On Monday I talked about how one advisor provided prospects with a reason to transfer their account.

Of course, before making your case to prospects, you first have to get in front of them. Once a quarter, I host a lunch with some top performing advisors to talk about what they're hearing. In January, a number talked about the difficulty of getting face to face with prospects. They may have had two or three telephone conversations, they might even have met a prospect casually at an event they both attended - but often securing a meeting to get into specifics remains a big obstacle.

In interviews with investors who have been approached about meeting by advisors, a number of reasons for this reluctance emerge. Let's start with the fact that we're all jammed for time - few of us are looking for another meeting. Beyond this, investors often feel apprehensive about feeling pressured in that meeting. Just as often, they are skeptical about how much value they'll actually get by sitting down.

Whenever we ask people to do something, they instinctively create a mental scale on which they weight two things - on one side, the potential benefit, on the other side the possible downside. When most advisors hear no from a prospect, they instinctively ramp up their sales pitch to increase the perceived upside; what fewer do is step back and think about how to decrease the downside.

In discussing why prospects are reluctant to meet I suggested the following; Assuming that they had built up even a low level relationship with a prospect, I proposed that they call her up and say "Joan, we've talked on the phone a few times - I'd really like to sit down for 20 minutes to learn more about your situation and also to highlight a couple of things that have paid off recently for my clients. I've got a meeting down the street from you on Thursday morning of next week at 10 am. I was wondering if you might have 20 minutes to grab a coffee - I could do it at 9:30 before my meeting or at 11 after it"

In testing this approach out with investors, for most twenty minutes seems about the right amount of time to ask for - for many even half an hour is too big a commitment while any less isn't credible for a serious conversation. This was confirmed in a recent conversation with one of the advisors who sat in on the lunch - he had tried this tack with a few prospects and while he didn't get a meeting in every instance, was able to secure a couple of face-to-face encounters with prospects who had turned him down previously.

This advisor also talked about an approach he uses if he runs into a roadblock in getting prospects to move their account over. If everything else has failed, his final recourse is to say the following: "Fred, I truly appreciate the opportunity to talk about your situation and can understand your reluctance to make a move at this time."

He then goes on to say: "Here's what I propose. The Globe and Mail has a website which gives people the ability to create and track portfolios of stocks and mutual funds. I would like to set up a portfolio for you and run it just like I would your account - only you and I would have the password to this portfolio, so that you could look at it at any time. The only thing that I ask is that you give me the opportunity to set up your existing beside mine; my assistant would contact you periodically to incorporate any changes you've made. If you're open to this, my suggestion would be to sit down in six months to see how both portfolios are doing." (Six months might not be the right timeframe for you - it might be too long or it might not be long enough - but you get the idea).

The markets that we've seen since last summer have resulted in lots of unhappy clients. To tap into the prospecting opportunity which has resulted, think about whether the 20 minute appointment and Globe and Mail alternative portfolio might help you get closer to landing some of those dissatisfied investors.