Knowing Your Clients

From Assignment # 1 you conducted an overview of your business by looking at; production, assets, clients, how you feel about your business, your quality of life, and where you'd like to be in three years, two years, one year along with some specific goals for the next 30, 60 and 90 days. So the overall landscape has been assessed, and some direction and action steps have been established.

In this assignment we're going to look closely at one of the most crucial elements of your business. Knowing your clients. It sounds like a fairly basic and simple concept and yet so many financial advisors, and other business professionals too, seem to overlook it, or don't fully grasp it's significance. Typically, they work so hard at identifying and closing a piece of business, which at it's root is an individual or group they've gotten to know, and then once closed, they move on to the next potential conquest.

What they don't seem to fully understand is that this new client has a wealth of information about themselves that is still unknown. And surrounding these new clients is a treasure trove of contacts, experiences, people and potential that is being left untapped.

For those of you who know me, you've been exposed to my "Arraying Your Universe" exercise which gets people to identify and profile the people in their universe. Individuals who do the exercise are always awestruck by the number of people they had forgotten about, and how little they know about the people they do remember. When people take the time to really dig into their universe they will find a "goldmine" of information and potential opportunities.

The same logic follows for the newly acquired client. They too have a universe that they are a part of, and a little exploration on your part will reveal that you have just barely even scratched the surface of that universe. The connections the new client has, the people they know, the associations they belong to, the companies they have worked for, or companies they have knowledge of, the golf and/or tennis clubs they belong to, etc.

I believe that in the financial services business, people or groups are only willing to give you their money when they have reached a certain watershed mark. That mark being that they "TRUST" you! Think about that! The significance of the statement of trust is enormous! And they demonstrate that trust with a huge psychological belief response. They give you their hard earned money to invest for them. Consider that until that trust is earned, you are nowhere.

If you accept my premise that people won't give you their money to invest until they trust you, then your business fundamentally depends on your ability to gather around you as many people as you can who have money, and who are willing to entrust that money to you. Each time you close a new client you have been successful at creating trust in the mind of the new client.

Now if your pattern of behavior is to close a new client, and then do a celebratory dance and go find another one, that's great, but you've missed the opportunity to mine the universe of a person who has already demonstrated that they trust you.

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