsured, and produced a level of coverage for those who are insured at 3 times income— significantly below the 15 to 20 times income most families would need post-death to stay “in their world.”

Disrupt? Dislocate? Tear apart? Throw into confusion? Alter normal functioning? We’ve had our fill of that stuff. Instead, a little stability, a little positive innovation, a sense that we are all better off if we hang together— because, if we don’t, we shall surely hang separately—would be a welcome oasis in a sea of uncertainty.

Now that would be revolutionary!

Brian Ashe, CLU, is president of Brian Ashe and Associates, Ltd., in Lisle, Ill., and the 2012 recipient of the John Newton Russell Memorial Award. A past president of MDRT and a past chair of LIFE, he may be contacted at bashe29843@aol.com