Your marketing is missing something and it is costing you clients. Unless you update your messaging, your business will fall far short of its potential.
You spend a lot of time telling clients about the benefits of hiring you. What are the costs of not hiring you? What are the stakes?
Early in my career I was taught that people are willing to hire you or to make a change to the extent they are perturbed or if they are perturbable. If a prospective client shows up perturbed, great! You can show them a solution. If not, you may need to create some tension to provoke a decision to engage with you. Without it they may lack the motivation to take action.
A story without tension is boring. And a boring message attracts no clients.
Addressing the cost of not working with you invests them in a decision. If there is an upside to working with you but no downside to not working with you, the prospective client can avoid a choice and be just as well off. Create a cost and there is motivation to choose.
Clients work with you because they desire a change. They want to be different. And we invest most of our marketing efforts on creating the vision of the change they desire. A comfortable retirement. Children with degrees. A legacy of philanthropy. These outcomes are nice. And they can be much more powerful when contrasted with the horrible outcomes that may occur without planning. Working through retirement to meet the bills. Our kids as young professionals with mountains of debt (or denied the opportunity of a college education). Being dead and forgotten. Some of our marketing needs to speak to the other side. A future to be avoided. Our message will be a lot more powerful addressing the good and the bad. The fear and the greed. The yin and yang.
You do this already in your advisory process. Why allocate assets or buy any kind of insurance? To avoid a bad outcome. How can you apply the concept of risk management to your communication strategy? It’s not just good planning, it’s good marketing.
For example, you can explain that allocating and rebalancing a portfolio can give you more consistent returns over the long term. And you can say that it can help limit losses in a severe market downturn. The combination of messages is more powerful than the positive alone.
What will happen if they put off retirement planning by a couple years? Let the portfolio ride for a while? Defer the succession plan until its closer to the time to retire? Update the will some other time? Do the tax projections later? Wait until after the divorce to sort things out? It could be bad, right? Ever hear the phrase you can pay me a little now or a lot later?
Why do your prospects need to hire you today?
This post by Stephen Wershing first appeared on The Client Driven Practice.
