A couple of years back I chaired a conference at which one of the speakers was a woman who’s built her business around successful entrepreneurs.

When approaching business owners, some advisors talk about taking a wealth management approach to provide comprehensive financial advice, working with existing professional advisors to provide integrated advice around their finances.

In this woman’s view, this approach is too vague and generic.


Getting in the door with business owners

Her experience is that to get busy business owners’ attention, you have to focus on something that’s specific and that is causing real concern and frustration – and so is a hot button for them.

She suggested saying something like:

“A common concern for many of the successful business owners I work with is increasing the interest rate they get on cash balances in their company bank accounts.    

Are you satisfied with the interest rate you’re getting on your bank balances?”

Almost always the answer is no. Sometimes it leads to a short meeting with the owner, on other occasions she gets passed off to their VP Finance or Comptroller.

But the fact is that this increases her chances of getting in the door. And even if she initially meets with the comptroller, she inevitably gets in front of the owner.


Tapping into prospects’ hot buttons

The same principle applies to other prospects.

When approaching prospective clients, some advisors talk about their plan based approach to hitting client objectives or their focus on building conservative portfolios that allow clients to sleep at night.

The problem with these is that they’re fairly generic.
   
Consider instead two words that given today’s level of investor anxiety will get through to many prospects.
   
Those two words – Managing risk

So you might start by saying something like:

The major focus of the work I do is helping clients manage the risk in their portfolios

Your goal with that initial statement is to get a prospective client’s attention

Next you might go on to say:

That means first of all getting real clarity on each client’s long term objectives.

Once we’ve done that, we construct a portfolio to achieve those objectives with as little     risk as possible – we focus on something called risk adjusted returns,  employing the     same methods to optimize risk and return as the most sophisticated pensions.

In fact the academics who devised principles we use to construct portfolios have won     the Nobel prize.

Again, your goal is to get a prospect interested enough to want to hear more.

You could go on to say:

In our process, we identify tradeoffs – in some cases we may have to revisit your objectives to keep risk to an acceptable level.

And then finally, we monitor risk in portfolios on an ongoing basis – and where necessary make adjustments as the environment changes.  


Other hot buttons

Remember, to get a prospects attention today, you need to focus on their hot buttons – managing risk isn’t the only one, but it’s a big one.

Other hot buttons include saving taxes and protecting assets.

And sometimes you’ll run into someone with a disabled grandchild or who has a charity they’re attached to, so their big concern is how to take care of that grandchild or that charity. 

So the next time you’re planning to talk to a prospect, consider taking two minutes to ask two questions:

First, how can I tailor my approach to this prospect’s hot buttons.

And second, if I don’t know what his or her hot buttons are, how can I find out?

Over time, those two minutes to focus on the issues that motivate each prospect could just be the most valuable time you’ll spend over the course of your week.