Many financial advisors believe, without ever thinking about it, that sales success is convincing the prospect to do business with you. Accordingly, the goal is therefore to enroll people in conversations and the longer the conversation goes, the greater your chance of the close. Naturally, you believe that if you talk to a lot of people, the goal is to find those people that want to buy. Top producers know that the goal of sales success is just the opposite—the goal is to identify the people who are not buyers.
Think of any 100 people. How many of those people at this very moment have interest, are qualified and the right fit for your product or service. Maybe 5? The goal therefore is to get the other 95 people, the non-buyers, out of the way. Since your most valuable resource is time, you ideally want to have a 3 minute qualifying conversation with all 100 people so that you can quickly identify and omit the 95 non-buyers from qualification. You don’t want to spend an extra minute with those people who are not a fit or don’t have interest. That way, you can devote your time to the 5 people who ARE buyers and turn your time into money.
Although this makes obvious sense—to spend your time with the buyers, I consistently see sales professionals have their longest calls and meetings with the non-buyers. These non-buyers raise objection after objection, are the most skeptical and will consume far more time than a buyer. Please don’t do this anymore. Have your sales presentation ask a few questions in the beginning to identify the non-buyers so that you can leave them and move on. You then find the better part of your day spent with buyers and go home feeling successful.
Your marketing strategy should reflect the same philosophy—to weed out the non-buyers. Here again, many financial advisors will want to attract as many people as possible from their marketing. So they serve a nice steak dinner to attract prospect to their seminar. You have now successfully packed your seminar with people, most of them non-buyers. If you did not serve the steak dinner, the people who attend would be those sufficiently interested in your seminar topic and adequately motivated by your invitation. We call these people buyers.
Now that you have packed your seminar with a lot of non-buyers, you will find that some of these also set an appointment with you, take up a two hour slot in your calendar and tell you every reason that they won’t buy. If you don’t feel you make enough sales for the time you spend at work, you now understand why. Please stop wasting time with non-buyers.
