219. The Complete Game Marketing Playbook: Step 4

I am a huge proponent of sales assessments. My Favorite were scale 1 to 10 type questions just to see where they stood on what they believed about what their plan was today, how they felt about their plan. Because the power in the assessment, especially when I used scale one to ten questions, is when they'd give me, you know, a six out of ten and I would fire back with a why a six? Man, they gave me gold. Everything they said after that was going to be used in the proposal.

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Hey. Hey. Welcome back to Friday bullpen sessions. My name is Andy Neary, and this is episode 219. We are on part four, the final part of the 2023 marketing playbook. If you've gone back or haven't, if you're just joining us for the first time, go back and listen to episodes 213, 215, and 217. 213 focused on clarity, how to identify your brand, how to identify your ideal prospect, and how to build a good marketing message for them. Episode 215 went into how you can capture qualified leads, how you can capture leads from prospects who are giving you permission to reach out to them. And then episode 217 was content, how to create content that draws them in using social media, email, and your website. So today we arrive at the final part. Convert. Now, how do you convert prospects into new clients? Now, a little warning. I am not going to teach you any closing tactics. I'm not going to teach you how to make the perfect sales pitch. What I am going to teach you is a process that puts you in the best position to win every single time.

You see, if I'm being honest, I was not a hard closer as a producer and I was losing time and time again, even though I knew I was better than the competition. And what I had realized was my sales process sucked. Well, let's be honest, I didn't have a sales process. Every new prospect I was creating, recreating the wheel, doing different things every single time, had no consistency. Find myself in a proposal. But at the end of the day, it wasn't a process. And so today, what I want to teach you is a process. So what we're going to go over is three parts of what I believe is an effective sales process to convert prospects to clients without having to be a hard closer, truth be told. And that first step is the process. You have to have a process you can control. You see, one of the first, one of the biggest mistakes I see advisors make, yours truly, for a long time was we don't have control of the process.

So you go meet with a prospect, and the entire meeting is them interviewing you. Think of, like a traditional rfp. That's the most obvious form of them having control. But they're interviewing you, you're pitching. You're telling them how great you are and how your agency can help. But at the end of the day, the prospect has the control throughout the process. And when they have the control, this is where ghosting can happen. This is where they fall off. They. They're hesitant to make decisions. They delay decisions. A lot of it has to do with the fact you're not controlling the process. And again, I found myself in this predicament for the first 10, 12 years of my career until I decided to do something about it. I said, I got to have a better control of this process, sales process. So, number one, I need a process. And that's where I would tell you to start. And it can be as simple as, you know, it starts with a discovery call. Step two is we collect data and we analyze your plan. And step three, we come back with a proposal. Why having a process is important, and I'd even argue, challenge you to name that process, is when you meet with a prospect for the first time, one of the first things you have to do is set the expectation of the entire process.

One thing we ignore but don't realize is when your prospects aren't clear about what you do next or what happens next, they don't do anything. They. That's where they get stuck in the pipeline. But if you walk into a prospect and immediately tell them, here are the expectations. If you like what you have to hear today, here's what step one's gonna be. Step two, step three, when they have clarity on that process, odds of them moving forward with it are much higher. So this is why you need a process. And when I look at a good sales process, it starts with a good discovery meeting. This is that intro meeting. First time you're gonna be meeting with a prospect. And I. There's a couple things you have to accomplish in this meeting. Yes, fact finding is important.

But the first thing you have to establish is the expectation of your entire process. So before you even get into fact finding and doing a little spiel about your agency or your team, you have to set the expectation of what today is going to look like and then the next rest of the process so they're clear. The second thing you'd have to do is fact find. And I challenge you to the questions you want to ask. Have to be very, very Directed to get your prospect story. You'll see why. So when I go in and meet with a prospect, I learn these questions from a coach in the industry, Steve Napolitan. The four questions he talked about and said you have to ask every prospect is what is your number one goal right now? What would it mean to achieve it? What's the challenge keeping you from it? And how is that challenge affecting you? Four very easy questions, but they tell a lot of of the story. What's the goal? What would it mean to achieve it? What's the challenge and how it's affecting you? How is it affecting you right now? They just gave you their goal. What would, what would it look like to succeed the challenge and what failure looks like today? If you look at the story brand framework, that's a good piece of the good chunk of the story. So that's got to be part of your fact finding. And then the last piece I highly recommend you include on that first meeting is what I used to coin my do you believe what I believe presentation. Because I would walk into these prospect meetings all fired up, ready to share my knowledge, excited to share my knowledge, puke my knowledge all over them. And I would leave the meeting feeling really good because I thought they were eating, eating it up. But then nothing ever happened. And time and time again I realized what was happening was I wasn't talking to the right prospects.

They weren't qualified. And so I said, okay, I need to develop a way that I'm going to qualify my leads, my prospects quickly in this meeting. And if they're not a good fit, no harm, no fouls, 15, 20 minutes, I'm on to the next one. So I developed this do you believe what I believe presentation. If you go Back to episode 213 where I talked about clarity, you got to stand for something, you got to have opinions about what it is you sell. And so this do you believe what I believe presentation was my way to say, here's what I believe is happening in the health insurance industry. Here's why I believe you're not winning. Do you believe that too? I wanted to see where they stood and if they were nodding their head almost a little angry because I was revealing things to them they had never heard before. I knew I had a good one. If they looked at me cross eyed or just with a blank stare, I knew they were probably not qualified. So it's time to move on. And this do you believe what I believe presentation really allowed me to filter out the good ones from the bad ones and move on with the good ones. So the process is very important now from that, you got to come back with a really good proposal. And the key I'm going to tell you with proposals, without going too much into depth on them, is just use the proposal to tell your prospect story. The biggest mistake I see so many agencies make is they do such a good job in the sales process of making it all about the prospect. And then for whatever reason, they come back with the proposal and the switch flips and they make it all about themselves. You talk about your capabilities, your size, how long you've been in business, the team, and you never really make it about the prospect.

That's why they're not getting back to you. That's why they're choosing to stay with their current advisor. You got to tell their story. You want to stand out, make it all about them throughout the entire sales process. The second pillar of a good sales process, if you want to convert prospects to clients, is assessments. I am a huge proponent of sales assessments. Why a good sales assessment, call it a questionnaire, whatever you want to call it, allows the prospects to grade themselves. It allows the prospect to give you a really good perspective of where they are. I used to ask my Favorite were scale 1 to 10 type questions just to see where they stood on what they believed about what their plan was today, how they felt about their plan. Because the power in the assessment, especially when I used scale one to ten questions, is when they'd give me, you know, a six out of ten and I would fire back with a why a six? Man, they gave me gold. Everything they said after that was going to be used in the proposal. It was gold.

And so sales assessments are a very powerful way to get a clear picture of where your prospect is mentally, what they believe about what they're doing today. Do they believe they're doing a good job? Do they believe they can make improvements? Maybe they believe maybe they gave something an 8 out of 10. But the reality is now that you know where they they're truly at, it's. It's more like a 2 out of 10, which helps you come back and develop a good proposal that's going to show them that their thought of an 8 out of 10 really is more like a 2 out of 10. And you're going to show them why it's ammo. It was gold. And they were giving me the playbook, no pun intended, for my proposal. So using sales assessments are so powerful. And most importantly, again, it helps you stay in control throughout the sales process.

So if you're not using any kind of assessment, a questionnaire, well, you name it, I highly encourage you guys to build one out before the beginning of the year. It doesn't have to be this elaborate four or five page assessment. I used to use assessment with seven, eight questions. There were key questions I wanted to know and they were not yes, no questions. Here's why an assessment's important. Let me give you a really powerful example. When I use my scale of 10 questions, if I just asked a yes or no and I asked this question yes or no. If you like what you have to hear from us, are you willing to make a change with your current broker relationship? And they give me a yes in a yes no scenario, I'm excited. But had I asked that same question in a scale 1 to 10 question, scale 1 to 10 scenario, and that yes was actually like a 6 out of 10.

It's a very weak yes. See how important that is? That's why I love the scale 1 to 10 questions. But whatever you choose to do with assessments, use assessments. Let your prospects grade themselves. Let them give you the ammo you're going to need to develop or deliver an amazing proposal. And then the third pillar of a good sales process is video. You want to stand out in the sales process, use video. Here's what I mean. We use video right now in our sales process. A complete game, and it works like a charm. When you schedule a meeting with us, it's all automated. The first thing you're going to get is an email from Amy. And the email is going to say, hey, Andy's excited to meet with you. In the email is embedded a video from me. And the video welcomes them aboard and says, hey, I'm excited to meet with you. Wanted to give you a few things about the discovery call so that we can be set up for a really effective conversation. And it's the video is just welcoming them and preparing them to have a good meeting. And it looks good. It looks official.

Now. On the back end of a discovery call, a second email goes out with a video from me that welcomes them or thanks them for taking the call. And I dive into what next steps are gonna look like. And I also dive into what I think they're thinking in the moment because it's easy for a prospect to be on a call. They're excited in the moment. They're giving you all the right buying signals, but the second you leave, they start having doub. I used a video to play right to the doubts. I know what you're thinking right now, maybe you don't think you have the time, the money, whatever.

So powerful, so powerful to stand out with that video and then with proposals. I love coming back when I offer proposals now, our proposals are done virtually. So we are offering, often putting a proposal in an email to a prospect, but I accompany the proposal with a video from me walking them through it. Now you listening to this are probably doing live proposals, but what would stop you from following up a live proposal with a video? Because you know what happens with proposals when you deliver them to a prospect. They still got to meet as a team. Maybe there were people that weren't in the proposal that are going to have some stake in the game and are going to be having some decision making capabilities who did not hear your message. And, and without a video, without control, you're relying on the prospect, the people that were in the meeting to deliver your message for you. And we know what happens when that happens. You're not winning the business. What if you could follow up that proposal with a video that walked them through the proposal again, just so you made sure that everybody who's in the decision making team is getting the right information. I did this with, I first did this about four years ago. I was in a RFP myself and one other, the incumbent. And we both were presenting to a board of 22 people from all walks of life. And I knew it was going to be two or three weeks before they made a decision. I knew they were going to reconvene as a board to make a decision. So I said there's no way they're going to remember my message or the highlights of my message. So I'm going to make a video, I'm going to give it to the HR director, ask her to pass it to the board members. And she did. She was kind enough to do it and we won the business. And I have a feeling that that video was a huge component of it because number one, it was a way to be last in again and number two, it allowed me to control my message. I didn't rely, I wasn't relying on somebody else to try to interpret it. So when you use video in your sales process to convert, it is highly effective and it is a great way to stand out. So if you want to convert prospects to clients, I suggest you think about these three pillars. Have a process, set the expectation with your prospects, what that process is going to be. Use sales assessments to control the process, to let the prospect grade themselves and then use video throughout the sales process. We communicate virtually these days. It is a great way to stand out and keep and maintain control of your process throughout. So I hope this helps. Again, I'm not a hard closer, but this allowed me to win a lot of business being effective this way. So I think it can do the same for you. Well, that's it. That's all four episodes of the 2023 marketing playbook. I hope you enjoyed it. Go back. If you have not listened to episodes 213, 215 or 217, listen to them in order because this is gonna give you the playbook. I hope it helps for next year. And if you need our help doing it, you know where to find us. And in fact, before I hang up, I'm gonna tell you. We got our next broker branding academy starting just in a couple weeks. 12 weeks, 12 calls. We cap it at 20 advisors industry partners. We teach our marketing playbook from start to finish. So if you're ready year the best year you've ever had, go check it out. There's a link in the notes. Get on my calendar. You and I will connect. We'll see if it's a fit for you. We do it through calls only because we don't take just everybody. It's about coaching and collaboration. So we want the right people. If that's you, check it out. Let's connect. Because you know what happens when you create clarity. You mix it with confidence. Damn it. You do massive things. So have a beautiful weekend. Use these four episodes to go make next year the most magical year you have ever had. It.